a halo of bees

Mrs. Scattergood noticed a mild perfume hanging in the air. The air was infused with an ambient, sensory luminescence and an aroma as when rosemary is thrown on the flames.  Her nose, a compass after all.  She was nearly in a swoon from the smell. She fell through the moment tasting the scent on every particle of memory.  Unable to form itself into anything solid it caught her heart as she was leaving, just like your shirt might get caught on the door hook, and tore at her.  She could not close the image of the green leather of the limes a lover kept in a bowl for their color or was it to cover her eggs long since spent. She was being mean spirited, she knew. But old reflexes, you know, return even when the follow through is just forgetting to follow through.

~

     Mrs. Scattergood headed home.  Memories circled her head like a halo made out of bees. Why now would she remember her mother’s “I love you”? Some would describe her mother as a simple woman. She didn’t appear to have the complexities of angst crossed with misgivings and shpilkes.  She was straightforward and what you saw and what you heard was what you got.  There was no polish or politic. She would describe her as old fashioned but what did that mean? For her it meant that her mother was older than everyone else’s mom. That she cooked and stayed home.  Had pickles and Kool-Aid frozen into ice cubes for snacks.  She was a briny one. She loved what she called vinick and sweet. Sweet and sour, sour and sweet.  Just like life.

~

     Heraclitus wrote that “Character is fate.” Her mother was surely a character and it was her fate to hear “I love you” for the first time from her lips when Mrs. Scattergood was twenty-six. She told Mrs. Scattergood again when she was dying.  She had to strain through the pressure of the fluid in her lungs, and it was the only words she spoke in days. Mrs. Scattergood would never forget that her mother loved her. What a world it is without her.  And life after her has become an immense journey.  Mrs. Scattergood suffered a sea-change when her mother died. You hardly hear of people suffering from that these days.  It is strange because all things come from the sea, especially change. Shape shifting spheres of consciousness that disregard all laws about staying within her skull. What changes compare to the loss of your mother?  Mrs. Scattergood recalled how disappointed she was when her mother had to hold onto the ropes in the water.  Unsteady on her legs, the ropes were set out on poles and delineated the swimming areas.  But if you held onto them while the waves were crashing, you’d get mashed up on the beach.  Better to just dive in.  Unsteady legs will make you do strange things in the water.  Mrs. Scattergood held onto her mother’s ‘I love you’ like a rope. Just like that.  She was her mother’s daughter, her belly girl, finding her way back through memory’s labyrinth.

her soul steeped in dill

the sea (5)

“During deep mourning, Baubo appears.”   James Hillman

Mrs. Scattergood heading home

      We fold grief back into the land with our dead. We let the wind take their ashes into the curl of a wave. She found just the right wave for her brother’s ashes, a rider. The wind trilled our dill before it came into the soup. This land feeds us. The dill was first deeply inhaled then touched her many times and places. It almost seemed a misnomer to call it chicken soup. Dill was the main ingredient and soaked Mrs. Scattergood’s bones every Friday night when she was growing.  Her soul is steeped in dill.

~

     The world is light and dark. Memories recede into the background the way melting snow pulls back from the grass, the way sleep pulls away from us till we wake.  Do we awake or do we just not sleep so deeply?  Mrs. Scattergood woke up that morning with a sweet sense of connection for the path she was on but couldn’t remember why. It’s the first time in a long time she remembered not remembering. In the past, when she felt a brain fog was upon her, it meant that her period was coming up from the place it slept. Sort of like Grendel’s mother, she used to think. Quiet but powerful and after something. Though she had it often enough she should have been prepared. She never was. And that is how the hall emptied of its great warriors; so she used to think.  Her fog was more about her emotional state this time.  It carried her the way descending layers of hoops supported old fashioned gowns; holding her a distance away from her own body. Another way grief wraps cotton around your head and separates you from the world. Coupled with your period, you are far away from what is visceral and moved into realities that have no maps.  Even so, there always is a knowing within.  Whether we understand it, recognize it or can call upon it at will is another matter. But it resides within. Your friends will recognize what you’re talking about if you can garner the will to talk about it, and they’ll nod. At least the women will. A person has to follow her feelings when sense cannot make sense out of the directions on a compass.

ancestral memories

from mosaic (4) by freda karpf

She could accept, even relied on the sound and sight of the waves to bring comfort. Why not another animal or person or character, or bunch of dill bringing contact with someone she loves?  When she felt the connection she would feel as if she had touched something or someone that felt ancestral.  But who were her ancestors? The waves, the sky?  Too big, too vague.  What else?  Who else? 

~

     Memories come through her like ghosts.  Are these what is left of her ancestors?  As she tried to weave the reality she wanted into being she remembered that ghosts and golems are the descendants of people.  In some situations, they were necessary and binary, like the golem.  A word on their forehead meaning life gives them life.  A flick of the last letter, knocking it off their head and they’re dead.  The power of words is like the power of waves.  They keep coming and meaning folds back into the sea again.

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