Small Town

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s Auto Writing Prompt: Featuring at least one example from each of the five senses, describe a small town.  It is helpful for me to force myself to do a sudden descriptive writing piece since this is the type of work I demand from my students.

The town marches straight up the hillside. Walking up Main Street from the River, you feel the weight of gravity pulling you backwards and downwards.  Perhaps it’s the weight of the town’s own defiant history, furtively harboring the desperate people who followed the River northward to freedom and burning the bridge across the River to keep the southern armies from marching on their neighbors to the east.  Brick and stone and wood–your fingers can almost trace the layers of history, read the stories of rebellion and desperation in the walls of this town.

On a clear breezy day, you will just catch the briefest whiff of the metallic tang mingled with rot (almost more a taste than a smell) that comes from the dump high on the ridge, and the town is daily filled with the rumble of trucks from many parts of Pennsylvania and her neighbors on their way to unload their burdens at the landfill.

Gratitude List:
1. The heart-filling gratitude of students.
2. Little naps
3. Nailing it, but also trying again when I don’t nail it. So, second chances.
4. Being part of a team, a net, a compassionate web–knowing that others are also looking out for the ones I feel troubled about
5. Snowy mornings.  My favorite thing, besides a little extra time in the mornings with my family, is seeing the tracks in the snow.  Cat feet. Squirrel feet. Bird feet.  Wingtips.

May we walk in Beauty!

Breaching Innocence

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I had an anguished moment of breaching my child’s innocence tonight. It all started with the project I was helping him with, a poster on Thurgood Marshall. And that’s great, right?

And we read that he was a staunch opponent of the death penalty. And that’s great, right?

Only: “What is that, Mom? What is the death penalty?”
Really, I had no idea he didn’t know. I told him. I am a firm believer in not unpacking the harsh realities too early for children, but I don’t believe in the outright lie.

“But then the person who put someone to death would have to be put to death, too, right? And then on and on. . .”

Me: “Yes, it would seem like that, but we say that it is the state that puts them to death, not the person.”

Quiet. Thoughtful eyes. “Well, I’m glad they don’t do that anymore.”
Oh, Sonny. “Well, actually. . .”

Then, with certainty, “Only in other countries, right?”
Really. He said that. I knew we were going all the way down this trail. “No, here, too.”

And, here it comes: “But not in Pennsylvania?”

“Yes, in Pennsylvania, too, Buddy. I’m not happy about any of it myself.”

At least if he needs to know this small and terrible truth, he has it in the context of the good man of Thurgood Marshall. Loving Source of the Universe, may he always find violence confusing and strange. May he be one who works for the best of human good.

Waking Up

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Today’s Writing Prompt from Auto Writing Prompt is to write a two sentence story with a mood change.

I have been walking through this fog, in this wood, since before there was a before.  Today I saw a shimmering silver light above the trees.

Gratitude List:
1. Deer on the hillside
2. Sharp-shinned hawk in a tree
3. Snowflakes
4. Baby wombats (google “baby wombat images”)
5. Mary Oliver’s “Starlings in Winter” (you can google that, too)

May we walk in Beauty!

Child of Promise

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Yesterday’s writing prompt from a friend of a friend: “Write a seven sentence story featuring a grape leaf, a kayak, and the color chartreuse.”

So I tried my hand at a sort of flash fiction thingie in the interstices of the day. I think mine turned out more like a fragment or the conclusion of a larger piece than an actual story, but here goes. Seven sentences, and all the necessary words included.

Eleanor the Illustrious, Queen of Chickenroost, opened her eyes just as the golden kayak of the sun slipped free of its horizon moorings and sailed into view above the hills east of the farm. Shadows shifted in the corners of the coop, and Eleanor ruffled the last sooty vestiges of night from her speckled feathers, keeping one bright eye on the strange Visitor who snored shallowly, curled in a pile of straw across the room from her nesting box.

On the rooftop, the sudden clarion of Janticle’s matins rang forth upon the hills and fields, juddering the Visitor to a wakeful and wary crouch, patchy grey fur a-quiver and bare pink tail snaking over the dusty floor.

“Mistress,” spoke the tiny royal hen into the ringing silence that followed the Rooster-king’s bugling, “you will be safe as long as you stay in these lands. We have heard tales, whispered from the rafters by wandering spiders and trilled through the gardens by sparrows and finches returning from sojourns in southern lands, of the Brave and Valiant deeds of Chartreuse D’Rat, and of the Vanquishing of Moses the Viper only last week in the Battle of the Vineyard.”

Chartreuse the Mighty calmed visibly as Her Ladyship spoke, and–bowing low and murmuring her thanks–held out the bundle she had carried close and warmed with her own body heat for the last days of her long journey.

“Here,” she said, unwrapping a small brown egg from a grape leaf and placing it gently beneath the soft feathers of the amazed Queen, “is the Child of the Prophecy.”

Clouds like Mountains

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Gratitude:
1. Coyotes in the bosque.  I didn’t see them.  Jon did.  (Now my heart is a little fluttery with sadness because this afternoon, someone knocked on our door and asked if he could hunt foxes and coyotes on our property. We said, “No, we like them here.”)
2. The sound of the white-throat as we shoveled the drive this morning.
3. Family.  Weaver family reunion this afternoon.  It’s great to re-connect and hear everyone’s stories.
4. Those clouds that looked like mountains in the distance.
5. When people’s dreams come true.

