Things That Leave Marks

A door, a fence, beauty, an ice storm, and babies//Five things and writing as pure play

Caspar David Friedrich, Rügen landscape with bay

1. Tuesday at 5 a.m. my face met the narrow end of the opened bathroom door.

   Picture me in the dark, a zombie, eyes still dry from deep sleep, arms straight out in front of me feeling for the door. Imagine my surprise when I realize the space between my outstretched arms is wider than the width of the open door. My mouth takes the full force of it in a rude, awakening thud.

   
   The marks are inside my lip and the swelling is not noticeable, which feels like another smack in the face because I was injured and I don’t have any reason to explain it to anybody. Nobody will notice and I have no occasion to tell the story, except for the short explanation I gave my husband at 5:01 a.m. when he stumbled into the bathroom after me, having woken to the thud.

   
   All day I ran my tongue along the inside of my lower lip, feeling the vertical line left by the meeting of our solid Hickory door with my big front teeth, with only the veil of my lower lip between them. I applied copious amounts of aquaphor to make sure the slight bit of swelling didn’t cause a split in the skin, and no one asked about my lip.

2. When I was in college I was a caretaker on a horse ranch. There were only a few horses there but they were fancy, expensive show horses. Taking care of their feeding, cleaning their stalls, and exercising them gave free room and board for me and my own horse. 

   
   I kept my horse in the front pasture sometimes, so she would have exercise when I was busy. Late one rainy night, I reached under the fence to grab her grain bucket and saw a flash of light. Weird, I thought.

   I filled the bucket with the grain I hauled in my Mazda 323 hatchback, where I also had a bale of hay and my saddle slung over the backseat. I shoved the filled bucket back under the fence and saw the light again. Lightning? Headlights? Jesus?

   
   The next morning I saw two horizontal lines across the end of my nose. They weren’t painful and it took me a few minutes to figure out that the flashes of light from the night before were not lightning. I had been shocked, twice, by the bottom wire of the electric fence, and I hadn’t felt a thing.

3. Marks or no marks, those are both funny stories to tell. I tend to think every story should have humor, beauty, and some tears involved. (At first I listed “truth” in there, too, but then I deleted it.)

   
   Behind the screen my brain is thinking that I use the word beauty too much and my spirit rises up to smack my brain in the face, take it back, repent, you grey scum. Beauty is never ever overused, just always under-defined. Stories are beautiful in their entirety and you have to hear the whole thing, know the long story, to get it all; and you can never ever get it all because a good story is never fully told.

    
   But “truth”? I deleted truth from the list of what a good story needs. If beauty is under-defined (and our work is to keep giving new ways to see it), then truth is over-defined. Is that a thing? I think it is. Truth alone is hard-edged and sterile and pedantic, but humor and beauty and some tears all tell the truth just fine. 
   

   A wise older friend once told my husband that when he had something difficult to say to someone, something true but hard, he’d better have tears running down the back of his throat. 

4. Fallen trees and broken limbs are blooming along the interstate, still doing what they intended to do last fall when they began to go dormant in store for the spring, before the ice storms exploded them. There are tangled messes of mangled cherry and wild plum and apple trees, pushing blooms for one last time.

   This makes me glad that the state or county road department has not yet taken care of all the detritus. There’s a lot of clean-up left and it’s blooming beautifully, in one last gasp for life.

5. I noticed the blooms on the drive north to Salem last weekend. I was going to witness the birth of our grandson, and feeling all the feelings about the scariness and excitement of new life. 

   
   Twenty-four hours later, as the sun came up on Resurrection morning, I would capture this baby boy’s first gasp for life on a device I fit in my pocket, throw in my purse, and charge by my bed at night. Ubiquitous technology holding once in a lifetime moments, the precious first moments of our grandbaby hidden in my photos app.

   
   I want to tell you so many things about the day and the experience. I want to show you every picture and video and tell you his birth story, but it is not my story, and you would politely humor me but it’s also not your story, and there is just not time to tell the whole story of every life.

   I will just tell you that it is wonderful, and it leaves a mark.

   ---

   This post of seemingly random paragraphs was prompted by…well, the first event in point 1. I ran into a door in the dark, and it was painful but too funny not to share somewhere, so I wrote about it.

   Writing about the door incident reminded me of the event in point 2, so I wrote about that.

   Then I realized I was doing a Five Things Essay¹ type of exercise and I kept writing randomly in my rough drafts folder.

   Lastly, I read an essay titled “Writing as Pure Play” by Raed Truett Gilliam at

   Ekstasis
   and felt the courage to once again write and share something for the pure play of it, not for perfection.

1.

Summer Brennan

has a great explanation of the Five Things Essay here, and you can read about her Year of Writing Dangerously that was borne out of a year of Five Things Essays.