Wednesday, August 9, 2023.

“Trees. Green. Blue sky.”

“Trees, again. Green, again. Grey tree trunks.”

“Trees and green,” but faster this time.

As I spun, my eyes and brain only caught the simplest of images. Trees and green. Again.

“Focus, focus,” I whispered, commanding to myself as I spun.

“Tree. Grass.”

“Grass?”

Red sand. Clay-like sand.

“Sand?”

I knew now I was falling. I hit flatly as I hadn’t in many years. Age teaches a person to be afraid to fall, to learn how to fall, to catch oneself and to avoid jarring ones body unnecessarily.

“Pew,” I spit the red-orange claylike sand from my mouth.

Perhaps a bit of natural skill would be nice as a characteristic of mastery but I had been down this path too many times to not know that the chief characteristics of success were repetition. And time.

But here I was, face first into clay and grass.

“Mother,” I groaned in that low voice from one’s stomach. I hadn’t yet reopened my eyes. “Mother, I am too old for this. My time has come and gone. And I am more than okay with that knowledge.

She barely moved with her response.

Not certain if I had hit my head, I first came fully to my senses with that earthy taste of clay upon my tongue.

My hands still grasped the broom. I was disgusted that it had not helped me maintain balance at all. Wasn’t it supposed to?

“Mother, I never learned…this, this fighting. I never learned the art of it all,” I began again at her, as I slowly opened my eyes. I remained at the ground, lay there still but I braced myself to elbows.

“I..”

I stopped with more words.

She sat. She listened then shrugged her shoulders with her rolled eyes upward. Her palms too. It was a practiced move on her part. Her nonchalance infuriated anyone and everyone. And to me, she knew that I knew better.

“I could practice better with shorts and t-shirts. And I could cut my hair. It gets in the way. Every time I spin, my hair bats me.”

“Then you are doing it wrong,” she offered back.

“You are not learning to fight.”

I began again, to open my eyes. She had not moved. Calmly she offered, “Remember, you are learning to stand. You are learning to be a lady.”

My mother grinned at my confusion. Seems to me that sparring – even with only one’s shadow – was still the practice of fighting. Or defense. Or aggression. Or something other than the practice of being a lady.

“Again,” she stated calmly, with eyes half closed, half opened. Only when I regained my balance, standing on both feet, did I see her head lower slightly to nap.

Before I began, I stretched low to the ground, lunging in each direction with one leg then the other, the broom stick helping me balance. Lunge and lunge, front, the sides and back like winding them rewinding a clocks hands.

Somehow the visualization of passing time guided my thoughts to pair with my actions. “Tick, tick,” I revolved the lunges.

“I’m ready,” I thought. “I’m ready to practice the fight.”

I twisted again, then lunged. This time my hands dropped the stick but braced my fall. “My clothes are getting in the way!” I screamed.

Fifty-something years old and I am pouting to my mother.

“My hair. My clothes. My shoes!” I insisted with the gaps between words filled with expletives I had long ago been taught not to say, especially not to one’s mother.

She nodded awake. “Really?” she purred back to me in an insulting aura of disgust.

I unwrapped my hair, then loosened my tunic. I would look like a flipping tornado except without that regal wind of excellent force.

I brushed the clay from my pants. I picked the blades of grass from my hair as I unbraided.

“Fine, but I’m telling you, I’m too old.”

I had never ever dared to speak to her like that. My mother never looked up until she heard the apology from my mouth.

I stood still with my head hanging down. My shoulders dropped but my spine stood straight. The heat hung in the air, anticipating any movement which might cut the air.

“Have I ever been this sweaty?” I whined to myself. “Have I ever been this pathetic?”

The trees responded as they swayed in the sudden cool, gentle breeze.

“Dance,” trickled from the lips of the sentinel pines.

“Dance…”

Lots of love to you, tbd.