Diary of a Phoenix: A Memoir

By Prairie Heart

Born cinched in the Bible Belt, I worked the land, loving God and family. I married my high school sweetheart in college. Time revealed him to be an alcoholic/addict. In love, I was desperate for his recovery. We met an intentional community having locations spanning the globe, their own government, a tall ship for trading overseas, organic farms, soap shops, biodiesel and solar energy. My husband joined. Alcohol and drugs were prohibited. I followed. I became ill. Touting sickness and death to be punishment for sin, their leaders proclaimed God smote me over insubordination to men. Years later I found proof God wasn’t to blame, involved possibly. Something supernatural had transpired when I survived. Keeping a journal, capturing details, crippled and bleeding internally, I left, sought medical attention, got divorced, emerged a single mother, and began my recovery. It wasn’t their intention, but I made it out alive! Never underestimate your power … you just might unleash a Phoenix.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781663233592

Book preview

DIARY

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PHOENIX

A MEMOIR

PRAIRIE HEART

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DIARY OF A PHOENIX

A MEMOIR

Copyright © 2022 Prairie Heart.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

iUniverse

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-6632-3358-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-3359-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022900295

iUniverse rev. date: 12/30/2021

CONTENTS

Phoenix

Chapter 1 Commune Location: The Dying Room

Chapter 2 In the Beginning

Chapter 3 Hospital Up North

Chapter 4 Smalltown (Post-Commune)

Chapter 5 Smalltown (Pre-Commune)

Chapter 6 Post-Commune: Smalltown

Chapter 7 Post-Commune, Stuck in Smalltown

Chapter 8 To Be or Not to Be

Chapter 9 Post-Commune, Smalltown: The Lost

Chapter 10 Still Here

Chapter 11 Why Am I Still Here?

Chapter 12 Mayday Hospital: Up North

Chapter 13 Smalltown: Post-Commune

Chapter 14 The Tender Things

Chapter 15 Commune: Another Location in the South

Chapter 16 Mayhem Beach Goes to Shit

Chapter 17 The Commune and the Birth of My Son

Chapter 18 Commune Up North … Child Falls over a Cliff

Chapter 19 Married at Twenty-One

Chapter 20 Childhood on the Farm

Chapter 21 From Commune to Smalltown: A Snake Is a Snake

Chapter 22 From the Stars

Chapter 23 Smalltown Judgments: Life after the Commune

Chapter 24 My Daddy: A Story in Itself

Chapter 25 Family

Chapter 26 Remembering the Commune

Chapter 27 Church Dinners, Family Destiny, and the River

Chapter 28 The Aftermath

Chapter 29 Poor, Wayfaring Stranger

Chapter 30 The Awakening

Chapter 31 I Will Survive

Chapter 32 Smut

Chapter 33 Land of the Lost

Chapter 34 Wilderness and the Redheaded Bank Robber

Chapter 35 Crossing the River Jordan

Chapter 36 The Promised Land

Chapter 37 Rebirth of Prairie Heart

For

my friend … wherever she may be … who also

knows the color of a wounded heart … having a piece

of her’s fly like a bird from her breast to dwell safely

in the cleft of the rock and wait upon her mother.

PHOENIX

This mythical bird is a symbol of hope, renewal,

rebirth, immortality, resurrection, solitude, and

grace. Just as the phoenix emerges from its ashes,

so can man after devastation and loss.

…

Phoenixes are among the strongest and most

durable of supernatural creatures. They are quite

powerful and almost impossible to kill.

…

The legendary phoenix has not been shy in showing up in various

ancient cultures around the world. However, unbeknownst to

most, it is also mentioned in the book of Job from the Bible.

Unfortunately, it cannot be found in the King James Version,

NIV, or the like. Instead, it is found in the Hebrew translations.

Then I said: "I shall die with my nest,

and I shall multiply my days as the phoenix."

—Job 29:18 (Hebrew English Translation)

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CHAPTER 1

Commune Location:

The Dying Room

Seven, six, five … the seconds slipped out of my grasp … fifteen minutes were almost up. Four, three, two … the scenery blurs and is gone. Pain and me, again, became one. Responding in unison, we kept synchronized time to some peculiar waltz, never missing a beat, like a metronome. Well, since they say it takes two, perhaps it was a tango.

