A Memory of Music (in Motion)

    

When I was young, 

  the dancing was done

in halls with wooden floors.

In lines and squares, circles

and pairs, the caller was king,

the fiddles could sing and joy

drove the miseries away.

 

~ MAY YOU FIND JOY AND DANCE IN THIS NEW YEAR TO COME ~

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!  

 

 

 

 

   

SUMMER 2022: War and Women

 REMEMBER HER FACE

            What do you see in her gaze? 
Apprehension.  Fear.  Vigilance. 
A woman watching the sky.  Watchful for
planes, great streams of fire,
gathering storm clouds of war.

  

This is how it feels to be a woman in 2022.  We are alone and betrayed by our cultures and societies.  What once was legal -- the right to decide on healthcare and pregnancy -- is now kicked down to the states where abortion may be gleefully outlawed.  Women and medical personnel can be considered criminals for claiming basic healthcare, well-being and respectful decisions about our own bodies. 

It's political.  It's damning.  It's a way to take away women's power.  In this country where we have No universal healthcare, No universal childcare, No guaranteed right of maternal leave after delivery, limiting abortion is basically cruel and stupid -- and deliberately designed to hamstring the freedoms and personal progress of women as equal citizens.  Equal in the "eyes of the law".                                          

 

What's next?  Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is on a vendetta to make contraception illegal. Same-sex marriage illegal.   And who knows what else.             

 

I was a young adult woman before Roe vs. Wade was accepted as law.  Women's choices and sexual behaviors were met with shame, scorn and contempt.  Young women could be disowned by their families.  Some kept their pregnancies secret and gave up their child to adoption.  Some married, successfully or not.  Some sought out illegal abortions.  Some were treated by a "family friendly" physician in a private hospital, a practice I would expect will continue on for those men with power and money.

                   

And the men -- what about the men who are the other half of this equation.  What will you do now?  What did you do then, before?   Did you use contraception?  Did you disappear?  Say:  "Not mine".                                          

 

What is lost in our culture is simple care.  Every decision taken by a woman to carry a pregnancy is complex, laden with emotion and carries consequences -- welcomed or not --for life.   

 

It is not up to Congress or the deliberately skewed Supreme Court to take away liberties already granted.  We, the majority of people in this country who support choice, must stand up to those self-righteous bullies and remove them from office and power now, not in ten or twenty years.

                     

Sometime, someone you know may need a choice.  Where will you stand?

 

~

Note:  The statue used in this entry is in the Zahm Courtyard at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH.  The artist is English sculptor Thomas Bayliss Huxtable-Jones.  It was a gift of the Class of 1943 in memory of their classmates who died in World War II.                 

 

ACT THREE

It's the first day of Spring and I welcome the promise of change in the air.  Our New Hampshire landscape is fresh, running with the water of melting snow and ice.  I walked our road in an early morning chill with mist still covering the beaver pond and the patches of lingering snow at the end of the field. 

What a long and complicated journey since my last blog entry in 2019.  I am not the same woman I was back then.  In fact, there are times when I don't recognize myself now -- older, grey-haired, solemn, curt.  I have no patience with cruelty, deliberate ignorance and division simply out of spite.

This, after three years of man-made horrors and the constant attacks on freedom, compassion and respect for diversity across the world -- and then, the scars of Covid-19, a pandemic turned to political theater, panic and grief.  And now, we face Russia's attack on Ukraine. 

Change and transition. Fear and despair.  The seasons shift and here we are in Spring, a time of hope and wonder, yet we hold our collective breath.  World War III?

Change and transitions and loss.  As I said, it's a long and complicated road we travel moving through light and dark and back to the light, shadows to our right, flames to our left.

Here's a poem I wrote in early 2020.  My mother had just moved to a nursing-rehabilitation facility, her "new home".  But Covid-19 was on the move, too.  March 12, 2020, the center closed to in-person visits.  My mother died a year later. 

 

In March, I last kissed your soft cheek

squeezed your hand,

tucked the quilt about your frail body.

 

Yet all the while, the chill winds blew

fever and fear under the doors

and into the cracks of our lives.

 

Thick glass walls rose up between us.

I watched your eyes meet mine,

steady with grit and shared courage.

 

I smiled and waved,

then looked back --

one last time. 

 

_________