Today I am struggling with being and nothingness.
My mind travels from the bleak, drenching, 21st Century Arizona rain to artful black and white photos my mother never snapped of pans filled with shelled peas my brother and I had spent hours extricating from pods on an Indiana, summer afternoon.
Creativity allows me to examine an imaginary composition, a nonexistent thing, but a very real thing, prior to my mind assembling them just a few minutes ago.
The photo’s context is black and white too. A large bank barn, sets at the top edge of a long slopping hill. In front of the barn is a solid tamped-down barnyard with another outbuilding to the north located just before it also dips down to meet a tiny stream that drains a nearby wooded knoll. A rusty two-bottom plow rests there too, where last spring, it was detached from the old John Deere.
Closer still, to the vantage point of the scene, is a country lawn a few feet higher than the barnyard. In this imaginary, contextual panorama a skinny boy, scarcely adolescent, sits in a stiff gangly, non-pose in an aluminum lawn chair. A well-used aluminum pie-pan, filled with raw peas, rests in his lap. He wears denim dungarees, and a plain white t-shirt, and sports roundish tortoise-shell, horn-rimmed glasses. His hair is cut short, but the front has a little bit that stands up.
He seems fragile, and anxious, constrained by an unknown future so heavy it already presses in on him and weights him down.
I am there, too. I am incidental to the scene and too young to know more than the moment, the sunshine, and the bright, starchy crunch of raw peas. I am next to the lawn chair, lying on my stomach. I’m distracted, not noticing Mom taking the picture, by a sticky, sweet dance of a honey bee on the soft spikes of a clover blossom. I cannot imagine the scene being any different than it is.
Another non-existing moment, that is much harder to imagine, is of nuclear-tipped missiles being deployed against an island, Cuba, by my country at this very same moment/non-moment.
I wish I could not, now, imagine that second image as it hints at a real future. Maybe not a real moment from the Cuban Missle Crisis, but to a continuation of Cold War battles waged in Asian Jungles.
In the third image, I imagine that skinny boy in ten more years.
I am the same age as that pea-picking boy in the first picture. The vantage is from a second story farmhouse window looking down to the midnight black silhouette of a young man. Cigarette in hand, he leans against a vivid-red, Plymouth. The car, A Road Runner, a muscle cart hat he purchased, brand new, that shouted to no one in the night, “I am alive! I survived. Fuck you!” The car is outlined against the light gravel of the driveway. The red-hot glow of the cigarette punctures the moment and tears a rift in time as a maelström of shredded flesh and shrieking wraiths of Khe Sanh detach from this man and are sucked into a collapsing universe of another dimension.
Even at that moment, bits of him were already connected to that netherworld.
Soon the connection will be complete, and I will watch the scene unfold, alone, from that long-ago bedroom window; this time I will be alone in this universe and his journey to the netherworld will be complete.
Moving, beautiful, spiritual. Blessings.
lovely and haunting. just being is all we can muster. xo
Exactly. I am. Bits and pieces of a brother remain. Soon memory, electrochemical neural connections, will be the only real bit of my brother to exist.
The bleakness of the photos are amplified by your words, and they all feel haunting and lonely. I hope this feeling of yours is only momentary.
I can’t say much more than this now, but my heart is breaking. I had to write to release some of the sadness.
Beautiful and devastating, Nancy. Thinking of you and your brother, and sending lots of love.
Thank you Lois. My heart is filled with stark sadness.
The photos and your writing is haunting
Haunting is a most apt word. Images can haunt us in the same way spirits are said to. I wrote the images that were in my mind.
A beautiful, but hauntingly sad piece. I do hope yo and your brother find peace. Blessings.
Thank you, we will. Life is so beautiful, but we do not fully recognize it until we understand its tenuous and transient nature.
This is so beautiful and so sad. I am so sorry.
Thank you Chloe. Sadness seems to walk hand in hand with love. So complex.
I see, hear, and feel the heaviness and sorrow in your words. Sending you peaceful thoughts…ones that allow you and your brother to rest. Much love my friend….
Thank you so much Ruth, and yes, sorrow is the word. Thank you for your peaceful wishes, that is what we want for him.
wow…..your words were crafted so well. thank you for sharing.
I have learned that sharing, even sharing the personal raw stuff, is healing for me and can help others.
Being is a constant struggle. Especially in a world where so much tragedy seems to surround us. Thank you for your moving and insightful words and for sharing these beautiful images. Wishing you peace. xo
Thank you Linda for letting me know it is okay to share our struggles.
A scene. A snaphot in time. So beautifully written, Nancy. I am sure you didn’t start this piece thinking about writing something beautiful, but you have touched me in a deep way. I can see and feel your words. My heart breaks for you right now. And I am writing my memoir now, so I know how the writing can help get the emotions out. Peace to you.
Judy, thank you. I tried to write well, he deserved so much more, at least I can give him the most finely crafted words I could could muster. And sometimes words just flow.