Ampersands and semicolons

The wind is cold and my swollen eyes take in the Monet-by-midnight landscape of 4 a.m. A city glows pink over the ridge. Mist has just begun to drift upward off the wet grass. I draw in a breath of the air, all crisp like an apple sour-ripe from the short summer.

Sitting here means staying. Shutting down and clinging with eyes squeezed shut. It's everything that could be disintegrating back into the stuff of dreams like sunrays being swallowed by mist. After all, you still don't know who you're running from, or what you're running toward.

Prudence demands you wait, then, stuck in a mountain of remnants of life like an incomplete sentence, a hanging semicolon, a song ending in the middle of a verse.

The whole earth is violent in her beauty, the last flame before death and ice and winter. Sap runs dry and leaves scream red-faced as they are drained of life. The green trees yet to starve of moisture as water recedes deep into the earth's skin, they are silent witnesses to the bloodbath. They speak only in whispers brushing each other in the morning breeze.

The next hour the mist returns to mute the bold display unleashed by the rays of light breaking through. Rain descends, a surrender of the clouds to the dying earth, spiraling away from light and life, shot out of the slingshot of the sun's pull, path marked out and measured before we are far enough from her again that she will begin to pull us back, her fingers drawing spring from the fleshy brown earth as she reaches through emptiness to bring us back into the embrace of the universe.

The rain rushes down like a wounded woman's weeping, surging and quelling, as if each drop is an apology for how rain will behave in the earth in the colder days coming, splitting her and heaving her upward, expanding and gnawing up out of her wrinkles and scars.

I stand up from my swing, and realize that the rushing sound in my ears is not the wind bringing the rain ever toward us over the invisible hills. It is a cascade of words about something that is nothing - now in this time of everything. Why write about nothing when there are so many things hovering unsaid in the space between us?

I suppose words have always been the blanket I pull over myself like chain-mail against the world's evils. Falling down in typewritten font from the creased vanilla of old, sturdy pages...literature and plays and poems, whole volumes ravenously devoured in a single afternoon. Stories written that plumbed the darkest sides of twisted lives and left adult readers shaking their heads and wondering how a little girl with an innocent face got that in her head. Poems unwritten rattling around in the racing mind on walks through the forest. Lyrics to songs never recorded scribbled on the backs of receipts and in notebooks and journals. Now today it is the clickety clack of typing, the orange publish button hovering, a day when every authoress can read her words in print and it seems as though we're more connected and more isolated than ever before.

I swim in the proverbial primordial soup of self-awareness and here there are puzzle pieces of my life floating about me - Indian music and pages of a Bible and the words of a prophet that have always caught the ear in their foreignness. I can't begin to decipher where this return to the beginning will take me. Like the song that's playing broken record in my mind - I don't know where this journey will end, but I know where to start...

I am afraid of encouraging anyone with false hope; I hold my heart like a poker hand closer to me. No one is going to get a chance to break it this time around.

Prompt: "Write"

I spring up as we tumble into fall

It feels as though summer just began, and already we are tumbling like windfall apples toward autumn. The trees are beginning to turn to their scarlet brilliance, the farmers are rushing to gather last crops of hay before the hard frosts.

The plants that spent all summer growing strong are leaning over, turning their rusty brown, and lying their backs on the cool earth. It is the time of year for bonfires, sweatshirts and unearthing the deep down quilts from their summer closets. The front room is littered with bins of clothes as we switch our wardrobes over in preparation for the long Wisconsin winter.

This year, the butterflies are lingering, monarchs still blazing orange in the long grass and little yellow and blue swallowtails looking as though they had just cracked the chrysalis. The two kittens still home with us are learning to catch mice, although they'd rather play with their prey than eat it. We who hate shoes are still hanging on to our sandals, wearing long pants but refusing to shutter up our toes for the year.

My faith works in opposite of the seasons. This is the 4th autumn of cancer. I am still fighting it. The side effects of treatment drag my body down, but my mind and my soul are ever growing, ever more strong, ever more seeking. I remember the first November, when I went into radiation hibernation for a week, then spent two with my grandparents - them now gone ahead to heaven and my parents working hard to make their home into a vacation spot for the generations. They call it Skønnestad, Danish for "beautiful place". It lies in their sleepy hometown on the coast of Lake Superior, and they paint it in muted grays and blues, choose yellow comforters, lay maple flooring. A new beginning for a new November.

I won't leave for cancer scanning again till January this year. Last year, just before the holidays, and it was too much - too much to think about cancer so much, too much to be away from family. This year, we wait an extra month. My tumor markers have stayed stable all year, and will be checked again in October, in the height of autumn. My night sweats and hair loss tell me something is awry, but so far I receive no answers. By the time my scan comes around, I will be deep into my first hockey season since I had my first baby. I buy larger breezers to accomodate the extra inches, and skate hard till my lungs burn down the road where there is fresh tar.

God tore me down to my foundation this summer, a long road of construction I've been walking since last October, peaking this summer with hospital stay after hospital stay to treat the sudden onset of a black hole of depression unlike anything I've weathered in the past. I am slowly coming alive again, my laugh returning, my anxiety waning, my fingers able to make music again. While the earth sheds life for sleep, I am shedding dark for light. I wear a shirt too tight just because on the back it says, "I'm alive like never before". It's true. God is putting some amazing structure onto my foundation, and it looks nothing like my faith of before and more and more like Christ. In stripping me of my Christian "home" - my church - He is showing me that He and I are inseperable, that He will never strip me of His presence. Even when I could't look in the mirror for fear of the hatred I had for my reflection, He loved me. In the most tear-filled nights, He soothed my soul. He allowed me to come to the brink of myself, and now He is pulling me back into His arms.

And so, this autumn, we lift our arms in praise, we sing to Him in thanks, the tears flow for joy instead of sorrow.

...bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair. They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the LORD for the display of his splendor. (Isaiah 61:3)

I read this passage at a child's funeral - the Caleb we named ours after. I see his parents, who came through what no parent can imagine, and they are indeed a display of His splendor, almost ten years later. All this we've come through - my cancer, Amelia's brush with death, her ongoing special needs, the loss of our child, the chaos of infections, my doctoral studies, depression, anxiety, financial trouble - He is teaching us to lean on Him so hard that He can graft us on, never to be separated, part of His planting for the display of His splendor.