temporal nature

Face value

/ Fran Haley / 11 Comments

My three-year-old granddaughter, Micah, has finally experienced enough snow to make a snowman.

Two snowmen, in fact. Five weeks apart.

The first snow really wouldn’t pack, so we ended up with a little heap of snowdwarf. It was cute and we loved it anyway (see the photo on To Life and Lafo).

The second snow packed beautifully. Micah’s artistic big sister, Scout, took over as snowman engineer and designer, rounding the body and deciding what to use for facial features.

Micah said, “The snowman needs a hat!” She chose the Santa hat from the toybox I keep for the girls. In her words, the “Ho-Ho hat.”

And here you have it. Our merry friend:

That night, as I put our exhausted Micah to bed, she kept stalling.

She fights going to sleep, has always been a restless sleeper. She asks for songs: Frère Jacques. Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. She chats about a boy at daycare and calls him “my brother.” She says he’s going to the beach and she wishes she could go, too.

“All right, Micahroni,” I say at last. “It is time to sleep now.”

She twists around, lies still, and is silent for a moment. She looks at the ceiling, the wall. Her eyes are heavy.

Then those big eyes are on me. “We forgot the Ho-Ho hat! It’s outside!”

“Yes, but it’s okay. The snowman can wear the hat tonight. We can get it tomorrow.”

That seems a sufficient response, for she’s quiet again.

Then: “Franna.”

“What, Micah?”

“I don’t want the snowman to melt.”

“He won’t melt tonight, honey. It’s very cold outside. He’ll still be there tomorrow.”

She looks at me earnestly. Deep brown eyes, rosy cheeks.

“I don’t want his face to melt,” she says.

I murmur something soothing, I think, but my mind isn’t on my words.

It’s on the workings of her little mind, already understanding the temporary nature of things, fearing loss…yes, it’s just a snowman. But its face reflects humanity. She cares about it and knows, at three, it cannot last.

I stay with her until she drifts off to sleep and her breathing grows loud.

And then I go to bed myself, praying, I confess, for the snowman not to melt the next day while she’s staying with me… because childhood and life itself are so short. They melt away so soon.

When she goes home, the snowman is still in the backyard, joyful as ever, twig-hands raised in praise, undiminished.

I remember to rescue the Ho-Ho hat. She will remember asking. She remembers everything.

I hope she always will.

*******

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

Blue season

/ Fran Haley / 6 Comments

Today I am not driving along the backroads and byways to work, for that work is over and done for a season. There are a number of things I will and won’t miss but this morning I am thinking only of the drive. It has taught me much about noticing. And composition. Twenty minutes of travel in the countryside imprints images in my mind; I study them over and over.

For one thing, as I watched the verdant lushness of grass and trees deepen and the crops in the field bursting forth in their furrows, I thought about spring being the season of green. But not only green. Besides the blossoming and blooming of pinks, yellows, and whites, there’s the flash of fiery cardinal red, the dusting of robin-breast orange, the electric pop of the bluebird, the soft, quivering brown of Rabbit. It’s all poetry to me. Stirring a nameless longing. Maybe just for life itself.

Robert Frost comes to mind:

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

And then I contemplate how green is really a combination of two colors, yellow and blue. If nothing gold can stay, that leaves…blue.

Which is so utterly fitting, as nearly every morning on my drive to work this spring I’ve been awed by the sight of a great blue heron in a pond. I pass three ponds, actually, and in two there’ve been herons. I have learned to look for them and there they are. Standing tall, serene, peaceful, almost elegiac. Once a pair of them flew across the road ahead of me. Dazzling. Somewhere in the brush I know there’s a nest with baby blue herons. In all my life, I cannot recall even glimpsing great blue herons. This is the birdiest spring I have ever known.

The herons are part of me now, and I think on the layers of meaning. Typically self-reliance, self-determination, progress… these seem surface level, like the color green. There’s more than meets the eye. There’s blue, a color I don’t usually associate with this season. Now I do. As I play with blue in my mind, it carries me to shadows, a time of day when the golden hours are transitioning to evening, and a fleeting memory of youth. A time of preparation, maybe going to dinner, gathering with friends, celebrating… all this, flickering and cool like tree-shadows when the day is nearly done and the blue hour descends. Again, a nameless longing. A heron in a pond.

I have had a hard time writing during these last weeks of school. Partly due to demands on my time. And physical limitations. And my psyche. But none of these are the blue longing.

Nature knows infinitely more than I about creating…and that is the pull, for nothing gold can stay.

Here’s to the blue season.

“Creativity is the Blue Heron within us waiting to fly; through her imagination, all things become possible.”

—Nadia Janice Brown

Photo: Great Blue Heron on the Coast of Texas, McFaddin Beach. Texas State Library and Archives Commission. CC BY 2.0