legacy

My own St. Patrick

/ Fran Haley / 18 Comments

In 1906, Theodore Roosevelt was president, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, and the San Franciso earthquake killed around three thousand people. The Panama Canal was under construction and Cuba had its first president. Susan B. Anthony died that year. Lou Costello, Estée Lauder, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh were born.

In the far reaches of eastern North Carolina, a farm woman named Claudia Amanda Victoria delivered another of her ten children. A boy. She would have only two girls; one would die of diphtheria at age four.

But this baby boy would be hardy. He would outlive them all.

She named him Columbus St. Patrick.

Some folks called him Columbus. Those who knew him best called him Lump.

I called him Granddaddy.

As I grew up listening to the old stories, I tried to imagine living in his era. Seeing an early Ford Model T. Mail-ordering live chickens, delivered in wire cages by horse and buggy. Raising ducks that wandered off to the swamp on a regular basis, only to be herded back home again to eat bugs in the garden and to provide eggs for breakfast. Learning to plant and to harvest, to be in tune with the rhythms of the earth, following the steps of that ancient choreography, the seasons.

He was five when the Titanic sank, seven when World War I began. His older brother, Jimmy, served in the Great War and returned; I would know him and his wife Janie in their old age. They lived in a little tin-roofed house along one of the many dirt roads of my childhood summers. Jimmy and Columbus had a brother who drowned long before my time. Job Enoch. One brother accidentally shot and killed another on the porch of the family home. I knew their sister Amanda, who had a high-back pump organ adorned with brown-speckled mirrors in her house. The organ sounded and smelled of ages and ages past…but she could play it, and she could sing.

Columbus didn’t sing, but he loved country gospel songs and bluegrass to the end of his days.

And Columbus St. Patrick loved Sunday School. He had perfect attendance for years, garnering long strings of pins awarded to him. He did not enjoy regular school. He quit in the fourth grade to work on the farm. Later in life he had some regrets about this. But his father walked out on the family and Columbus rose to the role of provider.

He participated in community hog-killings, with the farm wives taking the backbone to flavor collard greens. The pork was preserved in barrels with salt brine. Some of the folks enjoyed scrambling hog brains into their breakfast eggs.

Columbus St. Patrick worked hard. He plowed fields with mules. He took part in the making of molasses, which required several people. Mules walked in a circle, harnessed to poles attached to large grinder where sugarcane was fed to extract the juice. The juice would be collected and heated in trays over a fire, skimmed numerous times until it became rich, blackstrap molasses. At the end of a meal, he sopped his biscuits in molasses, and poured his hot coffee in the saucer to cool it.

He competed with a scrappy little woman named Lula for the honor of being the community’s top cotton-picker. She often beat him.

Lula would be widowed when her husband Francis hung himself in the woods. One of their daughters would find his body.

Columbus St. Patrick’s youngest brother married another of those daughters.

Columbus made some time to hang out with the young people, attending taffy-making parties in their homes and driving groups of friends to the movies in town…all the while noticing Lula’s daughter with the wavy blonde hair and straight posture. There was a certain spark about her.

She considered him her mother’s friend. The “older” set. She was nine years younger and she had her eye on the preacher’s son, who would surely follow in his father’s footsteps: How wonderful, to be a preacher’s wife!

It didn’t happen. Desires of the heart sometimes come to unexpected fruition: I would be a preacher’s wife, a half-century later.

This daughter of Lula’s ended up marrying a farmer: Columbus St. Patrick. They planned to wed in September but he had the mumps. And so it came to pass in mid-December instead.

My grandparents.

Here’s a photo taken sometime early in their marriage:

Ruby Frances and Columbus St. Patrick, circa 1937–1938.
She would have been around 23. He would have been 31 or 32.
If this photo was taken prior to October 1937, my father was not yet born.

They would endure the Great Depression and the second World War with a small child. My father. When Columbus St. Patrick couldn’t make a go of tenant farming and sharecropping, he traveled to the shipyard nearly 200 miles away with a group of men from down home. He was working there, building cradles for ships, when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Suddenly U.S. ship production went into overdrive; the Yard turned out ships in three months versus the usual year.

He would try, after the war, to make a living farming, painting, and doing other handyman jobs. By that time there were three children to care for. Columbus opted to go back to the shipyard, staying in a boarding house during the workweek and coming home to see his wife and children on the weekends.

For ten years.

