The Heart Will Always Listen

The hall is empty.
Hollow.
The music changes everything.

* * * * * * *

The Hollow.

We lived in the Hollow, the hollow of the mountain, and a great blue wall rose around us. The windows of my sixth-grade classroom framed the landscape. It was an ever-changing masterpiece. Fall, winter, spring--the mood changed as if Bierstadt were sitting just outside with his palette and easel.

We each had a box of pastels and I drew a clipper ship...it was voted second best in the class. Betty Ann had drawn a mermaid perched on a rock...odd selections for mountain children.

My great, great, great, I lose track of the greats, grandfather was a bowlegged sailor who fought his way through the Indians to make a home far from the coast. He would have dozens upon dozens of descendants who never saw the ocean but had images of clipper ships coming closer and closer in their minds' horizons.

The waves rose and fell, mountains and hollows, mist sprayed from the splashing of creeks on rocks, and the fog, the fog billowed and rolled from the foot of the mountain all the way to the sea. On those days, mountain people recalled the oceans they had known, though not consciously, of course, just in their hearts, their bones.  They stood on the pinnacles and watched the ravens and hawks sail and dive with no place to light in the vastness, so that they were forced to return to the arks of cabins and barns.The mountain folk stood and they remembered.

They swore they could hear the waves crashing at the foot of Fisher's Peak.

What's Forever For

Michael Martin Murphey's voice is pure as butter -- rich, satisfying, sustaining.

I see love-hungry people

I see them, too. I see me, hungry for love and for life. It is 1980 something in the kitchen of our restaurant. Mama and my little girl and Michael Martin Murphey's voice,  rich as cream, while Mama made dumplings for supper.

If love never lasts forever, 
Tell me, what's forever for?

Mama nodded as she worked, Amen, Amen.

She worked the flour and lard and milk, looking down, thinking, somewhere else.

My little girl and I were going on a picnic, packing a lunch for the Shot Tower at Fosters Falls, straight up I-77. It was summer, and the Queen Anne's lace softened the road's edge. New River rolled below us like forever, like all our days, all the days that had ever been and ever would be. The sunlight on the water reflected for years afterward.

Photo of New River at I-77 by Denise Coalson; used with permission.

9:02

We were sitting in our hotel on Sunday morning when I glanced at my phone; it was 9:02.

People were having breakfast, checking out, loading their cars. The sun was shining. It was a cool, spring morning.  Life goes on.

Just blocks away, people were marking the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. We had visited the memorial the day before and the experience overwhelmed the senses--the gates/walls that stand on either side, one with 9:01 etched into it, the other with 9:03-- in between, the black water, the empty chairs, one for each person. There were flowers, teddy bears, Dr. Seuss books. It was quiet, very quiet, even with so many people.

Twenty years. 2-0 years. Twenty whole years. Facebook. Smartphones. 9-11. Birthdays. Christmases. Graduations. Weddings. Sunrises. Sunsets.

I was in Oklahoma City for an awards ceremony, a celebration. Celebration. Anticipation. Cowboy hats and turquoise. Happy folks. Rewards.

The space ...between anniversaries...is how I live my life now.


My friend has lost both her children. They were grown. They had lives, real lives, friends, jobs, hobbies. 

* * * * * *
We toasted one another with wine, made new friends, grabbed old ones. Pictures. Pictures. Pictures. Save the moment, savor the moment. 

* * * * * *
The morning after....9:02. People are happy, making coffee, having breakfast. 

The space between anniversaries.

Everything

This was my recurring dream:

I am walking up a road with high banks on either side; it leads farther into the mountain and there is a white farmhouse at the end. Clouds are gathering; it is going to storm. Opening the screen door, I step inside the kitchen and there is an empty chair. An overwhelming sadness washes through me, carries me as if on a tide of grief. 

"They have taken him away, they have taken him away."

The sadness is everything, everything.