I watched the second hand on the clock. Yes, he was back for me. Ready or not: three, two, one … my focus melted, and I felt the touch of my curious suitor once again. The suspended silence suddenly crashed into a crescendo of convulsions drenched in blood, vomit, and shrill pain. I cannot tell you how long these duets of cacophony lasted. Only that they came, and went, time and time again, in measured beats. They kept a pace with intervals of silence that interlocked. I was held tight in the grip of some choreographed performance.

There was a time before this when I had experienced this sort of clock-watching event. It was during childbirth. In those days, labor contractions were what came and went in measured time. This time, it wasn’t contractions. There was no baby … and no end in sight. Only senselessly violent convulsions came, shaking my body like a rag doll, as I drew closer, and closer, to death. I barely weighed eighty pounds. How much longer could this go on? Could I last much longer? As the blood flow reduced once more to a trickle, and the vomiting subsided into gagging, the fifteen minutes of rest that came were welcomed—but began their fleeting countdown.

Why fifteen? None of us knew … but in some unseen place of omniscience, fifteen had been decided, and without my consent agreed upon, for about two long weeks. Two weeks … where the sun and moon no longer ruled. Only the absence and presence of convulsive pain dictated schedules. Part of me had already left this world. Rest or toil, food or drink, all took their respective places within the calm of those fifteen minutes that spread apart the storms and kept the tempo of the dance.

Death was my suitor. He in black, and I in red, he hugged close to my side, and our dance raged on … and on, and on. Or was it just a moment? Time spiraled on the disc of my eye and glimmered in the light. It hung there in the air. I lost track, but the train chugged on. He came calling for me. We exchanged glances. He courted me, passionately. He drew near to me. I felt his gaze upon me. I knew intimately his touch. He ravaged my body. I tasted his kiss. His eyes were black. I kept time with his steps as he pulled me into his embrace.

When I moved across the floor, I saw my hair drifting softly to the ground behind me like petals from the hand of a flower girl, announcing the entrance of a bride. Death had come for me. He whispered something about destiny. But as I stared into his eyes, I had to turn away. For I could not give him my heart. That belonged already to my husband and our two children. I had already decided in the hospital, while attached to machines through my heart, that I would live, for their sake. The bone marrow in my body had responded to my decision, and somehow started making blood again. About a week before, it had shut down that vital production. I was dying. Relatives had already begun arguing about tombstones and where I was to be buried.

Looking back, I’m sure now that nutrition was largely responsible for my miraculous recovery. Though we all did thank God, whoever and wherever he, she, or it, may be. Vitamins, minerals, and fats began being administered via TPN, with a port like a dagger, that was stuck straight into my heart. My bone marrow resumed blood production after one week of TPN. That’s what had saved me the first time. Now here I was, a few months later, far away from any hospital, bedridden in the back room of a small stucco home, still in the commune, with my relentless suitor still refusing to leave my side. But, like they say, it takes two to tango … and I had already given him too much.

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CHAPTER 2

In the Beginning

Light cascaded down the leaves of trees overhead, caught in their branches, twinkling like stars heralding a universe of their own. The rays that slipped down past the canopy of tree limbs seemed to create some cosmic portal to a secret dimension of lush shadows and sparkling light before continuing to slide down through the fresh air, where they burst into a luminescent mist sprinkling the stream below. Landing on the ripples there, they broke into a dance upon the surface of the water. Trees grew too thick for grass to cover the banks here.

A carpet of leaves fallen in past seasons took its place, thick enough to sink in ankle deep. Grass did show up in islands, adding green to the hues of gold, orange, and brown that covered the forest floor. But most impressive in abundance and splendor were the thick clusters of white Easter lilies, putting to shame Solomon and all his glory as they flaunted their white gowns enthroned each upon a thick verdant stem of green.

This land is my father’s. It has been in his family since 1840, before the Civil War. Did some ancestor plant these flowers deep in the woods? Or are we just blessed with the rare occasion of experiencing the personality of God, as He, She, or It simply endorses nature to create this poetry in our midst? Whatever the case, I loved this place. It was mine. I found it on one of my many tromps through the woods. A stealthy trip to my father’s shed placed a machete in my hand and untold adventures at my fingertips. A she-warrior, I would carve my way through the woods to discover lands and build kingdoms. This one I found already built for me, and it became my fortress from which to rule. After all, I was a princess here.

