Blackbird
When I was sixteen, my parents and I lived in a turn of the century farm house, prior abandoned, with a defiant old biscuit decades earlier nailed to the wall above the small wood burning stove. Still hangs there I imagine.
It was cow country back then. Horses and ranch lands, swaddled in a verdant valley of irrigated hay fields flanked by snow-capped high country.
My room was upstairs. Its entrance, a doorless arch curtained with a faded blue fabric strewn with tiny periwinkles. Flour sacks once lovingly sewn.
The arch led to a tiny space with a steeply slanted ceiling on either side.
A small, single, narrow window shone brightly, centered beneath the apex of the westerly facing wall, papered in loosening blue scrolls.
Bare, softly worn pine boards lined the floor, little of the periwinkle-blue paint still visible.
It was perfect. I loved it. It was my space. And far more, really, than I required.
Most important was the window. I covered it gently with a white sheer panel and allowed it to billow freely, encouraging prevailing winds to course through... purifying the space with the ever-renewing breath of nature. It was a space closely guarded by an ever watchful, rather resentful previous matriarch - a ghost, now, stirring about the stairs and landings.
A stone's throw from the window trickled a long, wide bog circled by cattails and deeply shaded by tall cottonwoods.
Through that open window, during seasons when I spent much more time in the fields, in the foothills, along the creek, even along the road than indoors, the window carried currents of brisk spring air, freshly scented with awakening hay fields and dewy lilacs. Easterly air lifting a sunrise. Northerly wind, bringing the sea. Strong southerly breezes rising into a nearing summer, merging and shifting with westerly gusts, all of them stalwart in cyclical renewal... ecstatic with cosmic faith and the seasonal celebration of spring's tender grasses and buzzing dragonflies about the fringes of the pond. Its musky, muddy depths made light with the high resonance of leopard frogs, chirping crickets, and the busy chits and liquid trills of the lovely marsh warbler... redwing blackbirds clinging to the reeds... their nesting families hidden among the rushes.
Enveloping me as I lay awake late into the peace of lingering night - settled in my own sense of who and why, and thankful for it - these softening currents and reassuring sounds are what made that space mine. A space shared with life's vibration, naturally attuned, balanced and right. The wetlands just beyond and drawn within... my salvation.
Spring nears and welcomes us, each and all, within this season of grand and promising renewal...
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Blackbird - Text and Image (C) 2019 by Lisa Bracken / newflightbooks .com / All Rights Reserved
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