Resilience sleeps, creeps and leaps

“Cranes cover long distances leaving land storms behind.”   -  Edwin Way Teale

     These words bring me peace.  I think of the people I miss.  I’m living through the land storm.  There is peace. 

    

 It’s funny to think of my mother flying.  Finally.  How many times did I tell her that her bloomers were in danger of pulling the clothes line out of the ground?  Talk about fuel economy.  My god, where did she ever buy those things?  My mother, the crane. But I have to give her credit.  She was smart to fly away from the storm.

Sleeps, creeps and leaps

     Gardeners have a saying about almost everything.  Clematis, a plant with flowers cultivated on another planet: “Sleeps its first year.”  “The second year, it creeps” and, “the third year it leaps.”  Grief’s a lot like clematis.  I got one for Lynn because she missed Ro.  Ro’s family didn’t take care of the garden and eventually, they pulled it all out.  There went Ro’s clematis.  Besides being a tradition you can hand down and grow in your garden, flowers can remind you about the way things can work with grief. Grief holds you down.  Down like a wave.  First your spirit sleeps. Wasn’t it Melville that wrote “doom is darker than any sea dingle”?  You feel the doom. 

   

  Then life begins to seduce you.  It has an allure like the spring.  Remember, the first brush of color on the trees?  Whether you want to breathe or not, spring seduces you.

There are so many words for seduce, like entice, invite, even wheedle and inveigle mean seduce.   I didn’t know there were so many words for it until I felt as if I too had died and then life began, one way and another, to seduce me to join in.  First you sleep, then creep, then you leap.

the wild blue poem series is comprised of two sections. the first is grief, the second is resilience. this is the section called “II Resilience”. the entire book is available through Amazon Kindle at:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E2UU19O