My name made me sound like I was the land itself: Prairie. All I needed now were my two sisters to join me. There was Breeze. She was four years younger than me. Then there was Meadow, being four years younger than her. My youngest sibling and long-awaited prince heir to the family name, River Jr., had not yet come into our midst in the early days of this kingdom. As a span of eleven years did lie between us, his youth did forbid his journey with us for a long time to come.

This land is your land … this land is my land … from California to the New York Islands … this land was made for you and me … la, la, la, la … la … this land was made for you and me. I hummed along to the songs in my head. The blue plastic baby pool creaked beneath my feet. A long, slender holly branch rendered me a staff with which I guided our vessel like a boat through the watery streets of Venice. As I plunged the staff through the moving waters of the stream, it failed to reach the sandy bottom below in only a few pooling spots. The plunk of it rung in my ears, resonating with the song’s playing there. The water ran cool this time of the year. Not like the other times when it ran fresh and pleasant through the middle of summer, carrying me as captain of our baby blue baby pool, coaxing my siblings along as the crew. They made a spunky little crew the lot of them, for they weren’t always convinced of the venture in its initial stages. But once a successful voyage from the small pond starting point had been made downstream in safety, then the journeys began regularly. The following voyages were met with eager anticipation. Our round boat would spin us down and around that path of pooling waters we’d discovered rushing through our property. The stream’s origin was unknown to us. It was seasonal, passed under a section of our dirt driveway through culverts, continued to a distant end beyond us, and was referred to by us as the branch.

Branch in hand, we would branch our way down that branch in our toy boat that doubled as our baby pool while living out there in the boondocks of Haze County. The cool water felt good on those hot summer days, about twenty some miles inland from the coast, deep in the South. The thick forest drank in the cool waters and was as refreshed as we were by its course through the acres of woods and farmlands around us. A cool blanket of shade lay under the canopy of woodlands housing the branch waters as they literally ran during spring, frolicked through the summer, trounced through fall, and boogied their way to a slow groove near the end of autumn, and even froze over sometimes in the still of winter.

1969

The summer of love sent a heat wave over the American soil, hurtling its way through a little southern town located near a black water river the local Native American tribes had named. It stopped in the name of love among the tobacco fields of farm country in Smalltown, and it bestowed mercy upon my father as he fell in love with my mother. They met in the days of their youth while working in those fields, and oddly enough, it was the fruit of their love that ended up miraculously saving him from being sent to Vietnam. He was drafted into the war being fought over there, but my mother was pregnant with me, and a pretty young girl handling army paperwork wanted to help. We think she misplaced his file. The newlyweds, having recently eloped, were consequently granted freedom from the draft and the looming military service of young River Heart, my father, thereby ensuring the lineage of the Heart bloodline. A family was launched, and I was the first new member aboard. We set sail in the seventies, and soon afterward, the captain and his wife took bona fide disco lessons and wore out a vinyl album with John Travolta on the cover and the Bee Gees churning out the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever. We then discoed our way toward the eighties, which for me, only turned out to be a whole decade of bad hair. But it was within the soft touch of the seventies that I rode out this particular baby pool journey downstream.

On the end of my turtleneck’s zipper hung a big metal ring. It dangled from the top of my striped turtleneck, poised over my heart. It hung suspended there for only a moment, and then it suddenly swung like a pendulum, embodying some sort of symbol, the circle of life. For everything, there is a season. A time for everything under the sun; under heaven. The white lilies of Easter were only a memory now, but one so sweet, I could almost smell them even in their absence upon the sight of their silently reverent grassy knolls. Golden yellow, amber brown, and crimson red leaves swirled as they floated alongside my summer pool/boat. Some leaves, lingering upon their last touch with their tree branch, danced their final shake down in the wind before letting go of life and limb, to begin spinning and whirling their way down through the air speared with shafts of light, to finally relax into the touch of the water below. Like a kiss, each one held the wet embrace of the water’s surface and shimmered in the afternoon sunset.

I have to go in before dark. This will have to be the only voyage downstream today. The sides of the baby pool wobbled back and forth as the bottom of the pool caught the bottom of the stream bank. Along the edge grew some slender trees at the spot near my journey’s end. I leaned forward to hoist myself up and out of my little boat by means of a sturdy sapling trunk. As my cowgirl boot tips sprung off the bottom of the pool, the aged brittle plastic cracked and broke … the jagged edges turning the baby pool into a toothed predator biting at my boot as my foot exited its mouth. Cold water rushed in, quickly filling up one side of the pool. Looking on the sunken ship from along the stream’s edge, I took in the closing of a chapter like the pool was taking in water.

