Some days, I miss her so much I can almost feel her next to me, in front of me…taking my face in her papery hands and drawing me close to kiss my cheek.
She wasn’t always old, though.
We lived a number places together: the Green House in the hills of Granby, an apartment in Simsbury and then, later, a raised ranch further up the street. Wherever she was felt like home to me.
I wrote the following piece of fiction in response to the Weekly Writing Challenge: Traces, in which we were encouraged to talk about leaving our mark. Interestingly enough, I posted on a similar topic in January. As WWC posts are supposed to be written specifically for the challenge, I have created something new (below). If you would like to read my non-fiction thoughts on the subject, feel free to visit YOLO or YOLOL | A Post for the New Year.
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Valkyrie | Chooser of the Slain
With her finger, she traces the engraved letters, one at a time.
The stone feels cold. Cold and hard. And final.
A-R-D-E-N
That’s all. The rest had worn away. It was a long time ago for this world that forgets so quickly. And yet for her…
He was young and strong and strong-willed. She loved him instantly. She watched him for months before he noticed her. And even then, only because she wanted him to. His training was over and he would leave soon for the war. She knew she shouldn’t, but she did it anyway.
He sat alone at the bar, staring into his drink, his right leg shaking anxiously. She’d been studying him long enough to know that he wasn’t worried; he was impatient and excited, but not worried. Like so many others, he was eager for battle, for a chance to make a difference, to give his life for what he believed in.
She, however, had seen too many wars. Not dozens or hundreds, but thousands. Thousands upon thousands. Her heart, drenched and heavy with the blood of a million men, felt light when she looked at him – his dark hair and bronzed skin offset by bright, green eyes. His earthiness, his humanity pulled her toward him.
He started when he saw her. It was as if she had just appeared in the seat next to him. He stared, speechless, at first. Her beauty…it was otherworldly. Golden-red hair tumbled in waves over her bare, fair shoulders and her eyes were the most unusual purple-grey. He felt himself relax into her smile, as if he’d known her all his life.
“You smell like lavender,” he breathed.
“I…what?” she laughed, almost embarrassed.
“You just…I’m sorry…I just,” He let out a sigh and smiled. “Hi.”
“Hi,” she smiled back.
Three days was all they had. Three days.
Confident and maybe a little naive , as the young so often are, he kissed her tears and promised to come back for her. As he walked away, she let him think he was leaving her. Let him think she’d be there when he returned…if he returned.
Sometime later, he saw her again. She’d been watching, as she was destined to do. In the fighting and the fury, among the gunfire and the screaming, she glided, seeing but unseen. Watching, waiting. And choosing. She had no choice but to choose.
Just as she brushed her hand over the terrified eyes of a soldier too young to be a man, closing them forever, she heard him. His screams tore into her. His humanity, again, drawing her to him, above him, by his side.
She understood instantly, as her kind always does, that his wounds, while not fatal, were devastating. And so she chose.
He lay on his back, his face waxing pale as the agony began to overwhelm him. But his eyes, darting back and forth, searching the gun-metal sky, glistened green like springtime. He began to call her name.
And then, because she wanted him to, he saw her. His anxious eyes settled on her face and his body slackened. With her fingertips, she brushed the hair away from his face, so he could see her better. And at her touch, his breathing calmed.
“You…smell like…lavender,” he whispered with a playful smile.
She intended to laugh, but a sob escaped in its place.
“Hey. Don’t cry. It’s OK. See? I promised you I’d come back. And here I am.”
Swallowing her tears, she replied, “And here you are.”
She gazed into his eyes for a long moment before resting a hand on either side of his bloodstained face. She leaned into him and touched her lips to his. They were cold, as she knew they would be.
But hers were warm. Warm and soft and gentle and painless and….
…for her, it seems like days, hours even, though more than a hundred years and thousands of battles and countless souls have passed. Yet, she would never forget, could never forget.
She holds the lavender close and, taking a deep breath, fills herself with the earthiness. Then, just as she positions the purple and green flowers beneath his name, she’s gone.
© Nichole Liza Q.
