Meg Sefton's Blog, page 55
March 10, 2020
fronds
A date palm&bird by llee_wu, flickr
It is a late hazy morning. I step out of my air conditioned apartment. A mild winter Florida wind plays with my hair and skirt, kisses my cheek. Beyond the breezeway, a groundskeeper addresses the low growing date palm with pruning sheers and gloved hands, his large scissors eating green flesh, crunching through briskly. There is little movement, only the highway beyond and a distant city shocked by contagion. How I have longed for this man’s work without knowing what it is I wanted. The fronds fall together, discarded like written pages or crisp sheets, collapsing to the ground, spent. He walks around the cluster of low growing trees, tending each outgrowth. I thank the morning. I feel on the other side of a long burning anger. What I sense now are simple, quiet tasks.
February 22, 2020
Boy on the Bridge
Life on the Prairie by David Kingham, flickr
That summer was ablaze. Moira had left me and I was alone in the unairconditioned house we had so carefully chosen a couple of years before. I had never noticed how, at night on the plains, the wind whips through all those blades of grass so that for the person alone, the sound it makes can deafen ears that are not otherwise distracted by a loving presence. Moira and I had both spent our nights reading and playing board games and drawing pictures. When I sat down to my work, there was never a moment I did not sense my wife doing her work in the kitchen, or simply, breathing, turning pages, shifting in her chair. I am an indexer, responsible for filing away in categories the hundreds of pieces of minutia someone reading a source might find relevant.
I wish I had recorded the sounds of Moira. Had I known she were leaving, I would have scattered tiny recording devices in various places so that I could replay them on continuous loops once she dropped out of my existence, as quietly as the sun dipped beneath the curve of the earth.
One night after she had gone I needed groceries. I hadn’t exactly kept up with anything. The house was a wreck, I needed a bath, the yard was overgrown. I showered and showed up at the grocery as a slightly more improved man than the man of a few hours hence. I picked up things we would have both picked up. I had decided to make dishes we had made together or that Moira made me. I couldn’t be bothered to come up with anything new. I managed to pay for my groceries, but funds were getting low. I had to work again or I would have to sell the house. It was all that I had of Moira. I could still smell her. In fact, sometimes, when I returned home, I thought she was there.
On my way home, I was headed over a bridge when a boy appeared in my headlights. He was waving me down. I stopped the car. He seemed harmless enough and anyone who was trying that hard could easily sway me to do their bidding. I felt barely alive and could just as easily die at a stranger’s hands than live.
“I need help,” said the boy, who appeared to be almost a man, but there was something quite young about him still. “My mother has fallen into the ravine. Our car broke down a mile or so away.”
It was a damp night, easy to imagine someone falling if they took a wrong step off the narrow shoulder of the road.
I followed the boy down through the trees and undergrowth. I spotted a woman there beside the river, her left leg splayed slightly. She wore a dress and the t-strap shoes my mother used to wear when my brother and I were boys, in the days my parents ran a farm. She looked like my mother, in fact. As I approached, she fixed on me with her intense gaze. She pointed at me. “Boy!” she addressed her son. “I told you to bring help. Who is this man?”
“This is help, Mama.”
“I need someone who can lift me, a stretcher.”
I managed to get the woman back up to my car with the help of her son who supported her on the opposite side. I lowered her into the back seat. I was convinced now this was my mother and the boy my brother who had died in a farming accident. I got into the driver’s seat. What else was one to do but behave as one always does? I started the engine and when I turned to speak to my passengers, realized I was alone.
At home, I found a note I had somehow missed, something Moira had written, a good bye:
“No one ever leaves anyone. We live on in memories and dreams. I’m sorry I have to leave you, James, but I will see you at night when I close my eyes. Please forgive me.”
I forgave her. I said it out loud, but really, I was saying I forgive you to Mother. I wasn’t quite sure what I had experienced on the bridge and the ravine. It was the loneliness and grief perhaps that had caused me to see things, to have such a strange experience. I needed to get back to work, some sort of normalcy.
I turned on the television for its friendly sound, a kind of atavistic pleasure and took my comfort that there would be less silence in the house from now on even without this bright distraction. I began making my dinner.
February 5, 2020
December 27, 2019
Amica the Christmas Tree
Washington Christmas Tree Farm, Washington State Department of Agriculture, flickr
It was the time of year in Orlando when evergreen trees were brought in from Michigan, Pennsylvania, Oregon, and Washington to be sold to loving families who would decorate their arms with lights and chains of beads, glass ornaments, homely and sentimental ornaments, ornaments collected from trips and black Friday sales and school and church craft shows, regifted gift ornaments, white elephant ornaments, grandmother’s ornaments, Christmas wedding shower ornaments, estate and garage sale ornaments, ornaments from the Winter Park Art Festival, the Orlando Museum of Art, Disney, the flea market.