In the aftermath of my farewell, I knelt forward to retrieve the remains of my memory maker and haul it back to the house. Alas, the water had made it too heavy for me. I turned and headed home alone.

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CHAPTER 3

Hospital Up North

Fate twittered her razor-sharp fingers. She poised herself above each budding and blooming life like a butterfly fluttering from flower to flower, ready to drink in their nectar and then course that brilliance through her wings. Flaunting their colors as her own, she drifts. She lifts off and again lights upon the blossoms of the earth.

I blink. My eyelashes move in slow motion, like in a dream. My sight struggles to emerge. I can see the sunlight caught in my lashes. It’s broken into kaleidoscopes in the prism created there. My eyelids were the only part of me that still found the strength to move. Perhaps this was the case merely because they are hinged upon the very window of my soul and could draw strength from that vantage point. Was this the eye of the storm … or the silence after … or the calm before? What was still to come?

Curiosity sent me daydreaming again. My thoughts turned to and fro, moving in different directions, like wheat when a billowing wind rushes through open fields. The wind beats harder, like my heart, thrashing the golden wheat against the earth in its path, lifting chaff into the air like confetti. Then the memories began to float in fragments around me. Each one catching the light, being illuminated but for a moment before being turned over in circles by the wind and spiraling off into shadow.

In this window of time, I felt no pain. The Demerol saw to that. My thoughts were interrupted. I could hear two nurses in the doorway speaking softly. She looks so bad, I could hear one of them say. The other agreed and commented upon the sadness of the situation.

They must think I am sleeping, I mused.

Their tones faltered as they spoke. They didn’t think I would live. This thought alighted upon my consciousness as softly as others, but it lingered to sip the nectar there. I wondered what it would be like to die. Somehow, I didn’t think I could. It sounds silly, but I didn’t know how. I had never done it before.

I remembered my son … my only son, and at the time, my only child. Payton had brought him to me on his first birthday, to let me see him. I couldn’t hold him because of all the tubes attached to my heart. They dangled like a sea anemone from the upper part of the right side of my chest. A port had been secured into the artery exiting my heart just below the collarbone. I asked my husband to hold our son’s robust one-year-old body near me so I could reach out and touch him.

He wriggled, wide-eyed at all the hospital machines. He was afraid. I don’t even think he recognized me. I had not seen him for two weeks. Since birth, he’d never left my side, until then. He’d been weaned abruptly at my departure to the hospital. Friends told me stories about how he cried and cried, and called for me, and would not be comforted. Cold rushed through me, a lot like when they’d shoot liquid medicine into the rubber-tipped tubes sticking out of my pincushion heart.

I watched my son in my husband’s arms as they both disappeared past metal double doors. I can still see them from behind, frozen in that moment: Payton, holding our clinging child, walking in movie like slow motion, as the two metal doors began closing lethargically behind them. My heart lay quiet in its chamber. In the stillness of its slothful passion, it throbbed in anguish over the loss of time that pierced it through. That dagger, sharper than the catheter inserted by that foreign doctor, sank its teeth into my hope and tried to drain it like a vampire. One son, one life, one chance … they were drifting away from me like a birthday balloon accidentally freed from the hands of an unsuspecting child. I could only reach out helplessly for them. They would see things I would not see. They would be places I would not be.

*     *     *

The mortar of night holds the day cemented into its fixed position. Bound together, they turn in circles like a millstone, grinding time into dust to be blown away in the wind. Gather the dust like manna in the morning—before it vanishes in the heat of the noonday sun. Pack it together like flour and bake it into loaves to be devoured by man. Man cannot live on bread alone. And if he presently eats cakes of time made from the harvested past, will it change inside him and enable him to spit out the future like bees do honey? Does history repeat itself because no one takes the time to chew it up, break it down, and digest it? Perhaps they have no appetite for it because they are already full from something else. Hunger … it smacks of mortality … ours.