Weekly Writing Challenge: Traces
The following post was written for the Weekly Writing Challenge of WordPress.com.
Every scar holds a memory.
When I was little, my mother used to wince at the sight of it. 42 stitches from my scalp to my eyebrow. There are others…smaller ones…including the one inside my upper lip. Sometimes, I still run my tongue up and down the jagged ridge that cuts from the edge of my lip to where the skin meets my gums.
The memory is my mother’s, not mine. An empty aquarium shattering over the hard skull of her 14 month old daughter. Blood. Deep red. Heavy.
Washing glass from her little one’s hair while she waited for the ambulance.
“No time!” the police officer shouts. “I’ll drive you in my car.”
My father screaming, blaming. The officer leaves him behind.
Doctors whisking her baby girl into surgery.
“Will she be okay?”
“We’ll have to wait and see.”
Wait and see…and be questioned by protective services. It’s the standard protocol, they tell her.
Wait with empty arms as her little girl sleeps a dreamless sleep in a cold, sterile room down the hall. Wait as they pick glass splinters from her baby’s soft skin, as they stitch the broken, delicate flesh together. Wait and see the new face. The face of a memory she can never forget.
A memory I can never remember.
In the mirror, I see the only face I’ve ever known. Scars from a memory I own but cannot find.
I don’t remember my father screaming or the officer leaving him behind. I don’t remember my father much at all. But he left a scar too. Sometimes I can feel it – running along the outside of my heart -the jagged edges I sewed together to close up the cavity he left when he left us behind. It’s not a pretty scar. I was only a child, not a surgeon. But I needed to stop the bleeding…to keep the life from spilling out of me…to stop the world from getting in.
Like the scars on my face, this heart-scar is a part of me. It’s the only heart I’ve ever known, shaped by so many memories: memories I love and memories I loathe, memories I can’t remember and memories I never made at all, but could have, had he stayed.
Scarred hearts beat funny sometimes. And they ache…for what was taken and what was never let in.
Looking in the mirror, I ask The Surgeon, “Will she be okay?”
He gently rests a hand – a hand carrying scars of his own – on my heart. Knowingly, his eyes smile into mine as he whispers, “We’ll have to wait and see.”
© Nichole Liza Q.
“I am intellectually empty and vacant.” Those are the words one minister spoke to his congregation last Sunday. Not as a man without hope, but as one honestly acknowledging that he had come to the end of himself. There was nothing that the intellectual, rational part of his being could do with the tragedy of Newtown, Connecticut.
We are all a little desperate today.
The following, somewhat paraphrased, quote from the movie Love Comes Softly, keeps running through my mind:
“When we’re hurting, we spend an awful lot of time looking for answers, when what we really need is comfort.”
I believe we need that truth now more than ever.
Now, as the shock wears off and the anger surfaces. Now, while we search for someone to punish. Now, when we are grasping for reason. Clinging to frayed hopes for humanity. Now, as we race to protect our children and ourselves. As we try to control the uncontrollable, rationalize the irrational and console the inconsolable.
Now – when we are searching, desperately searching for answers, we must remember where to look.
I have wrestled with pain before – pain that the world can do nothing to ease. I have searched for answers. I have railed against God. Pounded on His chest and screamed, “WHY?!!!”
Then God asked me: “What answer would satisfy you?”
So, I imagined the God of the universe standing before me and saying, “Nichole, you have suffered because ______.” But every word I used to fill in the blank fell short of my expectations. No answer sufficed. Every time – every time – my response was, “Well, you’re God. Surely you could have done it another way.”
Some pain is too deep, some things too extraordinary to understand.
20 children shot dead and hundreds more traumatized, scarred for life. Surely there was another way!
When Job lost everything he had – family, health, business, friends, position in society – he cried out to the Lord for an answer. The Lord answered out of the storm. But probably not in the way Job expected:
“Brace yourself like a man;
I [God] will question you [Job],
and you shall answer me.
“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone—
while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels shouted for joy?”
