No surface mining allowed!
Sunday, October 29th, 2006
I really do not like dark places, I prefer to walk in illumination, upright, and free to find my way around by some other means than crawling through the muck, and having my miner’s light beam its narrow pathway into the darkness. But I have heard that there is company awaiting me, and nuggets of real value to be mined from behind this door. So I gather courage, and insist that it be friends with fear.
They shake hands, at first reluctantly, eye each other suspiciously, and then agree, in the interest of what is best for me, that they will lay aside their petty differences and go together into the mine.
So it is, with courage holding one hand, and fear sweatily squeezing the other, that I push open the door to a place of mystery, an underground bed of discovery.
It is odd that all of the world’s most precious and highly valued commodities come from beneath the earth: diamonds, rubies, emeralds,oil, coal, and oh,I almost forgot… taters. Perhaps, I shall emerge more valuable for this deep mining effort, or at least better prepared for what is next.
So I shut my eyes, inhale deeply, and give the door to the mine a hearty shove….. and step across the threshold that symbolizes my entrance into a world of wonder, and all the while courage is kissing fear, and I believe they will become very good friends indeed.
there is new, pink, baby flesh under there!
Saturday, October 28th, 2006
Oft times the most useful tool, is the one that that inflicts the most damage. In my case, I shall have to be aggressive and ruthless in my attempt to scrape away the mutiple callouses that life’s oppositional “rubbings” have caused me.
No loofa will do, I must use putty scraper and chisel to rid myself of the ugly, toughened, deadness that I acquired as a means of “protection.”
Isn’t it odd how a word, or a phrase, or even a look from kin or stranger can be internalized? Internalized, sucked inward, incorporated, and then burst through to the outside, forming a calloused, dry, and unfruitful spot that causes us more pain than the initial wound?
So tonight, I carve, with reckless abandon. I will rid myself of the naysaying words spoken over me and my dreams, I will cut deep until the tender flesh of who I am is once again visible.
I slough, therfore I am……………..whatever the hell I want to be!
Frogita
and from Pandora’s box….an appeasement perhaps?
Friday, October 27th, 2006
Nanny’s Hope Chest
By: Debbie Necessary Gibson
2006
” And from Pandora’s box spilled a host of evils, but one thing remained……………..”
Nanny died at eighty-six. No bones about it, she was my favorite grandparent, and I, her favorite grandchild. No bones about that either. I inherited from her a spice of temperament, a whole host of knick-knacks, a recipe box, and a cedar chest known as “Nanny’s Hope Chest.”
Upon its creation, it was a masterpiece of shining wooden beauty. By the time I inherited it, it had become an eyesore that was cast aside by my mother and sister as a reject that paled in comparison to the luster of an emerald cut diamond, and a very perfect amethyst of purple majesty.
Dented, scarred, scratched, and bumped it found its way over the mountain in the back of a 1983 Silverado pick-up that had seen its better days also. Four men of ample, bulging, muscle moved it into its new and permanent location, the foot of my matrimonial bed.
Everyone in the house was curious regarding the contents. I dodged their requests, for it seemed to me that whatever treasures were housed there were first mine for the taking, and should the lid be shut to secrets, well then, they would be whispered only to me. The lid stayed locked, and I became the keeper of the key. A key which I hid from curious voyeurs wishing to peek into the window of Nanny’s life. No one would see Nanny’s nakedness until I did.
The day finally came when everyone I shared home with fled the premises. I finally had scrounged a block of time when no interlopers would be peeking over my shoulder, and I retrieved the key from its hiding place in my underwear drawer. I knew it was safe there, for no child, and only a very anxious husband would dare to sift through big-girl bloomers to find anything, much less the key to the chest of Nanny’s secrets.
As I inserted the key into the lock, it occurred to me that I might walk away from this afternoon of rummaging with a very different understanding of the woman I had loved and adored. Gathering my breath, and placing it in the hand of courage, I turned the key.
The colors assaulted my senses. Handkerchiefs, beaded purse, leather gloves, satin handmade undergarments, old perfume bottles, and boxes upon boxes of letters wrapped in ribbons and catalogued by year, and newspapers from historic moments both worldly and personal. Woody and aromatic, the smell of my grandmother’s life crawled up my nostrils, and found its way to my heart. Here were the “important ” things, the treasures worth fondling, the dreams worth keeping.
