MindSpinner

It is time to write again, and yet there is not time for writing.

The hardest work of the heart is to filet the many fine bones of longing, desire, and need out of love.  Under the happiest of circumstances, these find expression entwined with love and answered in kind. In less happy circumstances, longing, desire, and need may prove irrelevant or even deal enduring harm. In that instance, we have to choose what finds expression, out of all that contends within us. If we love earnestly, then it is out of love rather than selfishness that we should act.

There are noble reasons to eschew the use of an energy-guzzling appliance - reducing one’s carbon footprint, slowing the frightful pace of global warming, saving on the frightful bills. And then there’s the operative reason at my house: one morning you get up, throw a load of wash into the dryer, push the “Start” button, and … nothing. Almost nothing, that is. The dryer does buzz. I have a 27″x43″x28″ buzzer in my laundry room.

It is important to know that my laundry room is not really a room. It is an amateur architect’s afterthought, tucked at an angle under the stairs and next to the garage. It is, at best, half a closet. Squeezing a full-sized washer and dryer into the space was no small feat. I think the movers who did it were genies; one of them looked like a genie, if he’d only been blue. Getting the dryer out again looks to me to be nearly impossible, unless I call upon genies a second time, and these days, I can’t afford them. If I could afford genies, I’d have new dryer. One thing is clear: the washer would have to come out first.

So I think Big Buzzer will have to stay put for a while, especially since it will not be replaced in the forseeable future, at least not until teachers get real cost-of-living raises or cows fly, whichever comes first. It might be possible to repair Big Buzzer, but I think sixteen years is probably a better-than-average lifespan for a dryer. This dryer is the one my father bought to help me out when the children were still in cloth diapers.

Big Buzzer is now occupying coveted space. I could have a pantry in that space if I didn’t have a dryer. What to do with a dead dryer? I can put things on top of it, but I do that anyway. There’s a lot of space in the drum. Surely something could go in there - extra blankets? Sleeping bags? If I could only get Big Buzzer out, what could an old dryer drum be good for? Could one plant potatoes in it, minus its boxy white shell?

When you come to my house, you will likely find clothes drying on a folding rack designed for that purpose, and if you stay for a day or two, I will give you your own cardboard towel with which to pat yourself dry after your shower. It will be as rough as the cat’s tongue.

We are powering down in the laundry room, reducing our carbon footprint, slowing the frightful pace of global warming, trimming our electric bill. But I can’t pat myself on the back, now can I? Virtue, to be virtue, ought to be voluntary.

“We need a picture of you when you were a cheerleader,” my student told me, sharing the idea for the feature article. We’re getting pictures of Mrs. M and Ms. S, too. Then we want to take pictures of all of you in our cheerleading uniforms - then and now.” She was all enthusiasm.

I tried to envision me in a cheerleading uniform now, with a little shudder reserved especially for my thighs.

I wasn’t a real cheerleader. I was never a ribbons and bows girl, a doer of back flips, or a death-defying flyer atop a tower of girls. We were a simple lot, we cheerleaders at a tiny school in the mountains. Our mothers made our uniforms, or we did - I made mine - and we jumped and whooped and hollered and performed maybe a dozen simple cheers. I was a cheerleader because cheerleaders got to go to all the basketball games, home and away, and I could jump and yell “Umph! Ungawah! Falcons got the soul power!” better than I could shoot a basketball in a game.

At one time, there was a picture of me in a cheerleading uniform, back in 1974. I can almost remember it. My hair is long and straight, a bronze-streaked blond I will never see again except from a bottle. The uniform is a simple, solid maroon jumper over a gold shirt. I look as if I might have crawled right out from under a collard leaf, so unsophisticated am I in this picture, at thirteen years old.

Dutifully, I looked through two albums tonight, though I haven’t seen this picture in years. Sure enough, it is not there. It may be in one of my mother’s albums, back in the mountains, in her house not a mile from the smallest school in the entire state of Georgia, where I was, for one whole basketball season, a cheerleader.

I noticed, as I scanned photograph upon photograph, that the old Polaroids - the ones we children loved to see pop out from the camera, the images emerging from the smelly film like ghosts to become bright familiar faces - are growing dark now. We are all receding, as if someone is slowly dimming the lights around birthday party tables and some lasting night is falling over the lake, the mountain, the pasture, and the horse I used to ride in midafternoon.

Next weekend, as long as it’s not raining, I’m planning an excursion to the restored Shaker Village that is one of my favorite places to go. I won’t stay the night this time but will just drive up early, buy a ticket, and tell the person at the ticket desk that I’ll be walking the wildflower trail that crosses the fields, winds through the woods, then along the river gorge and finally down to the winter home of the Dixie Belle, the riverboat that offers river tours beginning later this month. Spring wildflowers should be in bloom along the trail and through the village. I’ll be taking the wonderful camera and re-taking pictures I lost last year when my laptop expired. I’ll find the tree that makes a little house out of its arching branches, next to an old stone chimney. Spring will be the same, but the walk will be utterly different, because I will be alone this time. And the pictures will be different, too, because they will be of horses and buildings and apple blossoms and wildflowers but not the companion who walked with me on an idyllic day.

It will all still be beautiful, I tell myself. Spring comes every year. So I’m going for that walk again. I will make that walk my spring ritual. I will don my jeans, my walking shoes, and my backpack camera bag and set off. I will take a sandwich for lunch and Kleenex in case it is the eye, not the lens, that blurs.