Prompt Week 7:

C. Sit down by the campfire with the Wise One: listen, then speak.

“A whole Life can be lived in a moment but a moment loses a bit of its magic in the retelling. The stories convey an idea that only the shared memory can comprehend completely. I’ll tell you my stories for as long as you want to listen. Your part will be to catch the memory in the tear that spills in remembering a word or a motion.

I was a young girl. Life took unexpected turns and found me angry on the tiled floor of the institution. I had a child that the state deemed I could not care for and a husband abusive and drunk. I tried to pacify the injury that would not heal with my own drug of depression. I took the path that led to the sanatorium. That’s what they were called in those days. That sanatorium became my path out of the life that led me there. That’s how I learned about the circuitous nature of life. What kills us gives birth to us as well.

The sadness isn’t in the facts. Sadness isn’t even in the feelings of the facts. A sadness that has no roots has no wings either.

Me sitting in this chair. You crossed legged in front of me…these are the moments that eat up the sadness. We share them so casually in the light of this fire but they leave their impressions and leave less space for the sadness. Did I ever tell you my recipe for miracle whip salad?”

Nikki always spoke in riddles, giving only hints, bits, and pieces. As suddenly as she’d begin to tell her “stories” she’d as abruptly change the tone and tell me how to make a really good salad out of just lettuce and mayo. It was part of the story. Something was missing if it didn’t end in the middle with a simple recipe.

We talked about sadness that night. I was very sad. My body ached with it and it wouldn’t stop dripping from my eyes. I didn’t think that I would ever heal or trust the life again. Nikki made it her mission that I would.

"What is your first memory, Cinnamon?"

I remember the bushes under the kitchen window at my grandmother’s house. I remember hiding deep in their secrets and listening to the adults talk. I was wearing the yellow dress that used to be my sister’s and thinking that mom was going to be mad that it was covered with leaves and dirt and clumps of sticky sap from the bushes. I was thinking about that because I couldn’t understand what the adults were talking about but it scared me. I don’t know why.

I wondered if I should have ended with a recipe so that she would know I was done.

After a little while, the crackling of the fire the only sound filling the space between, she turned to me and said that she thought it might be time for her to head back into town if I didn’t mind taking her.

We got in the old truck and she touched my hand as I was turning the key.

“Sadness is like those bushes at your grandmother's house. It’s like the sap that collected on your pretty yellow dress. Sadness is the secrets that you heard and the ones that you kept in those bushes. Sadness is as light as a feather or as heavy as an elephant, Cinnamon. It’s a tiled floor of a sanatorium or the window that looks out beyond it. It’s that fire, it’s you and it’s me. Do you understand?”

Somehow I did. I smiled at her. The first in many days and then I started the truck.