material things & esoteric dreams

i am still out here, still working on my place, ahem, my home. i am gradually going through everything and bringing some things back with me from my daughter's garage.

all this stuff, these material things that were mine, are mine, are now being sorted through as if i died, or am dying.

"don't need that anymore." "do you want this? no? then toss it." "put this in the box to donate."

holding something close, studying it; something that used to bring me such joy and fill my previous home with the common clutter that we fill our lives with, weighing it's importance now that i no longer have the space. it is a difficult thing to do. sorting through the debris of my life and seeing it from this side of my husband's death. i feel as if we are getting things settled before i die, doing this sorting of who gets what so that it won't be hard when i am gone.

my daughter is taking a lot. we are setting off in a corner all the things we know my son {her brother} will want. and i am filling my little car, Midnight, each trip with things to bring back here ~ back home......

like my piano shawl. have i ever mentioned that i used to play piano? i started lessons when i was 4. by the time i was 6 i was pretty good. by the time i was 8 i was competing. at 11 i was entered in the Van Cliburn Competition. that was a long time ago, a lifetime. my teacher gave me the shawl then. it was an antique back then. it is more so now. very old. beautiful.

i sat in my old chair and held it around me tonight while i listened to Beethoven's 7th, the 2nd movement. a beautiful piece i learned to play when my hands could barely make the octave spread. i was never without a piano until the divorce. i sold it to pay for things my children needed. it was an old studio piano of blond maple. my mother bought it second hand in 1961 when i first started playing. i sold it in 2002 for $100 that i desperately needed to keep the phone on after V. refused child support for a while. it killed me then. it is a hauntingly ugly scar now. i miss my piano.

i miss my Dragon. i remember him going to the church in Rockport to talk to the priest to see if i could be allowed a couple of days during the week to stay after morning Mass and Rosary to play the piano there. he was so happy to have gotten the okay. he and i would walk to church for Mass, and then we'd stay and i would get to re-visit a past that had once been my own. i got to close my eyes and play for my own soul the music that has always haunted me. classical. mostly Beethoven, JS Bach, GF Handel, and other more deeply spiritual composers. music moves me. i played the scores that seemed to reach for something no one could ever have imagined without that music to take them there.

looking at all my material things that i am going through, getting back, i find myself more somber. i am so relieved, humbly so, but i am also wistful and melancholy over all the dreams that no one but my children and my Dragon shared with me. there is no one in my life anymore, besides my daughter and son, who knows me. there is more to me than my sewing, my writing, the work i do for others, and my grief. i am a woman of depth that no one really takes the time to get to know.

i do have my Marlene Dietrich friend, and she is lovely to know, but she does not live close so we have never met.

i have a widow who lives fairly close, and we have lunched, but my work schedule, and tight budget for things like that, keep me a little on the humble side. i do not talk as much about myself as i probably could, or should try to. i am so afraid they will abandon me as others have if i talk too much, say what's on my mind.

i am a wuss.

no one ever knew me but my children and him. oh, God, i miss him so much tonight.

would that i could play for you. i guess my writing is a form of music. silent lyrics to feed my own needs, to echo through time to announce that i was once here. i am leaving a legacy of lyrics behind that can never be put to music.

some dreams do not come true. some were never meant to. the difficult journey in accepting that carves away at me,

but,

i am so very blessed that once upon a time,

i did dream.