Gale's Garden

fickle scenes stream to recall hinted grey days and the shovel blade’s scrape, slap into earthy layers beneath crabgrass

i  now follow the intermittent shine of spider web twine to a more southern bred aloe, refuting sunbeams in my old woman reality to remember that misty day when

my heart twisted and broken indoors, took to tear at the earth outside your window

monochrome world’s indifference made you wash dishes in the dark as I dug up lawn in the rain

the only color was your hair, willing life by its hopeful amber hues, but your womb would not consent

mine own, finally silent after an onslaught of drugs and surgeries,  two children enough  {white girl sigh} safely inside watching tv

your desolation left the sink full to turn away from this connection with me, intolerable even through windowed glass, as in solace you grieved, your husband working far away

i remained. busied by clearing sections of sod, back burning, and the whole world’s tear drops of rain for your lost child to dampen my clothes  

days ended and began with bared soil, thankful to be covered in layers of mulch,  grassy gowns having been torn away, dampened newspapers  sphagnum moss  mushroom compost  cow manure grass clippings and autumn's painted leaves a new decor

you didn't flee from your kitchen window now   i didn't  glance your way

flea market finds and field rocks bordered the polygon, a quadrilateral, with a happenstance of bricks broken and butting edges to snows’ first crime

the ground froze, i shoveled your walk in morning darkness, we passed each other as neighbors do in silence   until spring

pawing at the earth like a centaur, i sunk over one hundred and fifty bulbs

it was meant to be stunning, an antique art nouveau  costume jewelry bouquet, but the pieces I dug and placed  were pre-adolescent to bloom as gems not yet

beckoning birds with baths and feeders, tea cups and saucers suspended above the tiger lilies’ fan, i built

then I waited  waited and watered  placed bird seed  and it happened  it filled your view, you came out to speak with me 

I could never remove the loss from your heart, but I could fill your eyes with beauty  with the softness of nature  with the hope of flowers for new life

the garden grew as did your rounding belly. you carried a child as the seasons changed

red haired, hopeful as mom, she was born and as she grew.  i planted a Hogwarts garden for this little one and mine as well, complete with chocolate frogs and contorted hazelnut, warlock twisted finger branches, wilting leaved tree

when we parted, each selling our homes, you told me how you would miss the gardens, the spring blooms, but confided, almost thinking out loud, how you couldn't understand why such beauty I hid from my own eyes, far from any window from which my haunted home would breathe

i smiled, and bent to pull a weed   we hugged and shared well wishes  i had no words   only flowers

it was for you

                                  a garden, your garden~

                                                                healing petals to touch   reflect life’s beauty

                     to impress the strength of your name: one who never, never  gives up

                          






 © ruth follmann

Wabi-sabi & Brooke Shields' Eyebrows

Bicentennial middle school celebrated 200 years of our country’s birth and my green light to enter into the chasm of feminine preening. My lips were cherry gloss red, my skin stayed white, and my eye shadow was metallic aqua blue.

One weeknight evening, I found the tweezers. Having watched my brothers’ eyebrows fantasmically transform, I decided to leave the Boys 2 Men Club of the supraorbital arch. Time to pluck that hair!

Keep in mind that 1976 stood as a proud antecedent of the renowned Brooke Shields' Eyebrows. Young Shields hit the screen in the 1978 Lois Malle’s film, Pretty Baby, and mixed it all up in the 80's.


By then, I had already pruned my eyebrows. As any gardener knows, pruning delegates itself to be an ongoing chore. My tweezers didn't mind. Stop the horror! I do not presently ‘draw’ my brows in. Nor are they tattooed; but, I did create a left brow shape described by a blurting classmate as a constant “state of surprise”.

As forewarned by those many wives’ tales: arthritis sets in from skirted bare winter legs, horses spook when you have your period (still don’t believe that one), & eyebrow hair does not respond well to growing back in; I acquiesce. “That’s never going to grow back you know!” loudspeakered my degrading school chum. “Check it out! Ruth always looks like she’s surprised!”

Feigning fate, I have been.

I am surprised that women still earn less than men.

I am surprised most people do not know we are all racist.

I am giddy when young people go through, survive, and teach us oldsters what we should have learned on our own long ago.

I am surprised at how much work marriage requires, every day.

I am slapped with disbelief that the world is tolerating an election for a mass murderer in Syria.

I am seedling peeking through soil, fragile heart of foil, surprised calls still matter on Mother’s Day.

I am surprised by the wit and sharp reprimand to stay strong from my own dearest Mom.

Lastly, I am surprised, after what seems to be eons as a dedicated health care worker, that I forgot the rule of entropy, the constant of age, & Wabi-sabi.

I have decided that the 'vase' has fallen. It is somewhere in the vicinity of my knees now. Although the vase has not yet hit the floor, I can unreservedly say it will. I have been struggling to catch it midair with the slippery hands of life and circumstance. I have been casting curses that if the floor I had been standing on was in another state, the vase would not have fallen. Silly. Outrageous. Vases fall. Life happens. Health deteriorates. Age onsets. Accept it with grace. Once the pieces have hit the floor, safely access the situation, gather the proper tools and or assistance needed to 'pick up the pieces', regroup. Find the best kind of glue.

