Strength/Insignificance

Wherein I blame my mother for everything.

My mom worked a lot when I was young. Like, a lot. Like, two or three jobs, and put herself through school — undergrad and master’s. Did I mention she was single? Yeah. That too.

This could make a kid feel pretty damn neglected, but somehow (not through her own family, I can tell you that) she understood that it was the quality, rather than the quality of time, that ultimately mattered. So, among other things, every night, usually twice, we would walk the dog. Not just a quick out to pee, but an hour or more, each time. And not just in silence — she would point out the subtle changes as the seasons wheeled by, the way the leaves would flip over before it rained, how a ring would form around the moon before it snowed. We’d scan the ground looking for wheat pennies as she told me about how chlorophyl was involved with the changing colors of leaves during the fall.

Anyway. The point is that I grew up looking at things, searching for meaning and patterns and things that didn’t quite fit. (Which has made me, let’s say, difficult? In employment situations? But that’s a topic for another day.)

There’s one particular thing that I would look at when I went walking. They were everywhere, probably, but I particularly remember them near my grandmother’s house. A sidenote here: my grandmother’s house was a bizarre combination of love, silence, and something unspoken that I could never name. Now, I recognize it as the heaviness of secrets.