We stopped to look into the mirror mounted on the wall between my bed and the bathroom. That is to say, me and my robot companion of medical machinery on wheels that accompanied me more faithfully than R2-D2 did Leia in a Star Wars film. It was attached by tubes into my heart, and thus, we were inseparable. And it being the means through which the life-sustaining vitamins and fats were being administered into my body, I even developed an affection of sorts for the little metal fella and gazed, for a time, upon it fondly.

The significance of our relationship became painfully obvious to me when my sister Meadow decided to bust me out of my hospital prison. She intended to free me by her own hand. Her plan was to detach me from my heartfelt machinery herself, and together we would flee the wretched confines of the hospital.

Needless to say, this plan was disagreeable to me, hence very short-lived. I objected. Clearly it would result in my almost immediate death as I would bleed out from the main artery exiting one side of my heart. I lingered, leaning on my little R2-D2 and fancied my hair in two side buns. The nurses had said that I could be a waif model now. The mirror said something more like the lead role in a vampire movie. My complexion was as white as a sheet, and my eyelids and lips were blue. Scary. I much prefer comedies.

On that note, Meadow’s plan of escape came back to mind. Apart from me instantly bleeding to death, it would be a pretty funny story to tell. Like the time we busted our cat out of the pound. I drove the getaway car while she slipped in unnoticed and bounded out again with our cat in hand. We sped away from the scene and reveled in our victory as our cat vomited into the back seat floorboard of our car all the way home. We found out only later that it was a federal offense to break an animal out of its penitentiary. I found this out when the head official from the pound showed up at my home threatening me with this regrettable news. He began grilling me for information about the missing cat and the empty cage door left open at the scene of the crime. I turned the questioning on him. I asked how sure he was he hadn’t left the cage door open on accident himself—and maybe he was guilty of losing our cat.

Our orange tabby cat, narrowly escaping from death row, had been sentenced to life in prison until execution, and for what crime? The crime had been nothing more than our neighbors not liking his, or our, existence. They had called the pound on him. We had been given the cat as a gift back when he was just a little kitten. We adored him and decided to name him Caleb. Caleb’s name was a Hebrew one, and unbeknownst to us at the time, it meant dog. He was a rusty orange tabby kitten with thick, long fur. He had an equally colorful disposition. An avid hunter, he ruled as king of the jungle in the subtropical terrain of our big backyard. He killed all the palmetto bugs he could find just for fun, and one time, he even slew a squirrel.

Meadow and I didn’t think it was right that he should die young for no just cause. We wouldn’t sit back and do nothing in the face of this injustice. We were always trying to buck the system and save the world. This was too good to pass up. Hence, I felt completely justified to be evasive with this animal cop. Whatever the situation still lacked from confrontation, I soon achieved from smooth technique and womanly charm as I led the gentleman into my art studio, which was at the time filled with oil paintings of mine, featuring mostly naked women. Men are so predictable. The charge was soon forgotten.

After spending some time ogling the artwork and engaging in discussion of the subject matter, he left. I exhaled a sigh of relief. The cat was playing in our backyard the whole time. Now really, a felony for aiding and abetting a cat? Go figure. Does the government not have enough to do, or what? C’mon now.

*     *     *

Night fell into my lap as the day and night wheel stone ground up one more day into cosmic dust. The sun went down into shadow one more time. I could feel the release of the darkness all around me, warm and quiet like the Demerol hitting my system, spreading throughout my body. It blurs things as it slows down the rush of the day and the rush of your blood all at the same time.

A male nurse was on duty at the beginning of the evening shift. This fellow had the job of searching my scrawny little buttocks in search of enough meat to sink his sharp needle into, through which he administered the Demerol. Demerol was, unfortunately, one of the few things they couldn’t inject into the rubber tubing with which I was plumbed through the heart. So, despite the port they had installed, they still had to stick my bottom with needles relentlessly … or at least that’s what they told me. My bottom became more of a pincushion than my heart. That, along with having men for nurses who constantly handled my private parts, made Demerol sound more and more like demoralizing. All in all, my nurse experiences in general made me wonder if they’re really getting paid enough to substantiate quality employees.

At that moment, the innocently cliché waft of cheap perfume came sailing down the hallway on its nightly voyage through the dark and hushed corridors of the hospital wing. This fragrant nurse had us all under her wing, as if she were some kind of mother bird nestling her young into her feathery bosom.

