What Holds

This week we welcome our first Guest Artist, Barbara Lyghtel Rohrer. Congratulations to Barbara on the launch of her new web magazine, The Invisible Map, a place to read, feel, wonder and respond with writing of your own. Please visit this beautiful site. Much time and love has gone into its creation.

What Holds

Barbara Lyghtel Rohrer

I think of the deadline I was under for the college creative writing prize, how I sat at that old black desk that was once your sister’s, overlooking the north field that you mowed that summer. You enjoyed your day on the tractor, riding back and forth, the sun warm on your back, stopping to drink the lemonade I brought to you. I want a turn, I said. So you climbed down, let me climb up to the molded red seat with holes to engage the clutch, sputter forward until the ride became as smooth as driving my Carman Ghia, mowing down the two-feet tall meadow grasses that I could not name. When I returned to my desk later that day, the field with its burr haircut looked tidy and sterile.

I could see myself in the dark window above the desk that fall as I wrote my essay, the moon shining above the wooded hills, can still see us, and the little life I had with you on your farm, the gardening, the canning, the drying of herbs on old window screens set up on brick, collecting the morning eggs from the chickens, the delight when a hen appeared from under the porch with a brood of six fluffy yellow chicks, the guinea hen chicks we hatched in the dining room, how one escaped, wandered the downstairs as we slept, hopped his way upstairs, his peeping growing louder and louder, startling me up in bed to peer into the hall and see him standing there, both of us amazed.

So you climbed down, let me climb up to the molded red seat with holes to engage the clutch, sputter forward until the ride became as smooth as driving my Carman Ghia, mowing down the two-feet tall meadow grasses that I could not name.

I did not win the creative writing prize. “Your opening was rough,” said the professor who made the judgement. Yes, it may have been, or it may have been because I was writing of a life with a man to whom I was not married, an older man no less, and this was a Catholic college.

I completed my studies at the public university, after I left your land, ending my time with you.

Now that period remains a mixture of canned tomatoes, spiced pears, dill pickles and chutneys. I remember the pies I baked with the apples we picked at the local orchard. I remember the honeybees we kept, of being stung when collecting the honey that we sold at health food stores. I remember the chickens, how a hen grabbed a tomato from my sandwich as I held it, my arm resting on the arm of that director’s chair with the green canvas seat and back, enjoying my lunch outside. I remember the butterfly that landed on my toe as I sat in that same chair, my bare foot propped on the bench of the weather-beaten picnic table. And I remember the loneliness, how I longed for what you could not give, but on that fall night, I captured the sweetness of that life and hold it still to this day.

Photo by Thomas Pierre on Unsplash