Can you just imagine His booming voice, like the rushing wind or crackling thunder? Continuing like that for several more chapters, (Job 38-41) God’s answer hardly seems like an answer at all. It rather seems like…a rebuke.
But what answer would have satisfied Job? Would he have actually found comfort in knowing that God allowed Satan to sift him like wheat?
God is so good. He knew what Job needed better than Job himself.
Instead of speaking to Job’s intellect, God reveals Himself to Job’s heart. And Job responds:
“Surely I spoke of things I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me to know….
My ears had heard of you
but now my eyes have seen you.
Therefore I despise myself
and repent in dust and ashes.”
God didn’t give Job an answer. God WAS the answer.
Finally, Job surrenders. He stops his frantic search. He lays down his quiver of accusations. Throws himself on the ground and vomits up the bile of his bitter, grieving heart. He has seen the Lord and at last, he rests. At last, he finds comfort.
Grief, sorrow, pain. Harbor these waters of affliction and your wells will turn bitter and run dry. But let them flow, let your tears rain down, seek comfort in the arms of your Father, and there you will find the waters of life. (Oddly enough my blog last month was about grieving. You can read it here if you would like to explore this topic further.)
To my grieving fellow Connecticutians and Americans, what arrows are in your quiver? Strung on your bow? Acts of retribution? Making someone pay? Judgment? Or acts of morality? Giving financially to victims? Social activism? Or acts of self-protection? Fear? Isolation? Not all of these things are bad, but do them – even the “good” ones – without receiving comfort and you will be like Job, like I once was, perhaps even like the perpetrators you despise – weary, bitter, empty and isolated.
Can you admit, like the minister did, that you are intellectually vacant? Can you fall at the feet of the One and Only Answer you will ever need? Can you let Him be enough? Because He Is. He Was. He Will Always Be, the only Answer that satisfies. The One in whom all questions fade away.
© Nichole Liza Q.
This is one of my favorite songs and as music often does, it says more in 3 minutes than I could in a thousand years.
I Had a Dream….no really, I did!
I was with my youngest daughter, Christina, and a friend. We stood in a vast, barren landscape of dry, scraggly hills covered with natural debris. I didn’t look at the sky but it must have been sunless, because everything was gray, ashen.
I am bent over a pile of withered, cracked branches – branches much longer than I am tall and about the thickness of a baseball bat. The branches are so dry, they’ve begun to turn white. I kneel down, curious. Lifting up a few branches to see what lies beneath, I notice they’re stuck in some sort of gray mire. An old riverbed! The mire reeks of decay.
I lift my head. To my left are three dead owls.
Nothing lives here.
I stand and look around. I see now – the hills and valleys are actually the stony banks and dry beds of countless rivers and creeks. Each one filled with desiccated branches. Everywhere my eyes scan: parched, lifeless land.
A moment later, I am at an old farmhouse. Not mine. My grandmother’s? My mother’s? I think we’re on vacation. My entire family is there. Even my grandparents, who’ve long since passed.
My grandma’s in the kitchen. There’s a child sleeping on an over sized chair. Is it Christina? Or am I seeing myself?
I step out the screen door and the sky looms heavy, oppressive, dark. Drizzle dots my skin. I sigh and think, “Ugh, rain. Another family vacation day ruined.” Then I remember the dry riverbed. I put my hand out to catch the drizzle. “No. Not enough to make a difference.”
Next, I am standing outdoors. Christina and I are by the street, facing the white farmhouse. She seems younger in my dream. My friend stands in the yard, facing us. Behind her there’s a little vegetable garden. And I have a sense that my grandma is watching us through the embroidered café curtains of the kitchen window.
It starts to rain. And pour. And pour. For a moment I am disappointed. Rain on vacation.
I look at the ground beneath my feet. Mud. So much water the ground can’t hold. My skin, my hair – soaked. What a mess! What a…
I remember: The dry riverbeds. The barren wasteland. This rain – it’s falling there too!
I turn my palms heavenward and lift my face to the rain. Rain will quench the parched land and fill thirsty riverbeds. Perhaps the rain did not come when I wanted, as I expected, but it came and it is good.
