Posts Tagged ‘dreams’
music city drop-out
“Looks like they forgot your guacamole. I’ll get that for you.”
I recognized the voice instantly. I had seen him coming with our tray of food, but thought if I looked away really quickly it wouldn’t be him. I just wanted to pretend I didn’t know him. So I did. I kept my head turned toward Jude as he came back with my ramekin of guac.
3 Commentsbig sky country (some old dream)
I slowed my step as I passed the off-white Jeep-like vehicle in the parking lot. I’d never seen a Montana license plate. Crazy…I’ve seen Hawaii and Alaska plates, Maine and New Hampshire plates, even Vancouver and Ontario plates, but never a Montana plate. (Am I the only one who can’t figure out how Hawaii cars get here?)
The plate was pretty. Blue. The color we think of when we think of Montana, if we think of Montana. The DMV has indeed captured the spirit of its state and I couldn’t help lingering to admire it for a small moment alongside the tall, gray-headed gentleman with rugged, wrinkled skin.
We didn’t say anything – only studied the so-real-to-life plate together. Is that an actual photograph, I wondered. Then I moved on with grocery bags in hand.
But the gray man didn’t move for a few long seconds. When he did, he walked to the front of the vehicle, stooping to look for a plate on the front bumper. A quiet smile spread across his face as he searched. Not finding one, he came around to the back again and gave a final glimpse to the blue-sky picture.
As I closed the back door and prepared to climb into the driver’s seat, I saw him at his own car. He also prepared to climb in, but turned to see if maybe the owner of the vehicle had returned. He might like to talk about Big Sky Country, I thought to myself.
But that wasn’t all I found in his faded blue eyes. He wasn’t just searching for the Montana resident who happened to be in town. He was searching for something else, some old dream that had resurfaced for a brief instant, resurrected in a parking lot thousands of miles from its burial grounds.
He smiled again, close-lipped, and slid behind the wheel. A hope stirred for endless scapes and skies. And an aching for home.
1 Commentmagnolia and me
I went walking at the park again a few days ago. I walked there again today. The unseasonable warmth pulled me out of our quiet apartment, out of my droning workout routine, and into the fresh air alive with birdsongs, raindrops and the aroma of new life beneath the surface.
Even though I wouldn’t say I’ve technically felt cooped up these mild winter weeks, there was something almost necessary in the January breeze, the bare trees, the brown grass, the flitting bluebirds.
But it wasn’t just the immediate and physical world, and my place in it, that invited me to this little pocket of the world and washed over me with each step. I have a love affair with this place where I have walked, listened, sought, dreamed, breathed, and remembered; this place where, not so long ago, a boy proposed to a girl on a solitary moonlit amphitheater stage. It seems so much of my story – and a greater story – is told under the sprawling sky on these winding paths. I needed to hear those stories again, however they would be told to me.
And, today, one of those stories flooded me as I stepped in uneven rhythms over puddles and branches. It came on me at the magnolia trees, small and growing, their striking green leaves complete but for the absent glory of their crisp white flowers. It wasn’t long ago – maybe August or September – that I ventured off the concrete path to put my nose to the newly budded branches, inhaling a lingering fragrance more complex and lasting than any manufactured perfume.
Just by passing the trees & seeing their stark and persistent beauty, the bouquet came back, strong and real, like I’d again tread over soggy grass to draw in a breath of the pale petals. Isn’t that something? The way our brains resurface a distant and nearly lost moment, a sliver of our history, everything we were thinking, feeling and being, and then arrest it forever? And that we, without premeditation, can draw on it over and over and over again just by seeing something, smelling something, returning to a place that has mysteriously invited us.
I can’t tell you the story the magnolia tree told me as I walked. That’s for the magnolia and me. But I was just thinking it’s really something.
1 CommentFollow
