sunsets...and other things

When I was young, my parents' house backed up to a church...actually, our backyard butted up against the church parking lot, a huge expanse in my young mind back then. As I grew older, and then became an adult, it amazed me how much smaller it all became. But back then, it was part of my world. Especially in the summers. At the end of the parking lot, before the houses and the backyards of those houses began, there was a ditch. I guess it was a sort of a rainwater ditch of sorts. It's almost hard for my mind to comprehend what it really was now. Maybe it wasn't even that "deep", in inches. But when I was a child of say 10 years old, i don't know, maybe 9, maybe 11...it was a fantasy land. All of us neighborhood children...and with my younger brother and I, our group was comprised of about 8 or 9 kids...would use that "ditch" and fashion a summer world around it that kept us busy for most of the daylight hours every summer. I'm sure our parents were thrilled it was there. Not that they ever really knew where we were. Back then, you could leave your house at 8:00 a.m. after breakfast, and not return until 6:00 when dinner was served...and you were never in trouble. Wow, what a life. I always felt like I was a world away from my house. When in reality, the "ditch" was just at the farthest edge of my backyard. Oooooh, such mystery.

The scenarios we created were so complex to us back then. We actually formed "families"... someone was the wife, someone was the husband, and the younger ones had to be our children. We had dolls that stood in for the babies, strollers that we used while strolling through the church parking lot, or down the neighborhood sidewalks. Yes, we played all the appropriate roles...mother, father, child. Right down to the mothers yelling at the fathers for not doing this right, or not doing something to our liking. Oh...wait. That wasn't the role of that generation, now was it? No. For some reason, us females of the group took advantage of our situation to dole out what in my mind now seems to be what we may have felt our mothers really would have liked to dole out to our fathers. Some well-deserved shit for the crap that our fathers dealt them. Some retribution for the way they were being treated, walked upon, shunned, ignored. Did we, as the young daughters, really see it that way back then? I don't mean to be dramatic here, but to be honest with you, I'm looking at it all right now with sort of renewed open eyes. Maybe we were trying to do what our mothers were unable to do. Maybe we decided to treat the males of our group like shit because we saw the shit that our fathers were doling out to our mothers. Hmmmm...I didn't start this post to come to this realization, but somehow I've arrived here. Excuse me while I sort of take all this in.

Actually, I sort of started this post to address something totally different. How I got so far off the subject, I'm not sure. I haven't "visited" that time in my life for quite a while. It brings back so many memories. Strange mixes of memories really. Memories of my mother, who was a stay-at-home mom and was always there...always the one who made cookies, had Kool-Aid for all the neighborhood kids, provided the Band-aids when needed, called the other mothers when there was a need. Yes, most of the summer activity centered around my backyard. Geez, how lucky was I to have that happen to me??? I never realized how cool that was. Back then I was just a skinny, shy little girl who kept to herself, her books, her best neighborhood girlfriend, and hoped that no one would call upon me to do anything out of the norm. Boy, did I ever change. My mother said that it was my eighth grade year in junior high...something happened to me. I know what happened. I made friends. People actually decided that they liked me, that I was nice, that I was fun. I branched out, became "sociable", started wearing makeup, wore my hair differently, dressed differently, hung out with people who weren't total dweebs. (I'm not even sure we had that word back then.)

It's funny, because if I hadn't made that change in eighth grade, I could have been that shy, reclusive girl for the rest of my life. Eeesshhhh!! That sounds horrible. As it turned out, I made lots and lots of friends. People turned to me for advice, to be a sounding board, to be a friend. I made friends with people from a variety of different "cliques" in our school...not an easy task. I'm sure that this "talent" carried with me into adulthood, and allowed me to excel in certain areas in my career. Looking back, I can't measure the importance of how that change in my life affected the rest of my life after that.

My god, where did I start with all this? I have to laugh, because it had nothing to do with where I went! It actually had to do with sunsets. Yes, sunsets. And the reason I mentioned the church in our "backyard" when I was young, was that I used to go sit at the top of this long staircase in the back of the church building and watch the sun as it set. There was no one left at the church building in the evening usually when this would happen, and I was alone to watch the sunset by myself. It was then that I grew to love the sky, the clouds, the sun as it sank lower and lower into the horizon. I can think back to how it felt to sit on the concrete steps of that staircase, what it sounded like as the traffic went by on the side street, how my butt started to go numb because I would sit in one spot for so long and not move. But what I remember most is how the clouds would scatter through the sky...how on different nights, when the wind was different, how the clouds would streak into feathered patterns, into puff balls...how the colors would change from oranges and peaches, to lavenders and purples, and then into deeper purple colors, and how the eastern sky would almost turn a gray-purple color before it began to go dark. I found it hard to tear myself away from it all, and when I finally did, I would get home and my mother would scold me for being late and it being dark and I should have "been in" before then.

Okay, okay...i really started all this because of a sunset I saw two nights ago. Took me a while to get to it, didn't it?? I was having a very quiet evening, contemplating even turning in extremely early to bed, when I saw orange streaks staining my living room walls. I looked out my windows, and saw color like you wouldn't believe. As I walked out to my deck, the sky was strewn with hues of orange, purple, blue and white...it was a snapshot, like looking at some calendar photo someone had taken. But it was evolving, moving, changing with each minute. And the wind was high in the sky, so the clouds were being blown in streaks, almost creating a wall with feathered edges. It was incredible. I stood there, fixated, watching it all happen. Unbelievably, I didn't think to grab my camera. These images were to just be saved in my memory. But as I stood there, unable to move, unable to go inside and stop watching, i realized that tears had welled up in my eyes and were beginning to run down my cheeks. This amazing vision had brought me to tears...and i couldn't remember a sunrise or a sunset that had done so since my mother had passed away. It gripped my heart, damn, my whole being and just held onto me. I could hardly draw a breath. And then within minutes, it began to subside...as the light began to fade, as the sun dropped to the horizon, and the sky filled with darkness, night fell.

Why was I compelled to write about all this? I had the chance to look through a myriad of photos a friend of mine posted through Flicker on his blog. My friend travels a huge amount of time on business, but those travels have also afforded him opportunities to visit and partake of some beautiful places and do incredible things. In those photos, aah, such images he has captured! My eyes are jealous, my soul wishes to see. The beauty he has been given chance to have a table at is amazing. And in viewing these images, his visions captured by film, I wonder what more I can capture for myself. Without risk, without chance, nothing more can be achieved, right? It is only by striking out, by taking advantage of possibilities, of chances once thought impossible but then perhaps thought possible, we can achieve that which is incredible. I need some incredible, I need some amazing. I need to figure out how to take chances, assume risks, without totally screwing up what I now have. That is the rue, is it not?? How to figure out how to do all that and not lose what we have built up so far. My, my....stepping out on that rock, looking out over that cliff--whoa, that's the hard part.

I'm not what the "answer" to all this is...it's never that easy, never that neat and clean and defined. But I seem to be at a point in my life where I need to look somewhat beyond the beaten path that I usually tread on. Not sure how to do it, or how far to look, but maybe that will become apparent to me if I can begin to open up, watch for possibilities, take some chances, assume some risks. All while still holding on to what I now have! ;) Yeah, that's the ticket! LOL Stay tuned......

Take care, all you souls out there, and keep on breathin'!

Daffodil