“Refuge unfailing in which conflict
tempered silence reconciled.” One of my
favorite lines from another Mississippian, William Faulkner. I’ve known these words a long time. They came
when I was thinking about Virg and what I wanted to share about our friendship.
I know she worked real hard to overcome a lot of external and internal
conflicts. She was brave that way. It’s not easy to change. I believe she was
happy; that she found refuge in her friends and family, in her professional
achievements and that many of the conflicts she had were tempered. Silence is a
strange bird. It can be the peace you achieve through work or grace or it can
be a difficult passage through time, maybe it will show up as loneliness or an
unspoken fear or something you have to accept. I believe that Virg found the
whole package, ‘refuge unfailing in which conflict tempered silence
reconciled.’
What runs through my mind about her
is that she called me and Lynn her peeps. I hold onto this thought like a
thread that will take me through the maze of grief. There is the family you're
born to or adopted into. And there is the family you've chosen or who has
chosen you. These are your peeps. Peeps
don't just come in a box at Easter time; they come to you, sometimes decades
after you've landed on the planet, because the spirits smiled on you. Sometimes,
peeps aren't known to the person's social circle. Or they might not be recognized in formal
settings or public announcements. But their particular kind of special
relationship is about souls recognizing each other as family, even if
undocumented.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote about
granfalloon and karass. Peeps are like your karass. Granfalloons and karass are
wonderful and beautiful groups that you belong to. Your karass are closer to
your heart and soul; where granfalloon could be a professional group or the
extended family you don't know so intimately. Someone you recognize as
belonging to your karass could be in your daily life or someone you meet by
chance at a drugstore counter, randomly, for that moment only, and you
recognize your soul connection to each other.
Peeps are soul connected.
Virg was our peeps, me and Lynn.
This is why in the freezing cold of February we could bring sleeping bags and
coats and sweaters and blankets to lie on the beach waiting for meteor showers
that rarely came. It’s the looking for
them that’s grand. One time, the three of us saw strange lights coming from the
ocean that prompted us to scamper off the beach as best we could. It wasn’t a pretty sight. We were simultaneously spooked and delighted.
Once I saw a strange sight as Lynn and I were driving along Ocean Avenue in
Avon. I texted Virg about it as it was going on. She was our go to person for everything alien
and quantum. Somehow, we built up this conversation, through texting, and my
indecipherable talk-to-text, that made me laugh so hard I couldn’t even speak
half the time to let Lynn know Virg’s response. Recently, I saw something alien
through my kitchen window and texted her immediately. She helped build this
crazy tower of fun that was pure pee in your pants, gasping for air, crying
laughter. And, by the way, the alien object disappeared as strangely as it had arrived.
Peeps can make you pee in your
pants.
A new article on quantum
physics noted that when you really get right down to the smallest, most close
up look at molecules you’ll see quantum foam. That’s it, at the bottom of
everything there’s a soft cushion of foam. It’s what’s holding everything up.
It’s not Atlas. So, you don’t need all those muscles to keep it together. You
just need foam. Foam is good to pack
around peeps so that we don’t get damaged.
And that’s why we’ll go out this February, wrapped up in down sleeping
bags and quantum foam to see the shooting stars. If it’s not a great night for
meteor showers, we’ll at least have our soul connection with Virg and that is our
refuge unfailing in which conflict tempered silence reconciled.
freda
Virginia Downey January 30, 1953 - July 15, 2017
