Magpies Packrats and
Writers
They were on the deck overlooking the
valley. The air between them was
electric. She took off her earrings and
laid them on the table beside her and let her hair down. Without a word they went inside. The magpie came out of nowhere, picked up an
earring and headed into the scrub oak.
He already had a hiding place picked out in the crotch of a tree and he
hid it quickly and flew away hoping his actions had not drawn the attentions of
another thief. He would come back later
and take his treasure out of hiding to admire the way it twinkled in the
sun. He had many such treasures hidden
here and there.
When I first went out west I met a historian
whose job was to find packrat nests and search them for trinkets of historical
value. He had found many such items,
brass buttons from Cavalry uniforms, trade beads carried west to entice Indians,
jewelry, shards of pottery, and on and on.
When he died he left behind hundreds of tiny boxes whose labels
corresponded with the numbers on a huge map.
He also left behind a mountain of notes that no one would read and
hundreds of packrats feeling violated.
As
a writer I am like a magpie or a packrat collecting the shiny experiences of
life and storing them away. For some I
keep notes, most are stored in my memory, but some can only be hidden in the
heart. I could label these under people, places, and
things but they are almost always a combination. There are thousands of them and I bring them
out as needed to complete an article or start a story. And then there are those I don’t expose to
the public because they are to personal but they are there anyway shaping how I
feel and how I write.
Some
are just trinkets of humor or beauty.
Some are lessons learned. Some
are the unique characters I’ve met in the backwaters of life. It’s funny what may bring them out of hiding
and onto paper. We shine them up, change
the names to protect the guilty and string them together with poetic license. In thinking about this article I remembered
three totally unrelated gems I picked up in the out of the way places I love.
The
house had stood well over a hundred years of miserable mountain weather and just enough spirit filling mountain mornings and summer sunsets. It had
been built by her granddaddy as far up in the hollow as you could go before you
ran into the ledges. She stood tall and
strait on the boot worn front porch. A typical
mountain women, a flower sack dress hanging strait on her gaunt frame, her coal
black hair streaked with gray up in a bun and her green eyes bright as a
sparrows looking down on the valley floor far below. It’s as if she had forgotten I was there. I had stopped in after fishing to say hi and we had spent some time catching up and we had drifted into a peaceful silence. Her work hardened hands cradled a hot cup of
coffee bringing heat to her arthritic joints.
The deep creases in her face spoke of life. She had lost her oldest when the brakes went
out of a logging truck, and her youngest daughter to the neon lights and drugs
of the big city. Her grandchildren
brought her joy beyond measure. She
seldom complained but she did tell me once that those Ritis boys were no dam
good and that Arthur was the worst of the lot.
She kept an eye on the strait- away before the first push up the
mountain and when her husband’s old truck appeared briefly though the trees she
went inside to start dinner and I got in my truck and headed back to town.
Jean
had his shirt off and you could see a half dozen zipper scars of various shapes
and sizes on his upper torso and I knew he had a couple of doosies on his legs.
He had one huge scar that started at
the belt line on his right side and ended just under his ribs on the left where
an unknown bull named Bad Moonshine ended his bull riding career. The reason he had his shirt off was because
he was freaking out over a hornet that wouldn’t leave him alone and he was
using it to swat it away. Fear is fear
and most of the time the size of the critter or the circumstance isn’t necessarily
proportional.
In
the desert several miles west of the little town of Maricopa stands a beautiful
little Spanish style church. I was
invited there to preach. They told me to
come early as they always got together and made breakfast at the church on Sunday. Out here miles from nowhere the parking lot
was full. In the nooks and crannies of
the desert live a very unique conglomeration of people from all walks of life
and the congregation was made up of a wonderful patchwork of humanity. By the time it was time for me to speak I had
learned that the land the church stood on belonged to a tiny Mexican woman in
her mid-fifties. Her and her husband
lived in a tiny house in the back of the property. Several people insisted that she tell me how
she built the church. She told me in
simple humble terms how she and her husband had no work and no money for food
when God told her to go into the desert and build a church. By the time her story was finished I wondered
why I was there. What could I tell these
people about faith or obedience or love?
I
heard a preacher the other day say when we get to the other side we won’t
remember anything from earth. I hope that’s
not true because I have been blessed with the best of memories and the magpie
in me would like to keep them and bring them out every once in a while for the
joy of it.
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