A series of essays….
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FOR JUST A FEW MOMENTS IN TIME SHE IS FEELING INTENSELY AGAIN AS WHEN SHE WERE YOUNG… |
….as seen through my eyes!
By: Jacqueline E Hughes
Settling comfortably into the plush velvet chair, remarkably the exact shade of blue as his eyes, she is offered something to drink. Her playful personality wants to ask for a gin & tonic, but she settles for a glass of water and prepares for the long afternoon.
Lately, her simple pleasure has been looking back into the past and knowing that the present represents the culmination of everyone and everything she has come to know and care about. She contends that the stabilizer of life’s many chapters is the love interwoven within the interesting years between.
She has skipped, hopped, and wobbled through the early years like a flat stone tossed across the surface of a calm lake only to sink below its depths, each time, after the momentum had vanished. These are the years between, marking numerous pink, glittery birthday parties, visits to her grandparent’s farm when she helped to gather fresh eggs from the henhouse with grandma, baton and ballet lessons, and building snow forts with her cousins on blustery January afternoons.
The years between were a progression of choreographed moves from one city to another, attempting to balance school, friendships, and family life while growing-up in a time froth with discussions about when will we have to move again and coupled with the daunting possibility of nuclear war! A time when poodle skirts, saddle shoes, and choo choo bags were fashion icons along with pegged pants, copious amounts of hair gel, and going to the nearest music store to pick out a new ‘single’ to be played on the red and white, 45 rpm record player in her current rental bedroom.
Growing into her high school days generously stretched out between post-game dances, which teachers and classes she enjoyed the most, and whether to try-out for the school play. These years, among her most vulnerable, played forward with the velocity of a high-speed train, marking summer flirtations with boys from Latvia who acquired various kinds of alcohol from mysterious sources and learning, first hand, when the fun stopped and life became, inordinately, real. These were the true learning curves she needed in order to catalog life in accurate terms while taking deep breaths and counting to ten.
As suddenly as the arrival of a pounding Floridian storm, her life changed forever. Her sophomore year at State is when their eyes met for the very first time. How simple it was to sink into their watery depths, never wanting to come-up for air or mortal sustenance. Falling in love and being loved became—breathtaking! Campus sparkled even on a cloudy day and navigating through classes and a work-study program was soothing and agreeable as long as their lives were intertwined; their nights and weekends were spent together.
The years between then and now gave both of them purpose—after all, creating a new family will do that for you. Life itself changed day-by-day with its crazy roller coaster ride of twists and turns: getting children to school on time, taking the amazing opportunity to build a new home at twenty-five years old, losing one job only to find a better one, often living paycheck to paycheck, attending dance recitals, and watching parents grow older and then passing at such early ages, and empty nesting early enough to, practically, begin it all over again, but with grandchildren this go around.
The man and the woman lived, laughed, and loved through their pain and sorrow, as many people do. She always reasoned that it is how you learn to adjust to all of those years between that makes you better, makes you stronger, and gives you the will to carry-on. Knowing that when you look into those remarkable blue eyes, day after day, year after year, and still feel their power drawing at the heartstrings while creating new music every time, you’ve lived a very special life. She never doubted this for a moment.
They had always made a good team. Growing old together was their game plan. Being well into their eighties did not seem to slow them down a bit and their strategy for the next ten years was to keep their shoulders back, maintain a steady pace, and live each day as if it were the last; until it is the last…
Now, as she sits in the soft, comfortable chair and falls under the spell of all of the years between; a melancholic trance swoops over her in which she becomes absorbed in vivid sensory details—teardrops skittering down gentle faces, tall figures dressed in dark colors swaying in the large room, small seeds from a lemon slice swirling in her water glass—briefly soaking in the complex experience of being alive. Allowing her mind to wander, she enjoys the ride, allowing herself to differentiate between the ordinary and the epic: pages pulled from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.*
For just a few moments in time she is feeling intensely again as when she were young; when his deep blue eyes gazed upon the young woman who was to become his wife, mother of his children, and life partner until death do they part.
*Thoughts Inspired by The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig.
Copyright © 2022 by Jacqueline E Hughes
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