So I am breathing easier, knowing what I should have realized all along: I cannot control everything.

Of this obvious fact: known, held, crumpled and thrown away, retrieved, smoothed and reviewed, I am surprised ~

that it is so  very hard  ‘to do’.

 © ruth follmann

                                                                                                           

                                                                                               

Writers and Ribbons: Cross Cut from Hair

Annie Dillard describes in her essay: “Holy the Firm”, that a writer’s approach to life should be as with a “broadax” (7). Yet many times the “broadax” of life cuts us, sometimes, to ribbons.  I sat in quiet mediation of an assigned reading in an entry way and asked myself a question. What is a writer to do with the ribbons, these shreds of our lives? The scene that quickly unfolded before my eyes supplied the answer.

A thin mother stopped short outside the clinic waiting room’s exterior door.  Her sharp tongue cut her tan daughter like a paper’s edge.  Voiceless, the girl stood rooted beneath her mother’s gnarled haunch and pointy twig finger. I sat exposed inside the aseptic entry way on a grainy plastic upholstered oversized bench. The seat fit smartly between three clinic doors, the lab, and a sanitized bathroom.  One of my allergy shots still bit at the back of my left arm. My wait stretched longer in the entry way in the face of possible reaction.  The woman screamed out matriarchal words. They riveted past dodgy noises of late afternoon rush hour traffic. The feral tone alarmed me through the thick tinted window panels.  Almost baked savors twirled down from a sub shop to the medical no nonsense air below. The manic woman chewed at the girl without mercy, and demanded to know: who cut her hair.

This child’s face arched her mother’s voltage, even though the attack remained verbal. Cockeyed, the parent did not strike. Shrill questions continued. The woman blocked the only entry to the medical offices, and in my case, the exit.  The girl froze. Her gaze, level with mine, pulled me to her marrow through the heavy sun heated jaundiced glass. Old cuts from my childhood opened.  A family pew held me vulnerable to the way sharp tongues can make us bleed.  Recollection dumped me to her side as if I were a child again.  Ruthless, I turned away, sifting my creative force from elders’ milled words steeped in shame. My insides mimed a contortion: the girl’s panicky downward turned face.  I followed her gaze, a cue to her shoe. A left foot drilled ineffectively at concrete. Her toes pressed with random departure plans, devised for anywhere, maybe even nearby traffic. The fiery interrogation continued. The queries flew like a hard ball that smacked straight into a mitt behind the girl’s ribcage. She felt that one. My singed eyes did too.  Anger pulled my sinews up from a hapless inner child and stretched for adult skin again.  This maneuver forfeited honor.  Memory fought past fog horns of sinking ships and cleared to times past I had spoken with harsh tones to my daughters. Life cast me now, the mother, having imposed low self-esteem on my own children with piously shorn parenting techniques.  I cringed. The woman picked at her bangs like a crow, pecking out spots that were shorter than others. The girl must have mumbled a confession for the carrion bird screeched:  “Who doled out the scissors? Had the teacher known?”  The door opened with the tap of an oversized automatic handicap button.  My exhale finished, grateful this lady’s mouth snapped shut. The matron’s stockpiled confidence stepped past, confirming her methodology had broken the kid again. The girl slumped in faded musty clothes to push skeins of hair over shorter bangs. She must have simply been trying to keep hair from her eyes. The woman loomed wary and herded the child, like an overzealous sheep dog against a disabled lamb to a lettered glass office door.

Feeling my thighs strengthen to stand, my tongue ready to defend . . .  my mute voice could not escape.  The mother and child slipped away.  An epoch named me Coward then cast me as both players in the entryway opening scene. The seated perspective submerged my stasis to that of progeny.  Memory dismantled confidence to bare a child’s wounds.  Horror rebuilt bias to recite arbitrary parental lines.  Desolation reminded escape from abuse is not an easy path, whenever one walks away. 

Although in an era past, still “broadax” deep, these pangs cut me bare and keep my daughter estranged in a real time infection of generational disease. Abusive parents were abused. They hurt others. The ‘others’ are their children, who from pain, eventually ~ cut themselves free. These cut ribbons twist around the inevitable evening air and become a reflective fabric, the iridescence one sees before a shock state, dazed. As a therapeutic bandage, I net our shredded lives to paper before they fade away. Musings of my childhood, my parenting, and my child control my pen.  A salt tear and spit wet finger turns each filling page.  Writing heals.  Love letters tie these life ribbons, ours and others, like a tourniquet or a tea rose, but they tie.  Vessels and variables mend as we all shove aside another day. Words burst out of me, from writers too.  We scribble on receipts or the back of unopened mail just to get it out, put it down.  When it is down on paper, we feel lighter. We still carry it, but not the whole load. We ask half forgiveness and grant the same self-amnesty.  We remove the razor sharp voices finally from our heads, maybe to reach up with literary defiance - a shining blade in glory to cut our ties: to cut our hair.


for Deirdre~

© ruth follmann

                                                         Works cited

     Dillard, Annie. “Holy the Firm.” The Norton Sampler: Short Essays for Composition.

               Ed. Marilyn Moller. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2013. 7.  Print.