from
smelling the snow (3)
old
farts hang like mists deep in the bowels of the library stacks
Mrs. Scattergood had
been working on a story called Telltale.
It was about Sarah and how her niece Leah journeyed toward her. When she
could Mrs. Scattergood would get it down on paper. But she’d always seen it as
a movie. Telltale was a story
about community. A telltale is an indicator but so far her direction was off on
its own. The aunt’s temperament was what
Mrs. Scattergood would have had be her own.
The aunt kept an almanac of the self rather than a journal. It was calm and reasoned. So different from
the way Mrs. Scattergood felt.
~
Mrs. Scattergood would have Sarah write in
her journal what she needed to feel, “Few people understand the source of
wisdom. It manifests in our lives
without predictability and often without predicate. Much like whimsy. People like to think that wisdom reaches down
to our depths and plunges through the layers of our history into the streams of
our soul. There where the stories and
symbols of our peoples swirl like logs in white water, there we swim with
wisdom or whimsy to hold onto. Either
one can take us on our way home.” Whimsy showed her the divine good humor in
using the seasons, with an eclipse and solstice thrown in for good measure, to
make entries in her journal. She was creating an almanac of herself. Seasons could be annotated, segmented and
delineated as moods or notions would strike her. In this, she came to realize, was something like
wisdom, and something that allowed for the freewheeling turns of whimsy. A combination she was becoming fond of,
thinking of it as she did, as if it held a proper balance between two worlds
she'd like to blend so that she could set foot on its terra firma one day.
~
Whimsy was the furthest thing from Mrs.
Scattergood that day. But Baubo was near
to make up for that.
~
Baubo’s almanac of herself noted how old
farts hang like mists deep in the bowels of the library stacks. She thought
about books and history in a single stream.
They were a stiff pageant of thoughts with medieval waxing and wanings. Passing
thoughts were a sideshow with memories. Runes were like Chiclets. Messages were sweet but soon lost their
interest. She was there to be in relationship and the shifting, micro movements
of emotions were ripples in her consciousness.
She lived for those in need where a hale hearty and a ha-ha could pinch
them back to life.
~
Mrs. Scattergood’s mind was roaming
through one dark thought after another. Up comes this woman at work who said to
her a few days after 9/11, “I want blood.” This was someone who couldn’t find
enough time or energy to do all the shopping she wanted. Hardly has space left
in her house for another purchase. She wanted blood. Where was she going to put it? “Ha!” her sister Claire said to that story.
But they both knew with what frightening ease people could toss out “Nuke ‘em
all.”
~
Nymby
nimbus clouds raining down on all of us. So much about forgiveness is
forgetting. Forget the half-life and live now with the shining luminescence of
destruction. But don't call it that. Patches of dirt and neat little hedgerows
and the only thing wild coming out of England is Monty Python. ‘Really’ she thought, ‘what do I know of
wildness? Not a damn thing except a conviction it must exist. It isn't just the
peril of loss of wonder and hair raised on the back of my neck that I imagine
will die with this endangered world. It is the death of our souls.’
~
Some of us are alive by misfortune and
lack of planning. To be born in a time, as Neruda wrote, “when the gods are all
dead.” But the lack of planning on her mother's part was the worst of it, she
once thought. No money and all this hope extinguished by a nine-to-five job. At that time, not enough money to burn a hole
in her pocket and not enough spirit to say, “Screw it, I’ll find another
way.” Such was her lot in life then. Now
she was in hedges and garden patches and on the good days she found wildness in
the neon of nasturtiums and the comfort of baked root vegetables.
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