Carving and Keeping - of butterflies and hope

I feel a little nostalgic these days, looking back on a trip to Nashville, I remember the fizz and the sweetness on my tongue of my fantastic drink (photo above). I'm reading Carson McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and I wonder if this is what has triggered the sense of nostalgia. I think, then, of the connections - the world between the pages and distant sensory memories (the fizz of cola, the cold of the ice-cream, the heat of the burning sun) - and think again of the carving and keeping of shapes, of butterflies.

I wonder if Annemiek will keep the butterflies she has carved out.

The bowl they will have created will have a purpose and a meaning, after all. But the butterflies….?

I see them on a transparent string hanging in front of a window where the sun shines in, too bright to look at. There, they have found themselves: they are literally themselves.

Shapes of butterflies in the air, glinting (I think: she’ll paint one a metallic silver, the other a metallic gold – the moon and the sun).

Glinting, glinting, glinting.

Hope, hopefully, hope.

In each turn of the head there is a turn back, a way back, an antidote. In each (form) that is taken away there is a lasting image, a memory. A memory of love. A memory of hope. After all, “Nothing is lost, when all in love lives on.” (Quote © Adele Ward, “For My Mother” from Never-Never Land (Bristol: Bluechrome Publishing, 2009)

And with spring there comes the promise of those butterflies, they are readying themselves now, waiting for the time only when it is right, waiting as timing is everything. And my story “Possessions” now ends with hope. The Ward Sister senses hope in the struggle the patient makes against an antidote to the overdose being administered. I write:

She sneaked a smile. This was good. He was fighting.

“Bless you, my child,” she said, her voice melodic with sorrow.

© Shauna Busto Gilligan except where indicated.

The forgotten time: Between Christmas and the New Year

This is the time of year where we accumulate things and in this gathering of things amongst the making of memories my thoughts returned to where we put these things:

• small soaps;
• sparkling earrings;
• a new silver charm for a bracelet:
• a delicate necklace;
• a stray flower of pot pourri....

Of course it is in places..... in bowls.

We also keep our thoughts in places, tucked away like a soft pashmina against our skin on a night where snow threatens yet again.

And somewhere inside of me I feel that I have somehow let my profession down by not bringing myself to write in this joint blog where two in three posts are written by the person that is not the writer. There is something in this, too, I think. Something about the relationships that form during processes of collaboration whereby we define ourselves by the roles the joint creativeness assigns to us.

I will do more thinking about that, now, in this in-between-time but first, I return to the idea of things which inspired me to take this picture (above) in Tennessee, USA in April 2010. It was the idea that we define ourselves by both our possessions and how we are seen to possess ourselves....

Out of curiosity this is something which Carol Shields captured aptly in the wonderful short story "A Scarf" (in the superb collection Dressing up for the carnival).

And so: the task now is to explore those thoughts of place and time, those trinkets of things and what constitutes their beauty.