Learning to play

Dear Nancy:

I want to write about play, you said in your last letter, and how you miss it more than anything.

I think I have always missed it, really.

I wasn’t allowed to play when I was little.  That is a weird and sad truth.  My mother, for lack of a better description, was ill.  Her illness was fear.  Let’s call it that, since it was never named.  She was afraid of dirt.  And I mean dirt in the house in all its forms.  Dust, grime.  Coal dust when we lived in Harlan County.  Anything unsanitary on the soles of our shoes, which we could not wear beyond the doorstep.  Muss, fuss, disarray.  But more than all that I mean real, live, fresh from the yard stuff.  Dirt itself.

I was not allowed to go outside and play much, and when I did, it was within strict confines.  Many days I spent on the patio, which I remember as having a Rotary Club insignia on its corner.  No walking beyond the edges of the concrete, onto the grass.  Or, on days when I could go out into the yard, no coming back inside until I was sanitized properly.  Showered, changed, no reminders left of the outside world.

I do not remember the feel of dirt on my hands when I was little.  The feel of landing in it at the end of a slide.  The kick of it under my feet at a swing set.  The dig down in it and make mud pies.

I was not allowed to play.

Instead I sat inside and read Great, Big Books.  Ones way too old for me, many of them.  Crime and Punishment, by the time I was twelve, that kind of thing.  I sat in a recliner chair and read and when I wasn’t reading, I watched my mother’s soap operas, or Dark Shadows, or I sat and sat and sat, not allowed to do this, do that, to play indoors except in the chair and inside the confines of reading or watching images on a screen.

What happens when a child who could not play becomes a woman who never learned?

I mean, I have kept those little word magnets on the fridge.  Magnetic Poetry, etc.  I have a wind-up frog on my desk.  A miniature Jesus eraser.  That sort of thing.

But I mean play.  Deep play.  Deep down in the dirt of the yard, the dirt of my spirit, Hallelujah.  The earth beneath my soul kind of play.

That.

I don’t think I know how and this makes me unutterably sad.  It makes me go to books to read about it.  It makes me work really hard to play.  It makes me throw confetti and say, oh, there, now I’m playing.  Cavort in the surf.  Kick my heels up, waiting to see if, now, there, I have it right.  Play.

And when it comes to the words on the page, they feel it too, the lack of play.  The scenes itch to take hold and dance.  The words hold their little hands out, stretch their arms and say, sigh.  Let us laugh.  Let us be full of light as well as dark.  Amen.

I’m trying to unlearn my past.  Trying to invite all the forbidden words inside to play.  Laugh.  Soul.  Belly Deep.

This morning, for instance.  All I did was get up early and watch the sunlight come back after a night of rain.

Preparing the soil?

Love you, my friend,

Karen