Twisted Trees

A Story For Scrambled Sage on Toast: Narrative Exercise: (see sidebar for link to 'Scrambled Sage on Toast' where links to more stories can be found.)

I know I haven't followed to the letter the suggestions for this week's exercise. Rather, I have chosen to work on the bit I have posted here, to the point where I am happy enough with it as an example of an introduction to a character-driven piece. I don't seem to do plot-driven narratives. (I lost the plot many years ago!) The scene is set and introduced - the story is ready to be taken farther. One of these days I may even do just that. (If I ever find the plot again?)


Before Bess got to the house she stopped off at the horse paddock. As she stepped out of the car, it seemed the wind tried to take a running leap at her, as if trying to tackle her to the ground. She zipped up her sheepskin-lined jacket and slapped her woollen hat over her ears, tucking in her hair.The horses were sniffing the wind, their backs to the entertwined row of twisted trees that formed a wind-break.
“Jelly. Jelly.”
Her voice fought through the wind as she called to the pony, knowing it would be the first to come over. She held out a wizened apple she’d found in the glovebox of the car. Flabby, whiskery lips snuffled over her palm. The smell of the caramel-coloured pony comforted Bess like nothing else could. Perhaps not even Dai. Cooing and baby-talking to her, Bess slapped and rubbed the pony’s neck, back, rump, revelling in the living horse-flesh touch of her, like a warm, breathing work of art under her fingers. Then she looked over to where the large horse Roy stood, feet planted, his nose drifting to sniff the wind. She loudly clicked her tongue.
“Come on boy. Not in the mood for visitors today?”
Grass and ragwort stretched a rough carpet between them.
“All right, stay there then you old curmudgeon.”
Tomorrow she’d saddle him and go for a ride. The thought charged her with energy and purpose. Already after her thirty mile drive she could sense the distance between Maree’s illness and herself. The shop as well seemed far enough away to give her breathing space. Correspondingly, the space between her and her man, had shortened. Yes. She could call him that. Her man. Even if he didn’t quite see it that way himself right now. She’d never dare say it out loud.
She walked back to the car, the fresh, cold wind spotted with rain had very quickly permeated her skin and her clothes. That same smell captured in a bundle of cold, dry laundry fresh in from an outside line. The smell of home. The smell of the cut and thrust of a southerly wind coming straight from the sub-antarctic oceans. Bess turned the car on the gravel road. Its tyres crunched the small stones as she drove slowly away, through the scrappy town and past the railway water tank once used for the steam trains. In the distance she could see where the road to her house left the main road, and where her house huddled under shaggy trees. Beside it she could just make out the whitened pile of bleached driftwood like a spiky, wooden hedge. Like a pile of old, rain-blasted bones.

What Else Can I Still Be?

This is my Sunday Scribblings entry: To find more entries, see my sidebar link.

What else can I still be? This is a good question to ponder over a stirling cup of coffee, or a wine. Or hot chocolate. A question to ponder and mull as you look out at a view of the ocean. A view such as the one I had today through a rain-smattered window, as turquoise waves lipped and rolled and crashed just over the street from where I sat. I sat at a wooden table with a friend, a plate of pizza bread and dips in front of me, a coffee ordered. The sea's rhythm of rising and falling waves became the rhythm of my thoughts too as they surged and sank.
A log fire roared at our backs, warming our spines, and we talked of things in the past (our friendship goes back twenty-one years now) of what is current, and of possibilities for the future.

They say that you completely metamorphose every seven years. Apparantly in that span of time, every cell that is renewable, has been renewed. Or is that just an urban myth? Whatever, it sounds a good form of measurement to me.

I am 53 years old now, so that means (let me get my calculator out ... ) I am just about through my eighth cycle of reinvention. The last cycle (from age 42 to 49) was a particularly rich one. This present one, so far has been more difficult. Some people close to me have died, or moved away. My sons have left home (albeit coming back to roost for a couple of months here and there again.) So there has been grief to deal with. But there have been new friends too who have become a special part of my life. I have created new things and have had some very proud moments.

