Nonfiction by Jill Sisson
At first I think it’s a blemish on the kitchen wall, high in the corner where my soapy sponge can’t reach. Then I see it’s a resting moth, sleeping like a small golden leaf waiting to awaken at the end of the day. To search for another dusty-winged soul, to pull the future into their soft reach.
The purple-haired sophomore in my 4th period class, another solo soul.
And the senior who smashed his hand into a table, his hot-pink cast messy with signatures as he strategically fails three of his classes. The future is not something he wants. He’s not ready to fledge; the white-walled world is no refuge for his Muslim/Mexican blend.
Dark is not the worst place to be, with the espresso-brown soil of Earth, with ancestors’ songs and permanent dreams, the ones I keep close to the campfire when I travel away. Away to where the stars gleam. Where bats and coyotes have their say.
It’s mid-morning when an admiral butterfly tastes the rim of my blue plastic cup, as though the caffeine from breakfast or the salts from my fingers fuel her day-long flights of black, white, and stripes of gold. A twitchy chipmunk bounds toward my picnic table, eyes alert, his tail like a wind-tossed weed. The rush of wind high in the boughs, like a river bending our lives.
Dear Mom,
We’ve had our hard times, but I saw a double rainbow late this afternoon.
They used to say that rainbows are the arcs of hope, that God graced our flooded lands with a hoop of colors to save us from despair. Did you get the Billy Graham book I sent you?
There are rainbows everywhere. I keep taking photos of them. There’s one I took for my blog, a tiny rainbow skating across an insect’s lost wing caught on a spider web. (A rainbow on a wing on a web.) And those beautiful rainbow-streaks up in the cirrus clouds—can you still see those? I think they’re called sun dogs. Colorado used to get a lot of those compared to here in Oregon. My friend Tracy (she’s earning her PhD in marine science, you two never met) doesn’t believe in hope, but she studies tiny mollusks that glint like rainbows under her microscope. I guess I’m saying there’s always reason for hope if you look hard enough for it.
Anyway, Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. Call me when you can. xoxo
In loving memory: Alzheimers, January 24, Weld County Colorado
Jill Sisson is a naturalist and educator from Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Her writing is situated in that sweet spot where the everyday overlaps with the ineffable. Western settings, stretching from the Colorado Rockies to the Pacific Northwest, backdrop most of her written work. She has been published in Emerge 24.