A chestnut-colored woman whose circumference displayed a lot more than a little junk in the trunk came rolling down those slick-floored tunnels pushing her wheeled table of blood collections and thermometers. She didn’t seem to mind the night shift. I’d give her a buzz if I couldn’t make it through the night on my first shot. I hardly slept, but when I did, I slept hard.

In a fit-torn coma, my body poured sweat, and thoughts flowed forth in the same fevered stream. River dreams are inevitable in this warm, wet state. Some of them childlike and beautiful … some foreboding, for the alligators were always somewhere out there with us. Time spent on the river … so much water under the bridge.

Time has flowed like a river downstream between now and then. Like the river, it cannot stop. It splashes its way out to sea. I’ve loved life on the river. I’ve viewed it up close from the wooden hulls of canoes and small fishing boats that place you and your bikini gliding only inches above the glassy reflection of the sky on the water’s surface. Ripples caused the trees to wave in approval as we would float downstream on parade.

Smalltown used to only be accessible by the river. In the 1700s, men danced on logs rolling in the black water as they guided freshly cut pine trees to the train tracks that awaited them at the river’s edge. The little engine that could carried them off to their destiny The train snaked its way through the lowlands toward paper and lumber mills in the distance. That was before the bridge came to town. I wasn’t alive then. But I am now … and I want to stay that way. I don’t want to die, not yet. I want to see the river up close again.

I can still see those sunsets making the skies blush like the night had done gone and said something forward and romantic to the day. In the hush that follows, the river brushes up softly against the flushed cheeks of the clouds. Day, though she resists at first, allows her last few strands of golden light to fall across her face at final sunset. Day gives in, seduced by the night, and light disappears as she rolls over toward his full embrace. The moon comes over the river, shining like a silver beacon. It’s hanging from the sky like a charmed pocket watch in a hypnosis session. Time is ticking. I watch the clock on the hospital wall. Morning will come soon, and maybe that short-haired nurse will take me outside again today when she goes to smoke cigarettes on her break. I love it outside.

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CHAPTER 4

Smalltown (Post-Commune)

Raindrops scat across the pavement. Defying gravity but for a moment with their splash, as they impact with their destiny. Then, as the momentum of their arrival clings to their scattered remains, inertia plays its whims upon their retreat into the earth, causing them to skate away in circles. They have fallen from such a height. Racing down from the heavens to meet their end. Hitting the pavement with their tiny fists in rapid succession, they pound the planet with their passion spent. They weep for all that is lost. The raindrops stand in for my tears. I do not have to cry; the sky does it for me. The window blurs beneath the fury of their dance, and the landscape melts into a dream of a landscape. The clouds are sobbing now.

There is a time and place for everything under the sun. Selah: pause and consider. There is nothing that speaks hope quite like a ray of sunshine as it turns the corner of your eye and whispers something to your soul. Echoing down the shaft between the two, it wakes the slumber of the will. Like dawn in the sky, it need not explain the night as it heralds the coming of the new day. Fresh and innocent, it is born from the ashes like a phoenix. It sings an ancient song that we all remember.

You know what it’s like to remember. A memory spreads its wings across your sky and captivates you with its notions. It lures you in with its colors and sounds that hum something familiar to you, to let you know that it knows you. You hear it in the alleyway of your thoughts, near the back door of your private proverbial garden, where you keep things growing. It’s where ideas are planted and kept alive by your own nurturing. The good and the bad, the weeds and the flowers … they are all there, whether you sowed the seed or ’twas the hand of another. Time embraces their presence there. Search longingly among those blossoms for the sweet essence of budding fruit. What is it to be sustained? What is the breath of life? Linger in the garden, any garden. I do. I hold the tender shoots near my lips as they exhale the oxygen they exchange so freely with me. We both draw breath. I ponder such matters in my garden as memories flutter like butterflies around lantana in the sun.

Vastness lies within human beings. The moon sinks deep into the corridors of an embrace with earth, locked into motion by an ancient dance we so commonly refer to as orbit, and night is spawned. The universe ticks like the clock inside each of us. It measures time by our heartbeats. Time hooks us through the heart, and strings us up onto a single thread in history. Upon that thread, we can see the fabric of our destinies woven before our very eyes. The soul resides within the spirit, much like the center of a flower resides within its petals. Though separate entities, they are seen as one. They function as one. Separated, they become something altogether different. Centers without petals, or vice versa, aren’t flowers. Many flowers are blossoms heralding fruit. Such is the power of the flower, a legacy of beauty, and sustenance. A godsend to those who are hungry. What is it to be sustained, to be nourished in this famine of tenderness? Starving like wolves in the shadows, we prowl to have our hunger slaked.