With ABM, we have tried some career doors that just didn't fly open in the way we'd hoped. However, any disappointment was very quickly replaced by a particular feeling of peace about our present location and situation. We love where we live - our house, our community, our city, our work.

I still have three years left of this seven-year cycle, and with some new ideas appearing just over the horizon - a little like the tendrils of a sunrise appearing over the rim of an eastern sky. I have the hope of good things ahead. Of some changes - good changes - ahead. These new ideas generate a little frisson of excitement at possibilities.

As my friend and I talked this afternoon, the sea provided a background motif; a beautiful accompaniment to our words. When it came time for me to leave this amazing ocean-view, I did so with some reluctance; yet with the comfort of knowing that it would still be there tomorrow. And the day after that.

What else can I still be? I can only answer - myself completely renewed. Myself in rhythm with the surge and fall of ideas and plans coming to fruition, or dying a natural death, just like the waves. When I returned home this afternoon, it was to a place of shelter with the sea an unseen force just over the hill. A reminder of the force of life that drives through us all.

Which put me in mind of one of my favourite poems, written by Dylan Thomas, and which I post below:

THE FORCE THAT THROUGH THE GREEN FUSE DRIVES THE FLOWER

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

Dylan Thomas

Where The Sun Runs

A Story For Scrambled Sage on Toast: Narrative Exercise: (see sidebar for link to Scrambled Sage where links to more stories can be found.)

We park the car at the Gardens where in summer, tennis players thwack the ball and grunt their serves and returns. Where lawn bowlers flap dusters over ebony, ceramic bowls before letting them go from open palms, like proffered gifts that roll from their fingertips.

However, today in the middle of winter, rugged-up walkers throw uninspired frisbees. Muffled scrapes and shouts echo from inside the covered ice rink. At the back entrance, a mound of discoloured ice scrapings sits unmoved by the sun.

We walk to the Scott Memorial, a huge lump of glacial moraine turned into a memorial to the British explorer and his team who all perished in the unforgiving snows of that killer terrain.

A family sits at a picnic table where shadow has yet to reach. We decide to keep walking, our sauntering now taking on a hint of urgency as we know there are only minutes left. Soon the sun will slip down behind the hill where gondolas move slowly above a furrow of cleared ground between thick pines and slabs of rock. And once that sun has disappeared, like a round button under the hill’s dark lapel, the air will immediately begin to freeze.

We take a path that runs beside the lake. Ahead, against the sky, looms a mountain range with snow-thickened valleys and uncovered ridges that stick out like shoulder blades.

The lake is cold and methodical, its metronome of ripples swing in and out over a shingle shore. It’s a rhythmical sound that never alters from one season to another. A regular sound, like a dog licking a bowl, or a watch on a sleeping arm.

Ahead , where the sun runs into shadow, is where we will turn. We pass a woman who is walking two dogs.
“Here Tahi,” she says.
Then she calls to the other dog, “Rua, come here.”
“Tahi , Rua,” we say.
“Tahi, Rua,” she repeats, and all three of us laugh because in Maori, tahi means one and rua means two.

When we reach the town, we have a brief look at a market where the stall holders are beginning to pack up. Some children run around, screeching like buzz-saws.

Then we drive home past houses built where in winter the sun never shines. Permafrost coats the front lawns, giving them the pale, lifeless appearance of skin left to soak for too long in water.

When we arrive back at the house, we bask in the warmth of its under floor heating. I hold a white wine in one hand, and with the other hand write a poem about what I can see out the window. It is a poem about mountains and a lake and two peaks called Double Cone; how they look like two women in snow-white head scarves, who sit chatting, side by side on a bus. I write about the sun that has already begun its slide back under the earth.

Ajar

Sunday Scribblings: Where Would You Be Now?

(see link for Sunday Scribblings on sidebar)

*

If my mother and father hadn't had pre-marital sex in the back seat of my father's 1930 Dodge, I wouldn't be.