* * * * *

Mama and Daddy worked second shift and I stayed with Granny and Grandpa. I slept between them at night. Grandpa always slept with his back to me, facing the night.  It was like the great wall of the Blue Ridge.

In the summer, there was a box fan in the window and the warm, pink scent of mimosa settled on us like dew. The mantle clock marked each moment, striking it into forevermore, keeping time with Grandpa's breath. The night was like a rich, velvet blanket, stitched with the song of the whippoorwill and the gentle winds in the willow.

It was everything.

* * * * * *

In winter/spring of 1960, Grandpa was taken to the sanitarium at Catawba, across the mountain. They thought he had TB. Tuberculosis. Consumption.

It did consume us, all-consuming grief. I was not yet two years old. We believed he would die, Granny believed he would die. The tears turned to snow, and it piled up, snowing every week without melting until the snow drifted over roads and porches and pushed against chimneys. A soldier was found dead in his car at Fancy Gap, buried in a drift. We passed these banks of snow, bundled in Daddy's car, the sun glittering on our sadness. Our sadness was pure, so simple, profound as the cloudless sky between the blizzards.

There are memories I only have through my aunts' and my mother's description: I pitched a fit when they had to do a TB test, though it was painless. How could I trust these foreigners who had taken my Grandpa away? Then there was Grandpa's roommate, who years after would write to him and ask about his little girl. When Grandpa wrote letters home, they were addressed to me, "Dear Debbie and All."

After weeks of breathing treatments and rest, the doctors declared Grandpa did not have tuberculosis but had lungs scarred from years in the coal mines. They also declared that he had twenty-five years more to live. And though that power was not theirs, it was true.

* * * * * *

Grandpa had his chair at the table. If someone happened to be sitting in his chair when he walked in the room, they simply rose without a word. It was a small kitchen and Granny like to rearrange furniture. Sometimes all she could do was turn the table so it went longways instead of sideways. Grandpa's chair did not move, so his place at the table sometimes changed. His chair, always, in front of the window, facing the door, facing everything for me, for us, for all of us.

Everything.

More Nothing

People who have nothing, fight over nothing.

Ball of Gold

I am blessed to know inspiring souls. From my friend, artist Thom Ross, with a photograph by Dan Frick:

"A man saw a ball of gold in the sky;
He climbed for it,
And eventually he achieved it -
It was clay.

Now this is the strange part:
When the man went to the earth
And looked again,
Lo, there was the ball of gold.
Now this is the strange part:
It was a ball of gold.
Aye, by the heavens it was a ball of gold."

--Stephen Crane

I remember this poem from sophomore high-school English and, once studied I never thought about it again.....until many many years later when I began to consider the role of myth as a component of historical truth. It was then that I recalled this poem. It is like this:

Take Wyatt Earp. In the movies he is heroic and noble etc....this is Wyatt Earp the ball of gold. Yet when we actually study who he REALLY was, Wyatt Earp, the man, he's clay like the rest of us. In our disappointment we walk away; yet when we turn back to view him, lo, he is that ball of gold.

This is why all those realistic or traditional paintings that "artists" paint are always so boring to me.....regardless of talent and technique, they are ALL paintings of clay. But when the artist backs away and gets away from the pure reality of the subject, lo, it becomes gold.

This short poem by Stephen Crane is EXACTLY what I mean.

It's exactly what I mean as well.

Troubles, Bubbles

The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. The rain in the foothills falls, soaking the ground, soaking the cardboard boxes that blew off the porch, soaking. . . .

The claw-foot tub is deep, long. I painted the outside with black enamel, covering the years of red, blue, purple, yellow, chips, scrapes, episodes. The shiny black shell comforts me while I soak. The bubbles. . . . tear drops. . . . tea pot. . . . salts.

Rain, tears, tea--the basic elements. They seep into my pores, take away the pain. A big fish, a great whale is waiting for these troubles, enough to sustain him. Yes, they will keep him floating a long, long, time.

Soaking.