Kelly Garriott Waite's Blog, page 4

January, 2014

Grey Cat sits on the kitchen bench staring out the window, watching the starlings and the blackbirds leap from the overhead power lines and soar overhead before suddenly agreeing to gather at the green cat food bowl. They squabble and jostle and nip at Grey Cat’s food, while he paws at the window, protesting loudly. I rap on the glass and the birds temporarily return to their posts to wrap tiny feet around the power lines once more.

I bundle up and leave the house; headed for town. At Main Street, the crossing guard sits in her car, the stop sign upended in a bank of snow, the handle of the sign cocked at forty-five degrees. The wind brings the temperature down to ten below and steals away my words in great billowing gusts. I hurry to the coffee shop and head inside.


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Legend's Realities

“Welcome to the Place of Words,” Henry gestured to the small sign, nearly invisible unless you knew what you were looking for.

Britt squinted at the sign. “They should have called it the Place of Bugs.” She slapped a mosquito that had landed on her arm.

Henry walked up to a large oak. “They say a girl once came to this very tree and stood before it. As she watched, it birthed every word she’d ever said.”

Britt laughed. “Why would it do that?”

Henry shrugged. “She wished for it. She wanted to take back all her mean words.”

“Really.”


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Eloise Gramine

The Banker stood at Eloise Gramine’s door, suitcase in hand, a doleful look spread across his face like rancid butter.

“Raven kicked me out. Can I stay until my next paycheck?”

Eloise stood aside; allowed The Banker to enter. She studied her slippers, noted the small tear along the right toe.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?”

Dust moats slanted past the faded red curtains and shattered on the hardwood floor. “It’s good to see you.”

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Unspeaking Words Spoken

Lukos slammed from the cabin, the flames of the fire recoiling in response. Aeliana stared at the door, strong and permanent.

"Your tongue is sharp, daughter." Bekka emerged from her bedroom, eyes wary.

Aeliana crossed her arms. "You never discouraged it."

"Lukos is a good man."

"He was wrong."

"You were wrong."

Aeliana's heart sank. "What shall I do?"

"Find Esther."

"The diviner?"

"She knows the location of all of the words ever spake."

"Nonsense."

"Scribes tell of a magical place, rarely encountered, but tragic and beautiful." Bekka gave her child a shove. "It is your only hope."


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Soapstone Sink

There's an old soapstone sink in my basement. Double-basin. Each side twenty-one inches wide and fourteen inches deep. Chipped here and there, like the concrete basement floor, which is webbed with cracks and protestations.

My basement. Full of cobwebs in the old ceiling joists where new electric frowns upon the old knob and tube; a foundation of antique bricks decaying in white flakes onto the floor.

My basement. Several rooms with old doors of scrap wood nailed roughly together, doors that, when shut, don't completely fill the frame, leaving, instead, a two-inch gap of darkness and possibilities: The old coal room with a rectangular cast iron coal-chute, now sealed shut. The room that houses the incinerator—a behemoth of scrap metal that sits, unused, obviously—waiting for a future unknown while the gas boiler in the main room—another giant—keeps my house somewhat warm. Also in that main room, a dance platform, one wall lined with mirrors where someone must have practiced ballet and dreamed of being onstage. A fourth room houses the electric box and a set of wooden shelves, where, if I ever cleaned them up, I could set jars of my homemade jelly.

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New Words to Say

The first time I saw the tree, with slants of red that glanced through bare arms that scraped the sky, I feared no new words could draw it. I was wrong: There will e'er be words to say.


This was written for this week's Trifecta Writing Challenge.


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Final Giveaway

I'm finding that I hate documenting every single thing that I give away. It's frustrating, futile, even, trying to find significance in meaningless things; things that hold no value for me: The too-small socks. The hardware we'll never use. The three hundred or so thumbtacks that were used to paper all four walls of my daughter's last bedroom with covers from Newsweek: faces of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, mainly, but others as well. These covers will not go up on my daughter’s walls in our new house, not because she's no less of a democrat, but because the plaster walls in this old home are unfriendly to thumbtacks, and even if they were more accommodating to those tacks, I would forbid her from putting up so many pictures in this new room of hers: When we put the old house on the market, the painter we hired had to double skim coat her bedroom walls before applying paint.



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Love Letters Discovered

I must have kept every single card my husband ever gave me in the twenty-five years we've been together: Anniversary cards. Birthday greetings. Christmas and Easter cards when we were engaged. Some, early on, with brief notes penned by my husband. Others--the later ones--simply signed.

Today, I recycled them all.

And my husband did the same with the cards I gave him.

But I did keep this note, written in my grandmother Alice's hand...a note I discovered shortly after her death...a note that records a conversation she'd had with her husband, my grandfather.



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Great 365 Day Purge- Days Eleven and Twelve

And speaking of growing...

I went in for my physical the other day. Had that horrible stepping-on-the-scale moment (after slipping out of my boots, of course). Height. Blood pressure. The whole bit.

The doctor told me my blood pressure was good. I thought it seemed high. She told me the standards had changed. What was once considered pre-hypertension was now within the acceptable range. My weight, too, is now acceptable: Apparently I'm just a smidge overweight, despite the fact that my BMI puts my body fat at twenty-five percent. As we've grown as a nation, the doctor informed me, the standards have expanded to accommodate us.

This reminds me of the day my teacher explained the changes to the grading system to my third grade class. Whereas before, a student needed a ninety-six to quality for an A, now, the only requirement was a ninety. Suddenly many more people became A students. And while I'm certain I benefitted tremendously from this deflation of standards (especially in chemistry, geometry and physics), the change felt a little like a cheat to me.

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Great 365 Day Purge - Day Ten

My son discovered it when he was nine. He found it, tucked beneath the bills and the Christmas cards, among the pleas for donations, the community newspaper and the thick stack of circulars from the grocery stores. It really should have been wrapped in brown paper.

My son. My pure, innocent son. He tossed the mail on the table and disappeared with it. I found it later, in my son's bedroom, lying on the floor amid a stack of books and a Lego set under construction. Its pages were dog-eared and wrinkled. The centerfold had been pulled out.

"This is mine," I said. "What are you doing with it?"



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