Alternative lives is an idea I often like to toy with. For a start, it seems just one lifetime isn't enough to do all I want to do. I figure if I had another life as well, I would be able to do those things I haven't time to do in this life. Things like; learning to fly an aeroplane, raising poultry, learning embroidery, astronomy, living as a single person with no fixed abode - a gypsey, a travel writer. Owning my own island. Yes, two or even three, more lives would be rather nice. But I mustn't be greedy.

Then there are the choices we make in the one lifetime we do have. I can think of crossroads in my life where life-altering choices had to be made. Most of those times seem to have been when I was young - in my twenties, when the most dramatic and clear-cut choices are offered. Choices that gives your life the shape it becomes.

The most stark of those choices for me was when I became pregnant at nineteen and had to decide whether to have an abortion, or have the baby. I decided abortion wasn't an option I could live with. Was it because I too was an 'accident'?

The next choice was whether to adopt my baby out, or keep her. Adoption can be called 'giving your baby away', which always sounds cruel and heartless. Believe me it is not - it is a heartbreaking choice. I made it at a time when to choose to keep your baby was a stigma you and the baby had to live with. A solo mother in a state-house in small-town suburbia ... The thought was anethema to me, a student who had tasted freedom and an independent career beckoning. I also knew what it was like both to have, and not to have, a father. Mine died when I was fifteen. I wanted my daughter to know a father's love and I couldn't guarantee she would have that if I brought her up on my own. Such are the heartbreaking dilemmas you face when making such heavy choices, and trying to tell the future.

It appears now that I did in fact make the right choice for both her and myself. However, it's strange for me to say this, knowing that my life would be totally different (e.g. I wouldn't have the husband and sons I have now and whom - it goes without saying - I wouldn't part with.) Nevertheless, given that hard choice again, I would have chosen to keep my baby.

Back then though, I decided to adopt her out and trust that 'one day' I would see her again. Open adoption wasn't heard of back then. It was called closed-door adoption. Ah-ha; but you know how some doors can be left a tiny bit ajar? We have a couple of doors like that in our house. If you don't apply that extra bit of pressure to get the last click of the snib, the tiniest of draughts causes them to sway and creak, open and shut, open and shut. It can be quite annoying.

Over the years I'd hear this unseen, unsnibbed door's secret creak. It reminded me of the belief I had that I would see my daughter again; it would jolt me to wonder where she was, who she was, how she was ... and to pray.

Sixteen years later, in a more enlightened social environment when enquiries by birth parents and/or adopted children were encouraged, I discovered we were actually living in the same small city.

When she was twenty-two, my daughter got in touch and we met. I learnt she had a very happy upbringing and had no hang-ups about being adopted. We have become very close and the birth of her daughter eight years ago has been a sweet, healing reward.

Where would I be if I wasn't here? I guess it doesn't bear thinking about too much. Given the choice, this sometimes perplexing, sometimes exquisite, sometimes dull, sometimes dark, sometimes bitter, sometimes sad life of mine, with all its twisty turns and surprises round every second corner, is quite enough for me to handle, just on its very own.

*

They Knew

A story for Scrambled Sage on Toast: Two Narrators Exercise (see link for 'Scrambled Sage on Toast' on sidebar)

It was a day in August, with winter bordering on spring. So that we’d recognise each other, she said she’d wear a red tartan scarf and I said I’d wear a green tartan scarf.

At first on the phone, she’d sounded tentative. I had accepted this, knowing it was a situation that required tact and gentleness. Back when I had adopted her out as a baby, I’d had all the power. This time it was important that the power be with her.

As we talked, she seemed to relax a little, and then she said that yes, she would like to meet right now, this afternoon, and we agreed on ‘Governors Cafe’ in half an hour.

I grabbed a pen and with shaking hands scrawled on a sticky note: ‘Have gone to meet Lara. I can’t believe it!’

After finding a park for the car, I got out, took a deep breath, fastened the green tartan scarf around my neck and headed for the cafe. As I passed the church, the bells from the clock tower chimed three o’clock. This meant I was a little late. And I wasn’t even sure where exactly the cafe was. My stomach churned.

