Still Looking
“Still looking for the last perfect flower before it all goes down. There are so many tiny, ephemeral, gift wrapped blessings, closing in on death. But this kind of death is all relative. Of course plant roots & seeds are hoarding life now, pulling it below, saving the miracle of energy for an eventual, triumphant return to spring. In the meantime, we go about our lives in altered rhythms according to what we believe to be true. Perhaps we never recognized or merely failed to acknowledge how far apart our versions of reality are. And we could laugh about it. But now, this conditioning shows up, as a problem of sorts. Damn it, I wish you were different. But ... you’re not. You’ve run a flag up the pole, for the team you play for & I have to pass your signage every damn day. And when you parked your truck taking up all the spaces in front of the post office, I wasn’t really happy. It forced me to drive further into town, turn around, and then find a way to deal with your obnoxious positioning. I put on my sunglasses, and thanked an obscure god as I walked down the sidewalk, that you’d ear-holed somebody else. I got my mail. A new down jacket, with a better zipper than the cheaper one I’d tried to pass off to myself as adequate, in size large due to a more stylish, tapered cut that totally banished me from medium.This happens also with pants. But even though I don’t wear sunglasses, really, I used them to try to get past you, coming out of the post office on the way back to my car. What is wrong with me? Tossing my long hair in front of my face, pretending that after 30 odd years, you won’t recognize me? It’s a shit show. When you honked, flashed your lights, and showed up at my passenger side window, there was nothing I could do but roll it down. Your charming face, in its 80s probably, with bright blue eyes, shone down on me. I put the car into park, a partial admission that we were going to chat, without turning it all the way off. The things we have in common always have a way of out performing the things that have kept us apart. Your stories about the bad eggs in your past, and the bad eggs in mine. And I know your bad eggs, and there is some overlap. I feel for your betrayals, decades behind us now, yet still, somehow fresh. You tell me you’ve always loved my smile, that I have against the odds, kept smiling, just like Wendy, over at the general store. It’s me, and Wendy, still smiling, now and then cussing, but he says, no matter, even good folks have to vent. You trucked your excavator up to my place, a long time ago. When I was a young single mom, and I didn’t really get who was who, in the town yet. You stopped to talk to me, astride your backhoe, and I stood down on the ground, looking up at you. Wizened and rough though you were, even back then, I’ve caught up to you. We’re not that dissimilar now. Thank you for making me face you, and love you. We did say I love you by the end of it. And with your wife in a home with dementia, and me on the hill for another winter by myself, I know we meant it.”