As I broke the bread of her life, a shudder went through me. I knew not if it was anticipation, fear, or the ghost that I had inhaled upon opening the lid. Goosebumps rose on my arms. Quickly, I shook the feeling, and opened the first batch of letters, untying a pink ribbon. These were the letters of suitors and potential husbands, boys with an eye for a slim, tiny redhead with an attitude and wiggle to match. They seemed childish and immature to me, but they also represented the sexual yen of a young adolescent woman who knew she had something the opposite sex desired. ” Meet me at Wilson’s Drugstore and we’ll share a malt, one glass, two straws.” a boy named Wilfred had written. Wilfred? Who the hell would name a boy Wilfred? I am glad she never married him.
The next batch of letters, twined in green ribbon, represented the first true love of her life, the man whom she would marry. The man who would sire my mother, and run off into an alcoholic sunset with another woman, and forget he ever loved a girl named Louise and child named Barbara. I had never met him in real life, he effectively disappeared from all our lives. One by one I read the letters of his intent, the anticipation of marital bliss he had, the yearning for home he expressed while away at war, and I read every manipulative word he wrote to sway my grandmother from pity and into the recognition that she had married a con, a man who loved a woman for the gifts she could give to him in the form of cash. When he did not get his way he grew caustic, mean, surly, hateful and self-absorbed. He may have helped create my mother, but I hated him, and I never even knew him.
The next letters were works of poetic wonder. Another had pursued her. He was a writer, a dreamer, a visionary, a self-educated man, whose lack of diploma had no bearing on his intelligence. I fell in love with him too, and had I not known that at fifty-eight he would shoot himself and die an alcoholic, I would have thought that life could have been complete with this man.
The next packet was bundled in purple, all of them were letters from me. Written in block print and progressing into a swirling, fanciful adolescent script, the young dreams and dreary chronicling of a small me to a tall me. She had kept every letter I had ever written. I heard her voice on the far end of the phone saying, ” Remember to write me, it makes me so happy to check the mail and see your handwriting.”
I felt the hot tears rise in my throat, and I began to empty with a fury the contents of the entire chest. I fondled the cedar-scented items, and built around myself a bed of memorabilia. Hours passed and I could not shake myself from the task, the task of paying homage to one I loved. Several hours passed as I read and re-read her correspondence, and imagined a time when you made your own bra and panties in home economics, and you hung your dreams on a whimsy dressed in love. I went back to a time when war ravaged the earth, and every kiss was a potential last kiss. I scooped up as much of her essence as I could, and then I packed every memory, every letter, every cedar -scented memento back into the box.
It amazed me that one so buoyant, so full of cheer and delight, one so positive and full of elan, could have become all that in the face of all this. I have never unlocked the chest again, not since the day I floated on her dreams and drowned in her despairing sea. Since that day, the key has rested in the left hand corner of my underwear drawer. Her secrets are safe with me. Only two know the secrets housed in hope chest…only me and the ghost I inhaled, the day I turned the key.
Silver Dove’s Walking Stick
Friday, October 27th, 2006
Silver Doves’s Walking Stick
“What shall I gift you with Silver Dove Wolf?” said Frogita. ” Diamonds that blind? Sapphires whose colors mimic the ocean’s ebb and flow? Rubies that pulse like the blood in your veins?” “How would you like mansions and vast acreage? Or bars of gold stacked to ceiling, with silver coins laid out in a pathway for your feet?” “You may have anything you like and I will gift you with it, so tell me, Silver Dove Wolf, what turns your heart to poetic putty and makes your knees tremble with joy?”
“Why Frogita,” answered Silver Dove Wolf, “I only wish for one thing from you”
“Name it” squealed Frogita, “and it is yours.” “I love to give, especially to my friends!” “Tell me , Tell me!” Frogita exclaimed.
“Well, if you really want to know what would make me happy I will tell you.” said Silver Dove Wolf. “I want a stick.”
“A stick?” questioned Frogita, “A stick?” “Why a stick, when you could have the treasures of the earth and sea?”
“Well, ” replied Silver Dove Wolf, “I know you to be a crafter of walking sticks and I am in need of one for this journey we call life!” ” That is all I need, Frogita… a walking stick fashioned from your words and wood, and presented to me for my journey” “Will you make one, and gift me with it?”
Frogita was astonished at her friends request, but being one that loved to please and being full of words she said, “I will.”
The friends parted way, and Frogita began to contemplate the task at hand. How to craft a stick of worthiness, and where would she find the piece that would help Silver Dove Wolf withstand the storms of life and give her support in times of need? But Frogita did not want the stick to serve Silver Dove for only troubled times, she knew it had to be more. And so she began her trek to find the perfect stick.