As soon as I pushed open the door of the cafe and saw the beautiful, dark-haired girl in the corner table by the window, I knew.

*

She couldn’t believe how fast things had moved. From getting the birth certificate and all the cards and letters left in her birth mother’s file, to the phone call she finally mustered up enough courage to make, to the arrangement to meet at ‘Governors’, to sitting here now feeling so nervous she felt nauseous. She lit another cigarette. Her hands were shaking so much, she had to have a couple of goes to light the thing.

She’d made sure she got here in plenty of time so that she would have the advantage of already being seated at the table. She looked out at people walking past, watching out for someone wearing a green tartan scarf. When a woman wearing one did come into view, she hoped that woman wasn’t her, and breathed a sigh of relief when she didn’t come in.

Above the clatter of traffic and cutlery and the hiss of the coffee machine, she could hear the faint chimes of the church clock across the road. She looked over and spotted another woman wearing a green tartan scarf. This one was younger, smaller and blonde. Could her birth mother be blonde when she herself was dark-haired? Then she decided it couldn’t be her, as this woman was hurrying on past the church and out of view.

As she stirred the caramel dregs at the bottom of the cup she was drinking from, her gaze left the street. Funny how disappointed she was that she hadn’t had to spend months hunting down her birth mother. It had been too easy. They were even living in the same city. There had been no need at all for any detective work, which was a shame as she had been looking forward to some.

Then the cafe door opened and she saw the woman she had seen before, the one hurrying past the church. And she knew.

*

Slipped Away

She sees the expressions on their faces when they think no-one is watching. She watches, is always watching. An old woman sitting quietly in the corner of a room full of gathered family members, her pale, thin hands folded like resting butterflies.
Someone remembers her, goes up and asks if she needs anything.
“A sandwich? A drink?” and a tray is brought to her.
She finds she no longer has anything to say. Sometimes she nods in response, but mostly she just looks over the shoulder of the person shouting at her and pronouncing words too loudly and clearly. No-one just chats to her anymore. She misses that, but suffers the isolation in silence, her cloudy eyes hiding what she really thinks as she listens.
“ Would you believe it?” Marion is saying to her sister-in-law Denise. Her red hair is a wild storm around a pale, sharp face. “Dan should’ve been here an hour ago. Trust him. God, he’s useless that man.”
‘Ah yes’, the old woman thinks. ‘Dan.’ The only one of her grandchildren she had any affinity with. The only one of them she even liked. She had always seen something of herself in his careful, serious gaze, his connection to the present; that listening out for what was just out of range.
He’d married in haste. To that haystack on pins. That Marion who never did get what Dan was all about. Right from the start she was a whinger. How the old woman detested her. Her shallowness, the way over the years she smothered the light in Dan’s eyes, turned him into a weak drudge.
“I’ll just see if I can get him on his mobile. Probably not though, he never has it turned on.”
“Is he working today?” Denise asked her, “You’d think he’d be able to get today off work wouldn’t you, seeing as it’s an important family get-together and all?”
“He said he couldn’t get out of it, he had to do something and would be along later,” Marion said as the two women exchanged a look the old lady recognised at once. A look that made her heart leap. Marion suspected Dan of having an affair. And for the first time in a long, long time, the old woman speaks.
“Fly boy, “ she says, “You fly boy.”
Does anyone hear her? She knows Dan does.
Then behind her misty eyes, she meets the gaze of a child in the room whose own eyes have widened in surprise. A child with hair the colour of nutmeg and grey eyes identical to Dan’s. Eyes with that spark of connection - that recognition of sounds beyond the range of everyone else in the room.
“Great Gran talks,” the child laughs. But no-one hears her. She turns and runs outside through a doorway full of white sunlight, so bright it hurts the old woman’s eyes.
“Fly little one,” she murmured again, suddenly feeling very, very tired.
It was a good half hour before anyone noticed that the old lady had died.
“She just slipped away,” they always said afterwards.
When Dan heard the news, he was already far too far away to even think about coming back.