. Spinning .

My arms are heavy, laden like a Christmas tree with toys and trinkets from a better, sparkling year. Bands of sterling friendship, golden wedding rings of love present and passed on. Watches that kept perfect time in a time so different, never losing sense of seconds, hours, generations ticking by.

I do not need these metal minders of the dead, and yet how appropriate in their endurance. Visible reminders to myself although the world can see them in my face and stance alone. They live inside but hang their shingle on my building, proud signs of who they were and loved and touched with flesh that only touched the things I’m touching now.

Clinks and clanks of bangle bracelets, thunks of heavy golden bands, and time tick-tocking into eternity; the dead are never silent to the living.

Strange, losing my political advisor, adversary, comrade in the field of watching life. What better place to dig for roots and berries but in the farmer’s mind, the laborer and voter who saw wars from the best seat on the sidelines for three quarters of a century. Disappointed in me once because I was the other party; until he found out he was truly unaffiliated too, as were the many wiser and more honest of the land he saw as flawed but giving and the best, and so saluted. But weary of its struggle and its wars within its borders, feeling helpless to give guidance of experience, he despaired. But in the end I think he knew, I hope I made it clear for him to know, that what he gave his country was the integrity and the value, dreams and love he gave to family to inherit and hand down.

Memories live within the senses. The sight of baby bluest eyes and wrinkled smiles. I hear the roars of every kind of engine, mowers, drills and the chainsaw that we tried hard not to fix; the gentle voice heard reading Golden Books to little girls. Smells of sawdust, fresh paint and the seasonal burning of the lawns will live forever. Tasting still the swordfish sticks, his favorite pineapple upside-down cake, the hard candy snuck to children in a goodnight kiss. Reaching out to touch him when he’s gone away is the hardest one to feel through emptiness and summer air that chills me, till I can close my eyes and ears and breath the silence for a while. Then warmth returns and covers me in a father’s arms again.

Radar, radar detector, detector blocker; a natural progression, a learned response.

Just as in sorrow, tears withheld too long escape in sobs. And when it’s learned the tipoff to the action, that hollow feeling in the chest around the heart too tight to draw a deeper breath, the tears flow silent without warning, without fanfare or announcement, only there to run their course down cheeks too weak to smile or laugh again.

I’ve shared with you some bits and pieces of my father’s life, my own, unashamed of love and admiration. But this, this rawness of emotion is too much to hang out in the atmosphere for wanderers of weblogs who never need to know him, or the emptiness he’s left inside of me. Those who have, I’m sure, typed “spinning” in the search box and ended here, I feel a need to protect my father and myself from these who couldn’t care.

The scourge of writing is that once the voice is found, it won’t be tamed. In flesh and blood I’ve shuttered up my lips that even opened for a moment for a sip of morning coffee are seen by the pain that’s hiding deep within to rush out in a wail, a keening sound that only morning greyness of the sky itself is large enough to accept until the one whom I can cling to hurries home to hold me close.

And so, I thank you here for your kind words of sympathy and comfort, and individually have done so in more private notes. But this, for now, is all I have the strength to let out in the open. Please know your words and empathy mean so very much to me, but I must hide this side that’s bleeding till it heals.

Thank you, I appreciate you all.

Rain-wet wings of hummingbirds don’t hum, they whistle in their flight to suck the nectar from a bloom or plastic replica of life. Things are too intense in silent focus when in avoidance of the known.

I feel as if, if I would cry, the tears like rain would melt and break me down to tiny pieces and never would the pieces match up again to make the whole.

Two days ago my father died, born 12-12-11, 2 years 2 months 22 days after my mother, born 1-2-12, died. I see the natural beat, the natural rhythm in the count, but will I ever get beyond to count to 3?