It wasn't a particularly an old house but rather a younger home that had seen better days. It sat behind a wall of brush and young trees that served to hide it from the rural highway that went past. The original construction was supplemented with sheets of Styrofoam and collected wood to build a protected porch on the back side of the house. The front door wasn't apparent so I followed the tracks in the snow to the door on that back porch. The interior of that porch felt dark but it was close to nightfall and provided shelter from the wind.
I knocked and a woman who appeared a hundred years old came to the door. I told her why I was there and she didn't believe me. She wanted to see the money. I gave her a single fifty dollar bill and she examined it closely before telling me that it looked fake. I told her it wasn't and that she could keep it if she answered my questions, but was prepared to give it to her if she refused. She then held it up to the light to see the outline of a second president in the bill.
She disappeared for a moment in the house and then returned, dragging a chair which she set by the door. She then sat in it and took out a Benson and Hedges cigarette and lit it up. The rest of our meeting was punctuated by the smell of burning tobacco and the slow death of her lungs. She didn't care, she told me, she was going to be dead soon anyway.
So she told me her story about how when she was young she would imagine that she would leave the place she was and move to the big city and become someone famous, maybe an artist or something. She remembered the day she could read, and how the moment came in such a way that she saw the lines and shapes actually talking.
She searched endlessly to get an opportunity to leave, to go someplace where things could really matter and that she would be in an ocean of humanity that would buoy her creative spirit in the way of community support. But despite the pristine beauty of the north woods there laid a trap. “It was like walking through blackberries,” she aid, “and having the sharp thorns drag at your clothes, saying wait a minute, wait a minute, there's just one more berry over here you have to get. You get aggravated at their tiny thorns but them give in and reach for that luscious ripe berry, and when that happens you realize how you've been trapped by the blackberry patch.”
She worked hard at her one talent—singing--and used this as a vehicle to drive her south to the big city. She loved singing when she was young and know many songs, mostly traditional and some modern ones. When she came to the city she found singing wasn't enough by itself. She managed to get a job as a clerk and worked hard every day and would sing on street corners or small bars at night. She met others like her who could play instruments like a guitar or piano and so she would sing with them.
It was one day when she and her band mates secured a well paying gig at a restaurant and they played there but no one clapped. It wasn't an insult or anything just the nature of the place, the people all caught up in the sophistication of their lives so much that they didn't acknowledge the art laid before them. She then realized that there was nothing here holding her back—that if she wanted to go places she would have to charge this thicket of indifference and thrash about to attract attention and fame. It was kike she traded the soft thorns of a blackberry bush into the hard thorns of a thicket.
It was fall when she returned, she marched through the colorful trees up state until she was deep again in the north woods. There she would only sing in church and found a man and scratched out a family among the trees of the forest and relax at the lake in hot days.
I had her sign my tablet for the $50. She lit up another cigarette and said now she was like the wind, no longer full but only an empty force that really was all the weight of the world.
Comments