Shorts – Page 3 – Picking Up Roots

Carrying On

A thousand pinpricks of water punished his skin in the best way. Each drop growing into its own small river that traced an exploratory track down his body; soothing the aches of the road.

After a week of long hours in the car, sterile hotel rooms with their spineless beds, and days spent in all-consuming labor, shoring up the base of the company, this was necessary. Not for the first time, he stood beneath the spray of the shower and wondered why he kept on going.

It wasn’t the money that kept him tearing himself away from the home he loved – his family, his friends – every few weeks. The money wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t the driver.

Passion was a loaded word. The work was good. It wasn’t made up of empty consumptive calories. He believed in it, but passion? Passion invoked fire and he didn’t know that he felt a ‘fire.’ It was worthy, but lighting a fire? He hated the question. He wasn’t on fire about anything. He wasn’t apathetic either. He just was.

As the water wrapped warm fingers around his body, his mind alit on friendship and people. After 25 years, he had a great many deep friendships within the company. People who’d gone to bat for him over the years or shown up when he was reeling.

And then there were the new folks, the ones just starting out, who needed a kind word or guidance on which path to take in the ever-more corporate and sterile ways of the company. That’s why he kept answering the calls. He owed it to the people who’d helped him and those who were new, who deserved better.

All that was well and good, but his body was weary in the bones. The water had soothed, but now he began to think of the comfort of his bed.

Drying himself off he wondered how much longer he’d be able to keep doing this; throwing everything he had into the ever-widening breaches created by the broken corporate culture.

As his head hit the pillow, he tried to remember back to the point where it broke. Before he could close in on the time, his mind drifted to sleep.

Leaps

Next to the baseball field two young boys climbed the rickety chain link fence of the backstop where it met the third base dugout. They were all scrawny arms and legs as they made their way from the fence to the roof of the dugout.

Their unbroken voices peeled up the road as they dared one another to leap the eight feet to the ground below. The taller of the two neared the edge. An uncertain foot found the air…

I found myself aching with envy at their freedom. All I could think of was the way my middle-aged bones would rattle within me if I were to take that leap. These days it seemed all I did was worry.

I worried about the world. The fragile bonds holding us together seemed to be fraying by the minute. I worried about my work, whether I’d be the next one on the chopping block; secretly hoping it would be someone else, then worrying I was a bad person for having those thoughts.

I worried after myself. Was I healthy? Would I remain so? I could feel the passing of time. Would I achieve the dreams I had for myself?

That answer was easy, no. I never would, because I was ruled by all these worries. I just called them worries, because it is easier to hear that than to hear fear. Because I was afraid. I was afraid of failing at what I wanted most. I was afraid I would be hurt. I was afraid I might be good and then what would I have to beat myself up about?

Where along the path to older age does it say you have to give up your fearlessness? Why with experience does so much caution abound? I can look back across my life and see the time I wasted, why doesn’t that compel me to make the most of my days now, to pursue my dreams?

Why am I so afraid?

I looked at the boys laughing as they rolled in the grass. I wished for them that they would grow older and hang on to the fearlessness that had them picking themselves up off the grass to head back to the rickety fence to climb and leap again.

I hoped for myself, that I might find inspiration in them – a spark of courage – to help me make a leap of my own.

Clean

The wind howled from the northwest adding white caps to the placid waves of the bay as the sky darkened.

“It’s going to rain hard,” said Gram, who felt the storms in her bones an hour or two before they hit, “I’d say you still have an hour or so before it gets here, but you should start bringing in anything you don’t want to get wet.”

“Okay.”

I’d come up to see her on a whim. I needed to get away and the cottage was the best place for that. No one who knew about what had happened knew where it was. I’d turned my phone off when I hit the state line, so they wouldn’t be able to call either.

It wasn’t the biggest mistake of my life, but it was close. As Gram said when I told her about it, no one had died, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t happened and that a few people hadn’t been hurt. Gram had offered that “aches and pains are part of life, whether they are of the body or the soul, you can’t avoid them.”

As much as those words helped, they were only a momentary balm. Hour after hour my mind played out the events over and over again. I don’t know what I would have changed. Everything had to happen the way it did. I’m not proud of it, it just…there wasn’t another way.

“Here it comes,” Gram announced from the front windows, looking out across the bay.

I looked out and saw a wall of water coming towards us. A low rumble of thunder echoed out ahead of it. This is what I had been waiting for.

I opened the side door and stepped out onto the deck. The first drops of water slammed into my skin. I stretched my arms out wide and looked to the sky. I turned in a slow circle hoping to be cleansed.

Though she didn’t say a word, I could feel Gram’s eyes on me. I knew there was no judgement. Just love. That’s what I needed. That’s why I’d come.

Soaked to the bone, I went down to the water’s edge. Gram always said salt water healed everything. I lay down in the water, hoping my wounds had been washed clean by the rain and that the salt would now do its part.