I'll start with how my bones feel. There's an ache deep in the pocket, the socket of my left shoulder, now my right, again in my left. That pocket. I think of a billiard pocket, oddly, but the ball on the top of the humerus bone in my arm ratchets around like an 8-ball foul in the wrong pocket of my shoulder. It's an ache that has a sound. Should cartilege moan when it scratches against muscle fascia near the scapula? I think mine does. Something wakes me at night, calcium crying softly, dreaming of movement, full range, free of pain.
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Suddenly I knew that you'd have to go
Your world was not mine, your eyes told me so
Yet it was there I felt the crossroads of time
And I wondered why.
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These winter days, such a long winter, cold with snow, more months of snow consecutively than any string of December, January, February, March that I've known in fifty years in the Northwest. So my bones ache.
And, well, I think of my mother. Her superstitions and the Welsh folklore she carried with her on all days. Some might think she was humourously superstitious, but most of the time, her sayings and pronouncement were dead serious. "My bones are aching, it's going to rain", she'd say. No laughing aloud.
"Don't rock that empty rocking chair...you'd offer the Devil a seat?"
"Don't open that umbrella in the house! There will be death in this house before year's end."
"My nose itches. I wonder who's thinking about me?"
I remember spending at least some of my youth quietly worrying at a very low level about the small things, the things that would through cause and effect from my violation of a particular superstition initiate chaos, or death, or invite the Devil into the house. My mother wasn't particularly religious and lost all conscious respect of God when my father died in 1969.
The thundering waves are calling me home to you
The pounding sea is calling me home unto you
The thundering waves are calling me home to you
The pounding sea is calling me home unto you
It was His rejection, she would sometimes say. But she never let go of her superstitions. And still I subconsciously worry about walking under ladders or spilling salt.
I think of her at fifty. There must have been no prescience, no ominous glimmer that within two years her world would slide close to fracturing irreparably. That financial success, so close, meant little without her husband there to share. They worked for many years, built businesses and rented and renovated small dumpy houses into better, slightly larger houses, ran the motel, worked outside jobs, belonged to social organizations to network with other local business owners long before the verb "networking" became a modern-day action item.
They were within a year of selling their major business and beginning their dream retirement home. And then he died at 51; my mother was 52.
At fifty her bones ached. By 52, her heart was broken.
I wonder now how much her need to maintain the old Welsh superstitions carried forward generationally from my grandmother was wrapped up as a part of her control as a single parent. Some folkloric utterances became more pronounced. It may have been a curious device, a way of implying and inserting an otherworldly presence in a child's life by invoking a watchman over the behavior of errant young humans. Children so casually dismiss the gods.
It may have just been a way of tamping down whatever anger or guilt or unresolved pain lurks in the corners of a grieving lover's mind after the death of a mate.
I wasn't able to see this at eleven, or twelve, or even thirty.
Turning to go I heard you call my name,
You were like a bird in a cage spreading its wings to fly
"The old ways are lost," you sang as you flew
And I wondered why.
I carry some things forward as inheritance, as heirlooms. The superstitions? Well, not so much. I work on "putting away childish things" and I place those most of the time in my closet-hidden basket of insecurity blankets.
Then the bones ache. I've pocketed the ache that forever scented the aura around my mother. It's an ache that has a sound.
Something wakes me at night, a memory trapped on earth still, crying softly, dreaming of movement, full range, free of pain.
The thundering waves are calling me home to you
The pounding sea is calling me home unto you
The thundering waves are calling me home to you
The pounding sea is calling me home unto you
