Some people can look at a mountain
and read the layers of the earth’s eras there the way some will open a holy
book and read the steps one must take in the direction of a good life. Without the geologist’s training or the
adept’s familiarity with scripture we might only see the layers as different
colors. We might only imagine the remains of all the life that moved and flowed
in the wind during that particular time. The geological record is a compression
of bones and sounds of what was green and reaching toward the sky or climbing
on a nearby limb. She imagined all the
people, all that is green and gold and flies and swims or moves in waves with
the wind; all the animals and insects and birds and mosses, the algae and
fungus and the currents and streams, all of that life now in the beautiful
bands of the mountain. All that moved or stood still or was as slow and
overpowering as a glacier, all that is in the era’s name and the layer that you
see. Layer on top of layer. Life on top of life. All that a color on the
mountain’s robe.
~
She pulled the seaweed off of her body as
if she were peeling a layer of skin. She
was on her way home to make soup. That’s
how her mother belonged to the world.
Without knowing you learn things early on. And right now she felt a
strong need to belong.
~
Pablo Neruda wrote “…the
traveler requires triangular stars, constellations like dice cut into squares
by the cold...hands that distill hidden rivers in Antofagasta and restore to
the water what its avarice lost in the desert.”
His words are part of the marrow in Mrs. Scattergood’s bones. In some
way she too will be a part of a good soup one day herself. She will be in the bands of color in the
mountain’s side; part of the river’s wash at low tide. You never know how the world will come into
every part of your being, especially when you’re cooking. You just never know. For
now, like all of us, she just has to stir the ingredients and restore to the
water what her grief lost to the desert.
No comments:
Post a Comment