His son (my dad) became senior class president and entered the United States Air Force after graduation. The oldest daughter was a high school basketball star; Columbus St. Patrick nailed peach crates to posts out in the yard for her to practice. By the time his youngest daughter was ready for high school, he’d had enough of separations. He moved the family to an apartment near the shipyard.

Hilton Village, built between 1918 and 1921, is the first federal wartime housing project in the U.S. It was created for shipyard workers. These quaint, English-style rowhouses would be the setting of my first memories. I would awaken in the dim gray morning at my grandparents’ upstairs apartment and my grandmother soothed me back to sleep while my grandfather, having risen at four, made his own breakfast before going to work. On Sundays, his day off, he took me to the playgound behind the Methodist church.

I felt as safe as I ever have in life, walking hand-in-hand with him.

He retired after I started school and lived another twenty-nine years. He saw my children. He survived the removal of his bladder after a cancer diagnosis. My grandmother would empty the urostomy bag and dress his stoma (surgical opening) every day until his death.

They would lose their middle child, their basketball star, to multiple sclerosis in her fifties. She died on Good Friday; they buried her on Easter Sunday. Their son (my dad) was just recovering from bypass surgery after his first heart attack. He would not survive the second, but Columbus would not be here to suffer the loss of his son.

Granddaddy died of lung cancer under hospice care, at home his own bed, as he wanted, on a fine spring day. He refused morphine in favor of keeping his mind clear. And it was, to the very end.

St. Patrick’s Day rolls ’round again and stirs all the memories. They spring to life, as rich and sweet as molasses that Granddaddy and I sopped with our biscuits. He was always embarrassed by the oddity of his middle name. I am proud of it. I have loved it all my life, just as I’ve loved him. Fiercely. I have learned many a valuable lesson from Columbus St. Patrick: Treat people well. Help those in need. Money doesn’t buy happiness (back in the old days, he said, nobody had any money but everybody was happier). Love your family. Love your neighbor. Get a dog to love. Work hard. Persevere. There’s always a way. Tend the earth. Do your duty. Spend time with children, for they are precious. Go to church. Trust in the Lord. Return thanks.

One day, he said, we will meet again in a better place. I am looking forward to it.

Me, too, Columbus St. Patrick.

Me, too.

My boys and I visiting Granddaddy for his 91st birthday, 1997.
My youngest was six weeks old.

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the March Slice of Life Story Challenge

Interpretation of Grandmothering by AI

/ Fran Haley / 26 Comments

Over at Ethical ELA last month, host Amber Harrison invited Open Write participants to compose a poem inspired by Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good as belongs to you.

The idea being to fill in these blanks:

I celebrate____.

And what I _______you _____.
For every ___________ me as good
_______ you.

My poem:

Grandmothering

I celebrate the immutable now.

And what I pour of myself, you drink—a transubstantiation of sorts,
blood-memory in the making.

For every day, in passing, decreases me as good
as it increases you.

As anyone in a writing community knows, giving and receiving comments is the stuff we feed on to keep going. One of my fellow Open Write participants (“tellio”) offered this astonishing reponse to my poem:

Here is an explication of your poem by the AI Perplexity. It is, in a way a backfilling in of the lines. I wonder what Uncle Walty would make of it.

“Grandmothering” is a poem that delves into the profound connection between generations, particularly the relationship between a grandmother and her grandchild. The poem celebrates the present moment, emphasizing its unchanging nature, hence the phrase “the immutable now.” The act of sharing and passing on experiences, wisdom, and love is likened to a sacred transformation, described as a “transubstantiation of sorts,” evoking the religious concept of the Eucharist, where bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ.

The line “And what I pour of myself, you drink” vividly captures the idea of the grandmother imparting her essence to her grandchild, who receives it eagerly and completely. This exchange is described as a “blood-memory in the making,” suggesting that the bond between them is not only emotional and intellectual but also deeply rooted in their shared heritage and lineage.

The final two lines, “For every day, in passing, decreases me as good as it increases you,” encapsulate the bittersweet reality of this intergenerational relationship. As the grandmother imparts her knowledge and love to her grandchild, she recognizes that her own time and energy are finite. Each day that passes diminishes her own vitality and presence, yet simultaneously enriches and empowers the younger generation. In essence, “Grandmothering” beautifully captures the timeless cycle of giving and receiving between generations, acknowledging both the sacrifices and the joys inherent in this process. It speaks to the enduring significance of familial connections and the profound impact of legacy and heritage on our lives.