Frogita’s journeys took her far from home, and many days and nights passed as she hopped hither and yon looking for the perfect stick for Silver Dove Wolf. She gathered piece after piece of sacred wood from forests all over the world and took them back to her workshop. She plopped her gathering sack on the table in her quaint little house, and laid the pieces out so she could see them as a whole and she was quite pleased with herself.
And so, the stick for Silver Dove Wolf began to emerge, and the sticky little bulbs that Frogita had for fingers began to work. She carved, and whittled, created intricate inlays and marquetry, and then she began the assembly. She took the rare and expensive length of purpleheart wood from Africa and carefully split it in two lengthwise. The inside was more beautiful than the outside, and it pleased Frogita that the crux of the stick mirrored Silver Dove Wolf herself, gorgeous to behold from afar, but immensely more fascinating when examined closely and from within. When the pieces were laid out side by side, Frogita began her meticulous and careful work of whittling small little holes up and down the length of the pieces. Hours passed, and Frogita diligently whittled perfectly symmetrical “windows” that went from the outer bark through to the inner rings. Over and over she counted forty-nine rings, one for each year of the tree’s life.
When she completed the tedious and painstaking task of boring the holes, she pulled from her gathering bag the rare and extinct chestnut wood she had found deep in the Appalachian forest. She cut a thin translucent piece, and sandwiched it into the middle of the two purpleheart wood pieces, with a quick motion she bent down and kissed the wood from top to bottom and her froggy little kisses magically “glued” the three pieces together.
The walking stick was coming together quickly now, and she pulled from her assortment of gatherings, the embellishments. She had been so happy to find the little saplings of fruit trees from around the world, and one by one she began to tuck the tiny little root tendrils inside the holes she had carved. Apple, cherry, apricot, mango, passion fruit, plumcot, fig, pomegranate, banana, date, orange and lemon. All found their new homes inside the tiny little purpleheart-chestnut “houses” she had carved. When she was finished she thought to herself that the stick resembled a bird house with all sorts of winged beauties peering out at the world.
The project was almost complete except for its crown, and for the top Frogita had saved liquid molten silver that she had gathered from river moonbeams, and she carefully began to pour the shiny, silken silver into the hollowed cup she had left where the purpleheart root ball had been. It twisted, and turned, and magically caught the light and swirled from side to side , but never spilled over the edge. It was rapturous beauty, captured in pureness, and it would roll and twist and turn with every step that Silver Dove Wolf would take on her journey.
That evening Frogita hopped over to find her friend and tapped on her window. “Silver Dove, oh Silver Dove, it’s me Frogita, and I have something for you” Silver Dove had been resting, but recognized her friends voice and ran to the window.
“Here it is Silver Dove, your walking stick.” ” I have finished what you asked me to do and I hope it serves you well” said Frogita. “See?” she exclaimed , “Isn’t it beautiful?”
Silver Dove wiped the sleep from her eyes and she gasped as she took in the dimensions and colors of her new stick. Frogita stood back proudly and said ” This, my friend, is for you.” “It is crafted from woods from around the world and it will serve you well on your journey.” ” See these little saplings?” They are fruit trees of every kind, and they will grow, and you may even eat from them when you are hungry!” Silver Dove was so taken with the beauty of the walking stick she began to cry. Some of her tears fell into the lake of molten silver and others landed on the saplings themselves, and then the two friends witnessed a miracle! The tiny saplings began to issue forth little shoots and buds and then, one by one, they watched as tiny perfect little fruits began to emerge.
“Why, Silver Dove, your tears have brought fruit, perfect fruit.” ” Who could have possibly imagined that the saplings needed the watering of your tears?” “Perfect, just perfect!” exclaimed Frogita. “Well, my friend, there you go, enjoy your walking stick.” ” I am going home to rest now, for I have a feeling that after all our friends at Rio Abajo Rio see your lovely stick I will have a blossoming business!” ” I think I shall call it Froggy Finds For Furry Friends.”
And with that, Frogita turned her tail toward home, and Silver Dove Wolf went back to bed. As she closed her eyes, she reached out and patted the Purpleheart Stick that Frogita had crafted for her. It was good to have friends that love you, even if they are little and green and have sticky little pod fingers. So Silver Dove closed her eyes, and a tiny tear spilled from the corner of her right eye and the bed covers shifted ever so slightly as the tiny passion fruit sapling gave a gift that would be found in the morning.
by Frogita (Debbie)