Valentine Halle was a prominent socialite in town who, every year, could make several trees last for almost an eternity, until the end of February, ignoring all pleas of her husband and family to strip the trees bare and put them on the curb already. But according to Valentine, to do it too soon would be a little like prematurely putting old family members out to pasture. Almost every year she just couldn’t bring herself to do it until at last her family lured her away on false pretenses and arranged for someone to bring the holiday to a close.
Trees were not much different from people in that they wanted to live a long life. Only a few people seemed to care about a tree’s desires and one of them was Valentine. If we were to understand trees a bit more, however, they may have one limitation: The tendency to impute purely unselfish motives to people. Yet their faith was born fully formed and never died, continuing even beyond the cutting at Christmas as trees stood in stands of water, beneath skirts. And that was the real reason people wanted trees as decorations in their homes – the faith the trees had in humans – though most people did not realize this, only felt it somehow, like feeling the effect of a dream but not being able to recall what it was upon waking.
It was thanks to migrating mockingbirds, gossipy chatterboxes, that trees further north on tree farms came to know of Valentine’s reputation. Charlie, Jamal, Tina, Fiona – Balsam and Fraser firs – had been spied standing in the cool shadows of the living room, front entry, children’s nursery, and those were just a few of their numbers known to have lived at Valentine’s house. Furthermore, Valentine’s reputation as an excellent cook and hostess were reported upon by mockingbirds, keen little buggers, who could smell delicious fragrances from the kitchen and who spied well coiffed ladies and gentlemen and their children streaming in and out of the house. In fact, as far as Christmas trees were concerned, Valentine’s home was considered one of the best ways to finish out one’s life.
How long the people of earth have relied on them, the trees said, conferring about this together on the farm, the older, taller trees teaching the younger ones, all of them growing together. They would all be cut down for varying purposes and at various times, and yet they shared their history and the meaning of it: For as long as the winter solstice was celebrated all over the world, the deep green boughs were brought into homes. And as time went on, the custom transferred into a way to celebrate the life of a religious figure. Entire trees were cut down and brought inside. These legends were passed down through communities of trees so all would know their noble and sacrificial purpose.
It was February of the year Amicia the Fraser fir had found a place in the home of Valentine Halle. And it was time for Amicia to come down. She had been chosen for a special place beside the fire in the living though not so close her needles became dry. It was a cherished position though each tree had its function: Ichiyo the twelve foot Douglas greeted visitors in the entry, Livia the Noble entertained the now grown children in the nursery, adult children who continued the tradition of sleeping there Christmas Eve, except now they drank wine and spoke of their friends and colleges and days past.
In the living room where Valentine and Thomas each sat in their own chair, silent in the evenings after all the parties, Amicia observed their quiet dynamic before the fire, Thomas with his paper and his pipe, Valentine with her embroidery, the grandfather clock against the wall by the entryway a silent father, approving and dozing until it startled to life and sputtered the passing of time on the quarter hour.
Valentine’s reputation had held through Amicia’s experience and true to everyone’s word, Amicia had lasted beautifully for three months with few needles dropped to her skirt beneath.
Alone after Thomas had gone to bed, Valentine pulled her chair up to Amicia. She spoke to her then in a language Amicia had quickly absorbed.
“Thomas is taking me away for my birthday tomorrow,” she said. She held an ornament in her fingers that was dangling from a branch, a Lenox figurine, a bottle of champagne in a bucket signifying the turning of the New Year. Tears fell down her cheeks. “I know when I come back, you will no longer be here. Our daughter will take down everything. But I struggle. Time goes on. My children have grown and are leaving me. Holidays remind me of what was but also what is no more.” And she looked into the fire, her face wet with tears.
Amicia knew what it was like to lose family to their purpose. Ever so gently she shifted so she could reach the top of Valentine’s head with a branch. She stroked it gently, reassuringly, until Valentine had calmed.
Thomas came into the room, having changed into his pajamas, robe and slippers.
Amicia straightened, not letting on she had made an exception to the rule of remaining impartial to human suffering.
“It’s time for bed, my dear,” Thomas said gently to his wife, helping bring her to her feet.
When Amicia was thrown to the curb the next day, crushed by the garbage truck, then thrown into the city dump, she dreamt of Valentine.
She thought proudly as her branches and trunk disintegrated in the mound of waste that she had served her purpose.