Oh, Perplexity. You have me weeping over the way you’ve pulled all that’s behind the poem and in my heart out into the open. How profoundly you understand the depths of my soul.

And you aren’t even human.

Or alive.

I celebrate the immutable now

*******

Composed for Day 18 of the Slice of Life Story Challenge with Two Writing Teachers

Sun-kissed summer: Spiritual Journey

/ Fran Haley / 8 Comments

And so it comes to pass, at long last, that I return to the site of my sun-kissed childhood summers.

My ancestral homeplace in eastern North Carolina. Literally the land of my fathers: My dad, my grandparents, my great-parents, my great-greats were all born within a small radius of a tiny town and crossroads that were old long before my appearance on this Earth.

Thus began my fascination with Time.

In the bend of a dirt road stood my grandparents’ home, where my father grew up. My youngest aunt was born here in the same room where her father, my Granddaddy, would die fifty-three years later at 92. He wanted to die at home. He did, peacefully and “full of days,” as the Scriptures say of Abraham, Isaac, and Job: After this lived Job an hundred and forty years, and saw his sons, and his sons’ sons, even four generations. So Job died, being old and full of days (Job 42:16-17).

Likewise, my grandparents saw four generations. They lived to see my children. Incidentally, Granddaddy had a brother named Job who died in the 1920s (he drowned, if I recall correctly; this is a coastal area).

So it was that I grew up on stories of the old days and ways, a little city girl mesmerized by my deep country roots. In my time the once-thriving community was already history; nature was reclaiming the unpainted houses, one by one. Some were still visible through the woods (an early memory: a cypress shingle roof in the treetops, if you looked just right) and others were in various stages of falling down with yards still mowed by descendants.

On this return journey a few weeks ago, I discovered that my grandmother’s homeplace from the early 1900s is being swallowed by the forest:

A terrible jolt, as I can remember it having a hedge, a lawn, a porch swing, a screen door. I remember the layout inside and my great-uncle living there, tending to a patch of sunflowers.

And I knew, prior to this journey, that my grandparents’ house, which stood on the corner a little farther on, is gone.

This story is a little different, however. Instead of the forest reaching its veiny green fingers to reclaim its own, a young couple has built a home right in the middle of what was once my grandfather’s garden. I can’t help thinking how Grandma would marvel at the beauty of this new house and its lovely landscaping.

All that remains here from the enchanted summers of my childhood half a century ago (and from time before me) is the pumphouse, one of Grandma’s crepe myrtles (now wistfully draped in Spanish moss, which never used to be in these parts), and the sidewalk that once led to the front porch of Granddaddy and Grandma’s home:

As a teenager I wrote a song about a sidewalk. Haven’t thought about it in ages:

Where does this lonely sidewalk lead?
You think by now I’d know
Footsteps into yesterday
That’s where I want to go…

I had no idea, then, that only the sidewalk would remain in this place I loved so well, where I used to play outside in the sweltering bug-infested heat, where Grandma would sit at her piano in the evenings to have me sing old hymns with her as Granddaddy listened from his recliner, where I felt loved and wanted and sheltered and that I belonged…

The old dirt road remains, too, of course.

There was another dirt road branching off of it here in the shadows to the left; it once led, Grandma said, to a two-story antebellum house with a double balcony. I could hear admiration for that house in her voice. In my childhood the road was just two tracks through grass and thickets. The path faded more and more with every passing summer. Now you would never know it had ever been anything but woods.

From this vantage point, my grandparents’ yard is on the right, and to the immediate left is an old family cemetery. Not my family’s, although I walked it often with Grandma over the years. When I was a child, I was afraid ghosts would come out here at night. Grandma assured me they would not. She offered this dubious comfort: No need to fear the dead. Fear the living.

When I wondered at the graves of so many babies, she said people just didn’t know what to do for them when they were sick.

It’s clear how much the children were loved and mourned. This tiny cemetery remains painstakingly tended and strangely outside of time:

Hello again, baby Leafy Jean and big brother Leon Russell.

These siblings died a month apart in 1917. Grandma was born three months after Leon, almost a year to the day before Leafy, in the soon-to-be obscured homeplace just around the bend of the road.

Four-month-old twins Audrie and Aubrie died a week apart during that same summer.

