everything becomes a canvas for memory

from the sea (5) - Old birds ludes by freda karpf

  We slip between modes of comfort and discomfort.  The time between is growth.  We grow in random and chaotic stages for the rest of our lives once our knees stop hurting from the push of youth and marrow.  The random stages of growth carry into the finer less material phases of a person’s existence.  They extend into the mental and elemental.  They slide up your spine like the Kundalini and tickle your neocortex to remember a finer state of grace where the physical realities seem dense and burdened, where the sweet sensations of the souls’ mercurial unfolding breach the gap between the formal Russian Ballet and Twyla Tharp.

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      You know that everything becomes a canvas for memory. So much so that when the criss-crosses of life come to you you’re already painting before you realize. If you don’t stop applying paint you might miss what’s happening in front of your own eyes. 

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     Green herons will complain loudly. They’re not just telling you that you’ve bothered them, they’re letting the entire area know it.  Baubo felt she was always the one to surprise a green heron. Not the osprey flying to a dead wood perch, not the mute swans making a racket as they take off from the river, but her, as she tried to move quietly along the reeds. The tops of the cord grass became a doily bordering her view to the river across the way. So it is that what is foreshortened becomes backdrop and what is near becomes border. 

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     Dendritic lace.  It is like ice forming last winter at the edges of the river. This cold is alive and grows as the hours move.  Spring will move the ice back and have the pattern melt into the mud.  Patterns grow in our memories and recede with warmth because the living becomes more engaging. But they remain and we remember the cold.  We remember the warmth with less efficiency.

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     Mrs. Scattergood’s dreaming had become her living.  Baubo noticed. Noticed too that she had sandwiched the mundane with her work and her grief. That’s some sandwich.  Well that is life, is it not?  The practical, the soul.  They meet in a multitude of combinations.  You can see, as Baubo did, when a person’s life feels empty.  It’s always the eyes that show it but you can hear it too.  If you are not hearing pain you are hearing someone that has let life leave them. They will feel empty, without spirit. But the person going through this might not know that they are dry as a husk. How dry is that? Dry, really dry.  No grits, no maize, no amazing.

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