Riding the waves of comfort - the bawdy and the Baubo

from Baubo in the kitchen (2)

It felt like Baubo popped into Mrs. Scattergood’s kitchen the way Stoner, Mrs. Scattergood’s cat, popped her head out of her sleeping curl.  Wake up world, the lewd, the crude was here. Yet every day she came Mrs. Scattergood was surprised at the comfort she felt in her presence.  She wasn’t sure if she came out of habit or duty. How do you know such things anyway?  It became such a regular interlude, though always unexpected event, that she called them “ludes” to amuse herself. 

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     Just yesterday morning, lying in bed and wondering how to get through the day, Mrs. Scattergood was thinking, ‘What do I want these days?  It’s really not easy to distinguish between the quiet I was craving and the desire for company.  I’ve wanted the comfort of both but one seems to require an effort and knowing that I can’t muster.  The other is just a question of letting go of some desires.’ From her mid-thirties and down she was focused on sex; but managed to hide that from the world quite well.  Has desire run its course? Just thinking like this is already once removed from desire. Isn’t it?  The trick of it all was that when she was in the throes of it, she never saw it.

     Who knows, maybe time is the flint we strike ourselves against.  It could be that we know right where to strike when we need the fire.

~

     Mrs. Scattergood woke to the morning’s bird talk and was thinking, ‘Morse code no longer official yet this bird keeps sending messages.’  She was tired of being rational, though the habit of making sense is so ingrained in us many would be hard put to be “out there.” Let love go, grief too and they just might come back like a boomerang.  Or like love or grief. Desire also, though it seemed so far from this time. She thought, ‘Why try to focus it?  It’s not a magnifying glass that I can set in the path of the sun.’  It will burn on its own terms.  She wondered what happened to her desire; her feelings toward her lover.  She remembered there was a time when she couldn’t stop this simple desire from overtaking her.  But now, she couldn’t follow it with any kind of efficiency.

~

Except from riding the waves:  a tale about being home in the world by freda karpf