The greater wonder, in its way, are the children who survived disease and mothers who died giving birth to them, which almost happened to Grandma: her mother delivered a stillborn baby three months before she was born. My grandmother was a twin. Grandma journaled this because I asked her to; in her writings, she says several women in the community who recently had babies helped nurse her while my great-grandmother was so ill that she “almost didn’t make it.”

—Why am I just now realizing that Grandma’s lost twin would have come around the same time as Leon Russell? Could his mother have been one of the women who preserved my newborn grandmother’s hungry life? if so …imagine saving someone else’s child and losing your own…

So many mysteries in this place. I’ve always felt the pull.

Over fifty years after I first walked this cemetery with my grandmother, I’m awed by the good condition of the headstones. I halfway expected them to be eroding into illegibility — after all, these people’s earthly homes have long since crumbled. No greater mystery than Time…

I cannot linger here, ruminating, for there’s another place to visit. Really just a good walk “around the horn” to the church, a journey I’ve made many times.

This was once the heart of the bustling farm community. The church was built on land given by my grandmother’s predecessors. Her father, mother, brothers, and other family are buried to the right of this crossroads.

Granddaddy and Grandma are buried in the churchyard, to the left.

Such a beautiful little resting place, presently bordered by a lush cornfield. An old live oak felled by a hurricane in recent years has been replaced by a new one nearby.

Grandma would be so pleased to see how well-tended everything is.

There’s even a new footbridge over the ditch at the churchyard, for easy access to the little community center across the road. This building stands where Grandma’s three-room grade school used to, she said in her journal.

Here’s where old and new converge most for me, where Time is most relevant and paradoxically elusive. The spirit of this place is old; my own memories are growing old.

My father as a teenager, in the churchyard

I am the keeper of memories older than mine.

But I came for the new.

I brought my granddaughter, you see.

All along the journey, I told her stories. Of the old days, the old ways.

I brought her to dig for fossils at the Museum in town (which is where the phosphate mining company sends its rejects now, instead of scattering treasures on the old dirt roads).

We found a bit of coral skeleton, shark’s teeth, and some bony things I’ve yet to identify:

Making new memories from the old… even from the ancient, from time before recorded time.

As we were leaving, I discovered that the old library in this old, old town looks the same as it did five decades ago when Grandma drove me to pick out books to read at her house in the summer. I halfway expected to see her coming out with the armful she had to help me carry…

And I think this is used to be, or is at least near, the butcher shop where Daddy worked as a teenager.

There’s so much more to be said about memory, legacy, endurance, overcoming, and family… about the whole spiritual journey of life. The greatest gift my grandparents gave me, beyond their unconditional love and their stories, is that of faith lived out. I learned long ago that eventually there comes a homecoming so bright, so glorious, that all the former shadows are forgotten.

I expect I’ll recognize my little corner of Heaven, having had such a foretaste here.

Until that time, I carry on in the footsteps before me, praying I walk even half as well.

My now, my tomorrows ❤

From Everlasting to Everlasting: A Prayer of Moses

Lord, you have been our dwelling place
    in all generations.
Before the mountains were brought forth,
    or ever you had formed the earth and the world,
    from everlasting to everlasting you are God.

You return man to dust
    and say, “Return, O children of man!”
For a thousand years in your sight
    are but as yesterday when it is past,
    or as a watch in the night…

Let your work be shown to your servants,
    and your glorious power to their children.
Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us,
    and establish the work of our hands upon us;
    yes, establish the work of our hands!
Psalm 90: 1-4;16-17

*******

with thanks to my Spiritual Journey friends who write on the first Thursday of each month
and to host Carol Varsalona who posted this reflection and question for July:

Pause and praise God for His wondrous gifts! 
What are you rejoicing over this summer?

/

December 12th

/ Fran Haley / 5 Comments

Eighty-six years ago
they married

during the Great Depression
with war on the rise

they meant for the ceremony
to be in September
but he had the mumps

so the wedding occurred
on the twelfth of December
before the justice of the peace

she wore a blue suit

on the day after Christmas
she turned twenty-one

Every December after
he gave her
a red poinsettia

he knew
how much she loved them

Across the decades
she’d jest about
having nothing
to look forward to
the rest of the year

with her anniversary
Christmas
and birthday all
in the same month

December
for her
was pure delight

celebrations
of Light
and life

In the last years
when he was gone
I gave her
a red poinsettia
during the season

for the sight
of her face alight
blue eyes bright

Someone else gave her
a silk poinsettia
after she went into
the nursing home

once when I visited
she was watering it

We did not know
all those years ago
that their wedding anniversary
would become
National Poinsettia Day

I just learned it

how she’d love it

just another sign
that love is divine
and lives on and on
and on

My grandparents, on my first Christmas.
Love lives on.