What do you do with a dream like that? What do you make of it? I would love to hear your thoughts. It has been a couple of weeks and God is still speaking to me about it.
I should tell you that this dream came on the night of Tuesday, November 6 – Election Night 2012. Hmmmm….
I should also tell you that our church is in the midst of a spiritual emphasis we call “Pray for Reign.” Together, we are praying for God to reign in our lives, individually and corporately, and that His spirit would rain down on us and on our land.
Back when Pray for Reign began, I fell in love with this song Waiting for the Rain by Misty Edwards:
“..I’m waiting in the desert, just waiting for the rain…”
This weekend, I had the privilege of being with a friend while she grieved. As I watched her cry, God gave me a sort of vision: I glimpsed dry riverbeds, like the ones in my dream, deep in her soul. And they were being watered by her tears. The beauty of it took my breath away. The eyes of my heart began to see…to understand grief differently:
Loss of any kind leaves an empty space in our hearts. If we hold on to that loss or run away from it, that hole becomes an dry, decaying ditch. What water is left, sours from the rotting branches of bitterness – those worthless things we use to fill our hollow spaces. Then it happens again…and again, so that one day, we look around at the expanse of our souls, and see acres upon acres devoured by loss. An emaciated wasteland.
Nothing lives here.
“…oh but I won’t leave this desert, until I see the rain…”
More often than not, God won’t bring back what was lost – people die, dreams are dashed, life changes, friends move away, bodies grow weak. All this life…it’s just a letting go.
I have wrestled with this. I have burned with rage. I have desperately asked. I have silently cried. Then came peace – or at least the hope of peace: Nichole, every empty cavern, every hollow grave, is a place for Me to enter. Everything I take away, creates more room for Me.
This life is loss. I can rail against reality – rail against Him – or I can accept what’s true and give Him space to rain…to reign.
“… I can see the clouds gatherin’ now…are you ready…are you ready for the rain?”
Are you ready for the rain? When God sends it, will you let it fall?
Will you?
Because the rain that fills our dry riverbeds will not fall from the sky. The rain that soaks our shriveled souls, will fall from our eyes. Our very eyes.
Grief is a gift from God. A well to the deep healing waters of heaven. Let Him rain.
Lament your loss. Mourn what’s missing. Cry out in your pain.
I had a dream. God reigned.
See, I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
and streams in the wasteland.
Isaiah 43:19
© Nichole Liza Q.
My grandparents didn’t live a flashy life. They grew up here in Connecticut – my grandpa helping his father on the railroad in Torrington, my grandma helping out on her parent’s farm in Granby and working tobacco in the summers. During high school they both lived in Granby and went to school in Simsbury. Neither really loved school and both remembered being treated as second class citizens because they were “Country Bumpkins” attending Simsbury schools. Some things never change.
One of grandma’s favorite memories – and my favorite stories to hear – was of her and her friends leaving school for their 30 minute lunch break. They started their break by lighting up a cigarette and then running from Simsbury High (which is now the Simsbury Police Station) to Doyle’s Drugstore, which was located in what is now the Apollo’s Restaurant plaza. The drugstore was also a soda shop and Grandma and her friends, after running half a mile smoking a cigarette, sat down at the counter and quickly scoffed down hot fudge sundaes for lunch. Then they ran all the way back to school, smoking one more cigarette before returning to class. Doesn’t that sound just like Grandma? As for Grandpa, he was apparently smartest guy in school with the highest IQ (he did marry Grandma after all) and if you ever get a look at his old photos, you will probably agree that he was the best looking guy there too!
My Grandma and Grandpa started dating when they were just 14 and Grandpa loved to tell the story of one of their dates in particular. On that night, Grandpa had brought Grandma back to the house in his car. It was very late and very dark out on those country roads with no street lights and this night must have been a cloudy one, because as he tells it, it was pitch black. Anyway, they apparently parked their car on the street near the house and, as Grandpa tells it, they fell asleep. A few hours later, well past Grandma’s curfew, they woke up to the voices of Grandma’s brothers and sisters calling out “Arlene! Arlene!” as they ran around the farm and street looking for her; only to find that she was right there, on the street in front of the house the whole time! It was so dark, noone ever saw the car.
