Mother and Disorderly Child - Page 2

She sat up, holding her legs to her chest. She rocked, agitated, the muscles tensed around her eyes. She watched intently as the clouds rolled over each other, her lips moved with no sound. She was speaking with, not to, the impending energies. Her hands clenched and unclenched, an attempt to wait patiently. She didn't reach to grasp, she waited. But it was not a grasp she anticipated. It was an embrace.

A first gust gently lifted her face and fluttered her eyes. A stronger gust brought her breath then took it away, wrapping her in weightlessness. Her long blonde hair whipped around her throat and shoulders. Her expression became rested and peaceful. She was warmed as if by fire. She was comforted as if by the quilting weight of the wind. The rain was pelting but infrequent. I brought our blanket, soft on one side and plastic on the other, and we huddled as if shelter did not sit but thirty feet away. Cracks of thunder leaned her head against my shoulder and her face remained deliberately unshielded. As so often before in the olden days of her new youth her eyes danced from light to light, her body shivered and trembled as if absorbing the ions whirling through the air. She let the driving rain close her eyes, making her use her other senses to see the storm.

She moaned and sighed a language all her own, a gift from the sky when she was just five hours old. The storm raged overhead. She cooed and the clouds rumbled. She sighed and the lightning careened across the sky. She moaned and the thunder responded in kind. I witnessed two living, breathing, moving energies composing what few had ever felt, what no other understood. She believes in the god of the sky. She believes she came from the clouds. She yearns to be home and is soothed only when her family comes to visit. They stayed long and she slept into the night, huddled by her earthly mother and our blanket tent.

With our last move to my family's home country of Germany, she has discovered a culture of age and history. She is in awe of things that, unlike herself, have been in one place for hundreds and thousands of years but that have, like her, weathered many storms. Her walks along ancient streets are deliberate and decisive. She touches aged structures with the flat of her hand and holds it there, staring intently. For several minutes she is uncharacteristically still as if there is an exchange of energy, she feeding it aliveness, it feeding her stability.

Article Author: Diana Hartman

Diana Hartman is a (ret.) USMC spouse, mother of three in college and a Wichita, Kansas native. She is a contributing writer to Holiday Writes and can be found on Twitter.

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