May we walk in Beauty!

So Much Depends

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Gratitude List:
So much depends upon. . .
1. Crows and crows and crows
2. in a white winter field
3. beside a red barn.

4. And a snowy break from routine
5. and a nap.

May we walk in Beauty!

Good Work, and the Gift of Grief

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Gratitude List:
1. A purposeful work life.  Even when it feels overwhelming, the hard work is all to the greater purpose of developing confident and thoughtful communicators.  And even that has its own greater purpose, which is to help nurture this group of soon-to-be-adults into a deeper knowledge of how they will belong to the world, how they will make their lives their own. This is a privilege that fills my heart.
2. Grandparents who help to take care of the children while I get some of the extra work done.  A safe and caring and fun place to be, to make memories.
3. The hello part of the hello-and-goodbye cycle
4. Rain and mist
5. I don’t know quite how to word it, or how to express why I am grateful for it, but there’s something about grief that grabs my gratitude at the moment.  I just finished Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, and it triggered some deep grieving for me.  Like the main character in that book, my own (now many years past) grief over pregnancy losses is bound up somehow with the grief over lost species and the panic I feel about environmental loss.  During the brief months of my first pregnancy, we celebrated the tender and fragile hope that perhaps the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker was not actually extinct, but making a life in the swamps of Arkansas.  My hopes for the survival of the Ivory-Bill and the monarch butterfly and the several species of African rhinoceros crumble less precipitously than did my dreams of that first pregnancy.  Still, the grief settles in a similar place within me.  Like my friend Natasha, who spent a large part of a year of intentional grieving (The Year of Black Clothing) for all the environmental and human costs of our modern way of living, I want to give the grieving space inside me, let it do the work that it has appeared to do.  Whatever that may be.

May we walk in Beauty!

Epiphany

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My holiday season is Twelvenight, the time that stretches from Christmas to Epiphany, a quiet and contemplative time, time out of time, intended for the gleaning of images and words that might help me focus the unfolding of my story in the coming year.  I extend the season a little, beginning at Solstice.  Through the long nights and the waiting for light to begin to return, I watch and listen for images and words that compel me in some particular way.

Two years ago, I found myself suddenly obsessing over the word palimpsest, a strange and new word that carried the sense of layers and shadings of meaning, of old stories suddenly appearing in the middle of new stories to inform the current living.

Last year, bridge was my word–an image that appeared repeatedly to me in conversations and dreams, and a concept that became incredibly powerful to me in the meaning-making of my own life when I found myself suddenly making a major life transition, from farm and child care back to teaching.

My grab bag of images and ideas this year is full and cluttered.  Fred the cat has been in one of his agitated cycles during the past couple of weeks, frequently waking us up in the middle of the night, which leaves my head whirling with fog-skuthers of dream-images, compelling pictures that slip into my thinking space throughout the day.  I woke up one morning thinking about a student at our school, wondering if she would be in my class next semester, with an almost wild sense of protectiveness for her.  Vulture, lynx, and leopard have appeared in my dreams.  Plantain and pigweed.  Storytellers, fools, and shamans (somehow associated with the image of those magical folk from the east who decided to follow the sign of a star).  There was even a nightmare about watching a plane crash that woke me up with a pounding heart and tight breathing.  The dreams have been full and fantastical.

Out of it all, I have settled on two words that have floated to the surface of the pond of my unconscious: secrets and impeccability. I don’t really like the word secrets (I have seen unhealthy secrets destroy relationships too often), and I keep trying to change it to mysteries, but something in me thinks that the distinction may be important to explore during the coming season, particularly in the context of the word impeccability.  Perhaps it’s a step in gaining wisdom and maturity, that ability to keep one’s own council and trusting to the strength of one’s own character.  I know I have much to learn on both fronts.

What Will You Risk?

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In last night’s dream
we were racing down the road
in a jaunty little car.
(Aren’t all dream-cars sort of jaunty?)

“Holy —-!”
I’m afraid I screamed
what you think I did
as we skimmed the edge
of the giant sinkhole.

“Did you see that sinkhole?
It almost swallowed us up!”
My oblivious car-mates
(Me, Me, and Me,
according to Joseph Campbell)
were not paying attention,
and Oblivious Driver Me
sped up to crest a hill
which was covered with debris.

We didn’t make it over the pile of junk
and had to back up,
had to go another way.

“Oh, well,” said Driver Me to Disapproving Me,
“at least we tried.”

In my head as I woke up,
a familiar voice was singing,
“What will you risk?”

Waiting for the Dreams

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Each year, during the long nights between Winter Solstice and Epiphany, I carefully watch the dreams and pictures that appear to me, gleaning ideas and images that might be helpful to me in the coming year.  This year I am impatient.  I have been cataloging my list for the past two weeks and I want to solidify it and crystallize it.  But it’s also delightful to anticipate what these last few nights might show, so I will wait, and perhaps nudge some of my list into a poem:

While I wait for the dreams to be complete
while I sit at the feet of winter
listening

waiting for the little bell to ring
for the sound of rushing wings
for the things born in darkness
to take form
to rise up–

while a vulture flies across my window
red root and plantain nourish and heal me
a lynx crouches by a granite outcrop in the meadow
the storyteller raises her voice in a chant of longing
and a silent girl turns the corner ahead of me

I sit down to work
and sleep overtakes me:
One more vision for the road
One more message for the journey