Family Reunion

    I’ve lived with you forever and yet I live alone.
    I have known you like a home, yet I have known nothing.
    You are my family but do we really know each other, and do we even care.

    My cousins with smiles, my cousins in laughter, my cousins now
    with your own children who spy at me from behind your flowered skirts,
    children who look at me as if I came from another planet.
    What genes bore you, that you see me as a stranger?  
    The truth is what you fear—not me. I am but the messenger of the real,
    of the life you don’t want to see:  of the pain and the pleasure,
    the laughter and the fear, the life and the death.

    We sit civilly at gingham-draped tables—sipping lemonade and comparing memories.
    Memories which are arranged in our heads like movies in which we always
    play the lead:  we always are the hero, we always capture the flag.

    I watch you over the table, remember you
    running past me on long summers days on the farm.
    You were my supporting cast. But as your mouth moves and your mind-movie unfolds,
    you are the hero and I do your bidding.  I bake your mudpies. I am your sidekick.  
    All told from your point of view.  You who speaks more clearly,
    who articulates with ease and presence, are the one who is believed.
    All the cousins agree, it is you who sees reality.

    It was always that way, and I could never explain the crazy
    chaotic workings of my mind-movies, and the symphony that played in my soul.  
    Now I take my turn telling my mind’s movie, a tale that sounds more like a song.

    Cousins frown at me as if I am off key,
    as if your mind-movie makes the world real and that my soul-song
    shatters cousins’ pretty pictures of the past.  I snap my mouth shut,
    lose my voice, close my eyes, as you quickly switch—
    chit-chat about church folk and apple pie recipes from Gramma’s kitchen.

    I’ve always lived it that way, always waited for you to sing my soul-song, waited for you
    to mirror my mind-movie, and reflect my reality. It has been years I have lived like that:
    singing your soul-song, mirroring your mind-movie, reflecting your reality. Always patiently
    waiting my turn, while you always had something to say:  a sermon, a lesson, a lecture.
    Your mouth always moved with ease and the grace of a well tongued tale,
    and I tripped over mine. I stumbled to find the trite phrases that you could reflect back.
    I never found them:  always my words silenced your tongue,
    sent you scurrying away to another relative, whose relativity was closer than mine.

    Today I walked away, leaving your mind-movies behind.  Alone and wanting, my heart paining
    for a mate, I walked into the woods. The mossy wet woods:  green, dark, moist, dripping, silently
    standing witness to our family reunion. The stretched limbs and tender ferns, rabbit bread,
    and blackberry brambles. The cool, silent calmness—absent of regret, absent of judgment, 
    pungent with the odor of the rotting wood which feeds the towering columns.

    The wind drifted leaves across my cheek and ran fingers through my hair. The ferns felt my every
    step. The woods mirrored my mind’s movie, sang my soul-song, reflected my reality, and patiently
    waited its turn. Embracing me in nature’s wisdom, which lasts a forever, which records
    my family’s reunion in its roots, and yet it does not worry, does not seek their approval,
    does not wait for their enjoyment of its self. The wood grows over the farm’s unattended buildings
    and old shattering feelings, its fragrant ever-flowing love takes back its self from the mind-movies
    which only matter in the minds of man.  It sings its song through summer and fall,
    and dies to itself in winter to be reborn again in spring.

    Spinning its self  through forever, losing its self in nothing and becoming everything.
    Knowing its self through the seasons yet never needing to be known.  Defying our attempts
    to remake it in our own image, as wind, water, time and understanding take their toll
    and rebuild it more beautiful each year.

    The wood and I walk together through the past:  past the creek, past the barn, past the house,
    past the civil relativity of gingham-checked tables and lemonade—and cousins
    whose mind-movies keep them cozy on the farm. As for me, I have learned to walk
    with the woods: cool, silent, and always listening, reflecting, and patiently
    spinning through time.


Copyright © 2003 Colleen Lindsay