In the house is the man who calls me "his girl", who put his toil and his dreams for a better life to the test with the likes of me, now lays sleeping, dark circles of wonder around his eyes he frowns consistently in his dreams. I am the bearer of his "Frustration"
I see blue birds as bright as any blue I have ever seen making nests out of straw in the eves of the house. They flash from our lone pine tree to the eve and disappear into a tiny hole they call "home". The wind is roaring past me as I step out the twenty steps to "my home." I climb into the 36 feet of moving wonder, complete with a kitchen and a bath so tiny even I cannot sit down in it. It shelters me from the house that is still making my body rash, heat and hot and my stomach cramp and turn to glass if I stay too long. I am thankful for it all but in the whipping, punishing wind that takes my breath and my voice and throws it to the next county. I lose heart to revisit grace.
This has been a punishing year.
I lay at night under the stars and listen to the chorus of frogs in the distance. They mesmerize me, this symphony of stars and frogs. I drift into sleep and abruptly come to awareness as the flashes of loves lost come parading behind my eyes.
A mother, a brother, a friend. A child, a home, my health, my dreams gone in a year. I am stunned as if bitten by a serpent named death, destruction and losses. Can I live behind the veil of GOD being loving and still allowing that?
I want the distraction of the city noise and the sirens blasting and the children crying and the neighbor sneezing and I cannot live there anymore. My body, broken in ways that came from "Modern weapons of war" on the health of the planet with names like Round Up and Agent Orange and Monsantos and chemicals. Silent Spring By Rachel Carson comes flooding back. I am living her vision of death and suffering. Like a permanent scar I cannot breathe any more of the chemicals released, sprayed and used on a daily basis, for an ignorant and greedy gaggle of sheep who want lazy instead of safe. My mom lived in the midst of beauty and poisons and they killed her. Cancer. I can still see her face in the final moments of her life on earth. Death is not pretty. Her death was better than most and still I am haunted with her mouth gaping open, the death rattle in her chest. I bolt upright in my bed and try not to remember. I cannot look at the deaths and smile anymore. I can only force myself to listen to my heart pounding in my chest and wrench open the door and move out under the stars and hear the quiet in open spaces.
This was not what I prayed for.
These losses, this pain, this "sentence" to live in wide open spaces, next door to my man instead of next to him under blankets of peace and marital bliss. Life is a mystery. God is not defined and I am hearing the shouts of a half mad women living on the prairie with the wind whipping her hair across her face like a weapon.
I will sit here, long after the moon has crossed the sky listening, straining to hear from GOD. Does he not wish to answer me the longing cry of my heart? Is his silence a storm that I am in the eye of? It's the in-between that the madness occurs. Walking country roads sobbing my eyes out as bewildered calves look over at me with sad eyes. No one else to hear the tears.
Quiet in the open spaces.
I will return to sanity I know. One day the punishing winds will stop. One day the flowers and green of the valley will rise from the prairie brown. One day I will hear a still small voice call my name. The memory of those gone will bring a smile and not a cry. One day the house will become a home. One day the quiet in the open spaces will be the ease of my heart.
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