If only we could get our strength from flowers and fruits alone and not the bloody flesh of our prey, we could be beautiful. Perhaps then we would no longer be haunted by our mortality or driven by our emptiness. Yet still, sometimes in packs, and sometimes alone, we stalk, we hunt, stopping now and then to lift our heads and howl at the moon, above our gardens, in the night.

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CHAPTER 5

Smalltown (Pre-Commune)

I run my fingers through the starlight. Romanced by the twilight, I am entranced by of the passing of another day. Dust dances in its trail. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, we are both coming down.

Oh, what hour is this? The changing of one day into another. Shadows move their velvety hands over the beams of light that hang like wind chimes in the air. They cast a spell over the fleeting moments when the sun and moon are seen together in the sky but for the length of a pause in a dance. Havdalah … ancient Hebrew referring to that time between the night of one day, and the dawn of another. Where are you now, Havdalah? Burning away like manna in the noonday sun? The gentle morning breeze is your soft breath against the cheek of the day to come. Selah, as spoken in the Hebrew tongue … take a moment to pause and consider.

And so, two worlds collided like the night air against the morning breeze. A new age of soul-searching is ushered in upon their dew. Is it a sign from God? Is dew on the fleece and not on the ground? Is it on the ground and not on the fleece? Should we go up against the Midianites or hide in the winepress? Is the battle being given into our hands—or are we being given into the hand of our enemy?

Soul-searching had begun, that groping, grasping, desperately seeking for answers. Meanwhile, some don’t even hear the questions. But I do. I cannot escape them. They haunt me like ghosts that never die. They echo in the stillness of the night. They hide around every corner of the day. They lurk in every alley. They flash in the light reflected on the water. They linger in the eyes of every child. They call to me. And I have no answers to give them.

In all my searching I have found nothing that can quench their fire. They burn in my brain, only to melt into a puddle in my heart. There, they smolder and smother me like molten lava. I’m a volcano waiting to erupt emotions at any time. And so, it was one day in particular, late in a sultry southern summer. I felt the pull of the entire universe, dormant and empty, crying out for a reason. Why has life seemed to have so carelessly abandoned me and left me lost, wandering through this endless chamber of caves and chasms? I dug my hands into the earth that was finally cooling from summer’s torpor in my little aristocratic backyard. A yard that had formerly been pampered by Payton’s two old maid aunts, who’d left part of their house to my husband.

I held out my fistfuls of this planet toward the sky so indifferently blue and shook them at my creator. I hoped he was looking down at me at that moment. I hoped I was getting his attention. Assuming that he was taking notice, I cried out to him in a voice loud enough to release some lava—but restrained enough not to alarm my quick-to-judge Smalltown neighbors. I begged God, saying, Where exactly are you! What exactly are you doing? Can’t you see that we, I, need you? What in the hell is holding you up from coming to the rescue?

The lava pooled up. It became too heavy. My heart sank from the weight. I was one with the universe, and by that, I mean equally as abandoned by God. Thus began the saga of a pilgrimage … one that consumed a decade.

God must have been listening. That same day, some unexpected but sorely needed money showed up in the mail. It was the last remains of a job my husband had lost a year earlier, an unforeseen refund of some sort. Coincidence? Maybe, but I can’t say that about the timing of its arrival. That, at least, smacked of providence. And I devoured the idea of that providence. I hoped against hope that there was someone greater than all this crazy tragedy down here who could do something to help. I hoped again that he even wanted to help. Was he now responding to my backyard drama?

I flirted with the idea of such an exchange as if trying to coax it closer to me. If I batted my eyes and held my chin just right, would he love me? And more importantly to me at the time, would he help me? So many times, I had turned to look over my shoulder when the wind rushed past me, wondering if he could see me looking. Countless moments, I paused to imagine his angels escorting me like southern gentlemen used to be known to do. Perhaps the angels even helped drive me home a few teenage nights when curfew loomed over my drunken head like an albatross shot through the belly before it plunges into the murky sea. Perhaps they scurried like stunned sailors trying