Photo: National Day Calendar

The blessing

/ Fran Haley / 3 Comments

My Dear Firstborn,

You were always the Lord’s.

I rejoice

that His divine purposes
cannot be thwarted

that your preacher-father
lived to see this day

that your first daughter
sitting beside me
as you receive your
Master of Divinity
is the same age you were
sitting beside me
when your father
received his

seven,
representing
fullness
and completion

in an endless
spiral of blessing
that flows on
and on
and on.

You have always
been my joy,
baby boy.

With love
and gratitude
and awe
at the divine work
of the Master

always,
Mom

Round yon December

/ Fran Haley / 1 Comment

a triolet for my grandmother

Come December, I’m remembering you
in the lights and silent night
—how years, like snow and feathers, flew—
Come December, I’m remembering you
at sight of ruby-red cardinals, too.
On the wings of the morning, all is bright…
come December, I’m remembering you
in the lights and silent night.

December is my grandmother’s month. She was born the day after Christmas, was married in the middle of the month at age 20, and died the day before Christmas Eve, at 90. She loved the season, children, cardinals, and the color red, symbolic of her name: Ruby. “Silent Night” was her favorite carol; whenever I hear it, she is near. Her home place and resting place are in the outskirts of a rural town named for the dawn… “on the wings of the morning” is borrowed from my favorite Psalm, 139, a hymn to the omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence of God.

The cardinal ornament in the photo was a gift from a friend yesterday. I hung it on the tree last night after choir practice with the kids at church. They’re singing “Silent Night” in the worship service on Sunday.

Grandma, you would love it all.

Sleep in heavenly peace.

Personality color poem

/ Fran Haley / Leave a comment

with thanks to Tammi Belko, host of today’s Ethical ELA Open Write. Tammi invited participants to take a personality color test and to write an “I am” poem based on the color results and their traits.

I took the test. I began to write a series of “I am” stanzas when the poem went running off in its own direction…

True Color 

I am
the three bands
on the ring finger
of my left hand:

one worn by
my grandmother
engraved with
her initials
and my grandfather’s
alongside
their wedding date:
December 12, 1936
(the day after
Edward abdicated
for Wallis)

one worn by
my mother-in-law
a 1953 engagement
between a widow
and a widower
with two children each
with the long reach
of duty in Korea
calling

one given
to me
on the day
I married
thirty-seven years
two sons
and two granddaughters
ago…

a poet
named after
fleeting morning ice
may say
nothing gold
can stay

but I endure
because

that is what love does

like many before me

I am gold

*******

Interesting…

Poem of perspective

/ Fran Haley / 2 Comments

On the the fourth day of Ethical ELA’s Open Write, Ann Burg invites poets to “Think of a moment in time— an historical moment or a personal one. Place yourself outside yourself — as a favorite tree, a flower, even an inanimate object who has witnessed this moment…”

The Upright Mahogany Howard
(c. 1920s)

I grow old
I sigh
I know you hear
my bones creaking
as you walk by
I have no mirror
but your eyes
and there I see
my beauty
is not faded
although
I’m scarred
and snaggle-toothed…
you may not realize
my proclivity
for touch-memory
but I tell you
that baby on your lap
presently pounding
my ivories 
has the feel of her
—one day,
she will play
and I will respond
living on and on
in the song
for the chords
never broken
vibrate once more
stirring the dust
of five generations
in my bones…
I am
your reliquary.

The piano was my grandmother’s most-prized possession. My grandfather bought it secondhand sometime during WWII. My grandmother intended to bequeath it to my aunt, who also played; my aunt contracted MS in her 50s and died before my grandmother. Grandma then offered it to me. I do not play, but my youngest son is an extraordinary pianist with a degree in worship music. His brother’s baby, my granddaughter Micah, ten months old, is already showing an affinity for music. She sat on my lap ‘playing’ Grandma’s piano last week, thoroughly enchanted.

Car poem: Galaxie Ride

/ Fran Haley / 4 Comments

with thanks to Susie Morice for the car poem inspiration on the Ethical ELA Open Write today

Galaxie Ride

One thing I knew
from the beginning:

We were a Ford family.