The one mystery of course is that she had crossed the divide.
As she felt herself disappearing, she felt an animal, a bird or a squirrel, pick a cone from her decayed branches.
And as she felt grateful the world would know the compassion and faith of her progeny, she felt able to let go.
December 5, 2019
Fortune Plango Vulnera
Nightpalms by Roman Boed, flickr
We always went to Sanford, but it was never quite right. At the last brewery, the waitress actually said their stout was better than Guinness. That is actually what she said. It was water. She had a sizable figure though, something I watched you take in while you spoke to her, about on the edge of a conversation, though remembering my expressed hurt of this kind of thing, you pulled back. Almost a full conversation. The outside metal umbrella table rocked slightly on the brick. A bit like me, off center. Promise to myself, a plan, that if I sit alone while you talk I will call a car service and leave you. Delicious fantasy.
Last year was better at Christmastime in Sanford. We hit a downtown restaurant and brewery on a Saturday. It was just past the time I had been strongly suspecting Saturdays were your nights for other dates. That night, I drank a holiday spiced milk stout. You marveled I like such deep brews when you only liked lighter ales. You were probably laughing. When we went back to the car, you made fun of a bike bedecked with Christmas lights. I had made note of how great it was. It was so Florida I said. You said nothing. You held my hand.
That Christmas, last year, I could not get you to meet me out for rides by Full Sail. Or watch the choirs who sang beside Tiffany windows in Winter Park. I could not get you to go with me to see the opera Hansel and Gretel. You could make me laugh but you are staid. Maybe I laugh because you are staid and not like me. You are Greek and your face reminds me of an icon, eyes lined, down turned slightly at the edges, a calm, disinterested expression. And yet you laugh and smile too. That had been the chemistry: The light breaking through the godlike impassivity.
The watered down stout was hard to take this year, a year worn down by what you say you cannot give to me. I only thought an icon was a passage to something, not the finality of an object without transformative potential.
I feel only the coldness of being in Sanford on a Sunday this Christmas season night when almost all of the pubs and restaurants are closed at an ungenerous hour. The ones that are open mock the good times of Fridays and Saturdays, their doors hanging open like open maws, rock spewing forth, Third Eye Blind from one, Ozzie from another, songs I like except when something like death lingers. Down the street is a dark lake we don’t visit. And a bar I half suspect you’ve taken another woman for beers you prefer, Belgian.
And there is no garishly bedecked bicycle. I am no longer foolishly believing we will be holding hands at an opera or tipping over the apex of a ferris wheel, University of Central Florida below as well as waitresses and future diners and bars.
That last Christmastime night in Sanford, I feel my body aching from the drug I take to prevent cancer recurrence. You don’t hold my hand like you did before though I could break apart now more than ever. I had done something to annoy you. Gods and their punishments. Even to death. That night I did not have you inside my home but made up some excuse, I became a backslider. I kissed you only like a nominal orthodox kisses an icon. I said in my heart my beliefs are not giving back to me and I thanked you for my evening. I stepped into my home alone, a nominal Presbyterian.
November 26, 2019
bitter
flying mind by Charlie arts, flickr
Do not let bitterness build up within you. Let it flow out in your tears, flowing out of you and down and around, becoming lakes and ponds, rivers meeting with the sea and supporting creatures, evaporating and feeding life, becoming rain that quenches fire and thirst, renewing, refreshing, sustaining, gentling.
November 25, 2019
pluck
Tasty Mess by Emma Royle, flickr
Granny’s housekeeper Maimie plucked the chickens and wrung their necks. There once was a chicken running around with its head backward because Maimie let go too early. You had to be first at the table first for Maimie’s legendary fried chicken or you were SOL.
November 24, 2019
stuff
Homeless Woman and her Dog, Simon Whitaker, flickr
The homeless lady we hosted for Thanksgiving brought all her stuff. The best was her dog. She had him do tricks. She also gave us each a trinket. At some point she pocketed some silver and a few of Daddy’s coins. We couldn’t believe Mama and Daddy just laughed.
turkey
bass_nroll by Nonnol, flickr
When Papa was angry it was said he pointed with the electric knife he was using to carve the turkey. It was also said he shot at Mama’s spaniel. But I only knew him as the sleepy bear I leaned on while he drank scotch and yelled at Walter Cronkite.
November 23, 2019
family
Butterfly spike by Valerie Everett, flickr
My family is together again. We sit among the graves. My brother is there. He has spikes coming from his head. I don’t know why. But he is happy to see us. He looks down shyly at his hands and smiles when we say how much we miss him.
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