WHAT I SEE OR NOT

Norma Tucker

 

I sit at my desk before the sliding glass doors that lead to my balcony garden. The oak tree facing me, the one I’ve watched grow from sapling to full grown, years of changing its color in the autumn from summer green to vivid gold. This year I see only limp green and whimpers of dulled color. No fallings of dried leaves from its limbs to be raked into mounds or to succumb to a leaf blower. 

 

It is past mid-October 2021. A time when the season changes dramatically from summer pastels to vibrant reds and gold, and tinted brown. We anticipate the harvest and holidays. Our palate adapts as summer vegetation changes from stalks to root. This year is different. 

 

The seasons of the past year have given us little time to muse. One season to the next – each defined by hibernation, vaccinated, or not, and the politics of what keeps us from dying. This year we are continually tested as individuals and as a society struggling to achieve something we call normalcy. Humanity is struggling. I am struggling. The natural world is struggling. Fires suck the moisture of forests in the West, record breaking heat in the East. Increasing grief from more destructive violent tornados, volcanos, hurricanes, and wars continuing and ending. What is on the horizon? We cannot fathom, nor trust in the past.

 

My horizon beyond this single tree at this time of year is a hill resplendent - large, lush, colorful trees, an artist’s dream. They remain a reluctant green this autumn, not the glory of yesteryear’s reds, orange and yellow with glints of glaring brightness as the sun ducks in and out of clouds. I ask myself, is it too early, too warm, too wet? Will the next few weeks see the colors change, the influx of fallen leaves left to nourish the earth beneath?

 

Will the winds of late October stir these dry leaves on Halloween – a night of gusts and sweet goodies, ghosts, and giggles. Will by then my horizon change?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                         A RECORD OF TEN (10) GOOD THINGS THIS MORNING 

                                PLUS ONE(1)

                        FEBRUARY 23, 2021@10:30AM

 

1.     The sun is shining. Temperatures are moving upward from the recent days of freezing rain and snow.

 

2.     We are not in Texas today, a place of political rancor and natural disaster (or maybe unnatural).

 

3.     The U.S. Senate Committee on Rules (I think it’s Rules) is meeting to delve into the events of January 6, 2021, to discuss and question the happenings of that day at the United States Capitol. The good thing of today - it began on a bipartisan basis as stated by the lead Senator, Amy Klobuchar.

 

4.     My sister received her second Covid vaccine yesterday. She safely drove down the daunting icy hill that protects her home in her four-wheel drive vintage Jeep wagon and then geared up the ice when she came home with the biotics floating and merging inside her.

 

5.     I’m going to my hairdresser this afternoon.

 

6.     I finished watching THE QUEEN’S GAMBIT on Netflix and am now ready for Fran Liebowitz.

 

7.     I have no clothes or sheets or towels or anything that needs to be washed today.

 

8.     I finally figured out how to fashionably wear my wide cropped jeans in the winter with knee highs and boots that rise above the ankle to the calf.

 

9.     I am wearing earrings – large hoops I purchased in a shop close to the waters surrounding Amelia Island. They don’t look as cheap as they were. I wonder why I haven’t worn them before during this Covid eon.

 

10.  It’s really not an eon or whatever an eon is. It’s been a year of doubt, misery, loss - and gain. The loss of lifestyle, livelihoods, lives. The gain of a new, rational President, vaccine preventives, new and good literature, four distinct seasons, of an uptick in politeness, clearer skies and a broader understanding of less carbon, and those virtual stirring moments of musical creativity.

 

Plus 1   --- I wish it was enough.

 

Norma S. Tucker

 POLITICS AND PANDEMIC

The following entries were written during a period of intense political furor. 

WHAT WORDS 1/6/2021

 

They found each other in the Court Chamber, at the attorney table facing the Bench. The Bench where they formerly sat at opposite ends. All the doors were locked, and the building shut down. In their gossamer forms they eluded these barriers. They looked forward to being together again. She, new to this afterlife; he waited for her. In life, they argued founding principles, each finding legitimacy for their opposing legal decisions. They found commonality within their love of arts and family. Became “besties.”

 

Would she describe what was happening as a tohubohu, the Hebrew word for a state of chaos. She would bow her head and think long before speaking even a single word. He, patient to respond in Latin, rebellium. 

 

They had seen the crowds, seemingly out of control. But were they? They soon realized these individuals, and there were thousands, were on a mission to destroy the democratic principles they so fervently professed and protected.

 

This day, born symbolic, with rules and pomp, allows for each state to cast its electoral vote for the next President of the United States. For this maddening crowd, it was not their man. Theirs is a White Master. Theirs is a man born in richness, living lavishly, a man with whom they have nothing in common other than believing he cares about them. He does not.

 

What say Antonin and Ruth, their spirits from urn or grave, what are they saying to each other? Two, who in their lives of justice disagreed, and fought hard with words for their opposing perceived truths and laughed and wept together at the Opera.