Granddaddy could recall
his first glimpse 
of a Model T.

Daddy always spoke
with a trace
of yearning for 
the white Thunderbird
he gave up
after I was born.

I came along in the era
when cruising the Earth
was not enough;
governments sought
to be the best
at hurling humanity
into space.

In the hazy gray memories
of my early days, 
one bright pop of color
stands out:

Grandma’s car.

Ford Galaxie 500
fire-engine red
rocket-sleek
aerodynamic
meant for racing

curious choice
for a grandmother.

She loved it.

Granddaddy bought it used
never imagining, I suspect,
that it would carry us
through three decades.

No power steering
—that silver steering wheel, 
a full cardio workout—

no AC

—sweltering in southern summers:
when I was twelve 

I left a stack of 45 rpm records
on the rear window dash
and they melted, 
rippling up
just like ribbon candy.
Grandma would tuck a Kleenex
into her cleavage
to absorb the sweat—

seats trimmed in red leather
upholstered in scratchy red fabric
studded with silver dots
—I like to think they were stars—

I cannot remember seatbelts.

Over the years
the red fabric
faded to pink
and began to split.

By that time I’d learned to drive
having practiced
with the old red Ford
on the old dirt road
of my father’s childhood home.

Grandma said:
“Honey, if you can drive this,
you can drive anything”

—and she was right.

The Galaxie and me. Grandma took this photo. Can you guess her favorite color-?

Daddy with his pride and joy. I believe the T-Bird had a red interior.

Anniversary of twelves

/ Fran Haley / 20 Comments

On the twelfth day of December, back in the Great Depression, my grandparents were married. My father was born the following October in a tenant farmhouse.

That’s my grandmother’s wedding band in the photo. It’s not the one she received on her wedding day. That ring was thin; it wore “clean through,” Grandma said. Broke in half due to overuse, in the days when washing machines had wringers, in an era of canning and preserving, in the time of sharecropping cotton and looping tobacco.

This is Grandma’s replacement ring. She had her initials and Granddaddy’s engraved inside, along with their wedding date. A wide gold band, made to last.

It is my ring now. I wear it every day.

Often thinking of December 12th.

For it’s not the only anniversary.

Almost thirty years after my grandparents married, their youngest daughter got married. On the same day.

She was eighteen. A senior in high school.

Her husband, my uncle, was going to Vietnam.

I went to that wedding. In utero. I wasn’t born for another five months. My presence was obvious; my mother couldn’t fit into the dress she planned to wear. She had to rush out and buy a new one that day.

My young aunt mailed black-and-white baby pictures of me to my uncle on his tours of duty.

He brought these pictures back home with him.

Fast forward three decades…

On December 12th, exactly sixty years to the day of my grandparents’ wedding, my husband and I learn that we will have another child.

A second son. Our last child.

My grandparents lived to see him and know him. To tell him they loved him, like they always told me.

It is a day of remembrance for me, December 12th. A deep and quiet knowing, a dark-blue glittering gem that I carry in myself in the middle of the holiday season. Meaningful. Valuable. Priceless.

I think of the long-ago Decembers. Family gatherings, celebrations. Layers of blessing. A blanket unfolding again and again to encompass the next generation.

I am a grandparent now; the mantle is passed.

It is one comprised of faith. Of courage and commitment. In it lies the story of persevering against unknowable odds. The Depression. Vietnam. In it I find strength for living now. I know that what keeps us pressing on is having someone to press on for.

Numerologists might wax eloquent on the significance of the number twelve, in all its powerful associations. We mark our time by twelves on the clock, by months in the year…there are ancient connotations such as twelve Olympians, twelve disciples, twelve tribes of Israel, twelve of days of Christmas… twelves go on and on. Twelve is considered the number of perfection, cosmic order, completion. Just now I recall that our second son was born in our twelfth year of marriage. I am not a numerologist, only a poet contemplating patterns. Not a mathematician, just a wonderer. A believer. Pythagoras is said to have said: “There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.”

I sense a geometry in dates and a musicality to years…a song of life and the living of it. For me, this is the lesson of 12/12. There’s something of eternity in it.

Which makes perfect sense, if twelve is God’s number.

The song is love.

*******

Many thanks to Two Writing Teachers and the Slice of Life Story Challenge community.
And to readers…you’re all part of the story and the song.