Grandma and Grandpa married after Grandpa returned from serving in the Air Corps (I think that is what it was called back then). They married and bought a small home which they later sold because it couldn’t house their growing family. They would never own their own home again. They lived for many years in an old farmhouse at the base of High Meadow. Grandpa worked for the town and then for Hamilton Standard. He helped to build the suits for America’s astronauts and it is rumored that when the men of Apollo 13 were trying to find a way to survive on board their spaceship, Grandpa is the one who recommended they use duct tape to fix…well…whatever that thing was that needed fixing. If you’ve seen the movie, you know it was pretty important!
Grandma was a stay-at-home mom and housewife and ladies, it wasn’t like it is today. She had a washer and no dryer, even all winter long. Frozen underpants anyone? No disposable diapers. No microwave. She made three meals a day, every day for her whole family. No Subway, McDonald’s or delivery pizza and if there was a restaurant in town, they couldn’t afford to eat at it. No shower, just one bath and 4 teenagers. No heat in much of the house. A vacuum with no rug attachment…just the hose. And on top of all this, she had a garden – that they truly counted on for food – and farm animals to care for. Oh Grandma, you put me to shame!
They raised their children as best they knew how with the resources they had and as you know, they all turned out pretty great. Sometimes Grandma would lament about what she wished she had done differently ~ that she had read to them more or had not been so harsh. That is just what parents do, I guess. We always wish we could have loved our children better. Funny, now that they are gone, I wish I had loved them better. Anyway, while Grandma sometimes wished she had parented better, she and Grandpa never wished her kids had turned out better. They were both so proud of each of their children – who they had become, the trials they had endured and how they all seem to have come through it better in the end. They loved them to the very end with the care, angst and pride every parent feels for their children, no matter what their age.
In 1973 they had their first grandchildren, Brigette and me, and 10 more eventually followed. Grandma and Grandpa were, to me, more than Grandparents. Very early on, I lost my first father to what we will call a lack of maturity and then, when I was 12, I lost my second father, my step-father and Derek’s biological father, to a terrible disease. In some ways we lost him many years before he died. My mom did everything she could to keep us going, including working days at CG and waiting tables at night while pregnant with Derek. During those years, Grandma and Grandpa were our rocks in the middle of a stormy sea.To borrow from country singer Sara Evans: “My [Grandpa] he is grounded like the oak tree. My [Grandma] she is steady as the sun.” When everything else in life was uncertain, they were there – steady, dependable, faithful. My Grandma did laundry every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Lunch was at noon every day and dinner at 4:30. Grandpa went to work every day and came home each night in time for dinner. He didn’t go out with the guys or work endlessly to get ahead. He was there. I especially loved it when I would sit on his lap and hold his hands and pretend I was flying a plane. He would tell me “Pull up! Pull up!” or “Make it steady!” What fun for a little girl!
I know lots of people complain that their dads were never emotionally available, never talked to them much. Well, for someone like me, Grandpa’s just being there meant alot. Grandpa taught me that some men do come home every night, some men do stay, some men do love their wives forever.
I know they have touched the lives of so many people. For me and my brother, they were like the insulation of a house, keeping out the cold on a long winter night; the icing on the cake, holding everything together and sweet besides; the heart of our hearts and breath of our lives.
No, they never lived a flashy life. They never built a job from the ground up or owned a large home or made millions on a land investment or even owned more than one car at a time. But that wasn’t what made them great. The greatness of Tom and Arlene Creighton was in their day to day living, in the long haul, in their perseverance, dependability, steadiness, love and faithfulness. In the words of one of Grandma’s favorite authors, Jan Karon, they are a perfect example of “the extraordinary beauty of ordinary lives.” What they gave to me, to us, can never be measured or weighed. It is of infinite value and beyond what words can express. I will love them, we will love them, forever.
© Nichole Liza Q.
Lightning Bug 