MOG

As it's a little long, the post will be split in to two parts, with some interesting and illuminating background to the story coming in Part 2...

Listen to the track as you read the post. The song is from Shinjuku Zulu's "Various Chimeras Instrumentals" CD at iTunes HERE

Hands with more cracks than a riverbed in a drought, shoulders muscled like a man's, brown hair sunbleached light from long days outside... all mostly from doing the laundry: lugging buckets, making soap, scrubbing clothes and then squeezing and twisting and slapping out the excess water. Laundry: on a farm with a husband, three children and a house made from the prairie itself (dirt floor, sod roof, wood and mud walls), there was always the drudgery of laundry, laundry, laundry.

And yet, and yet... when hanging clothes to dry: a momentary chance to create. She'd arrange the laundry in fancy-- not beautiful, not pretty, she knew-- patterns of color and texture, shape and size...

Laundry was the worst but there was of course much more work: chopping wood, cooking meals, tending to the house, helping with the farm... an endless, exhausting cycle, with only one respite: a book. Given to her by her mother, it was the only one she owned. No one in the family could read yet, so she opened it whenever she could, relating the tale to her husband while he ate, to the kids before bedtime, and often, often, alone at night by candlelight. She loved the story; It was a long, involved... and beautiful. She'd gone through it many times; sometimes right from beginning to end, but more often in parts, as the kids or her husband asked to hear certain favourite bits.

In the book they could all be in another world, (one without dirt! one without drafts!) and it was very, very precious to her. She would even sleep with it under her pillow at night.

But then, a fire. The book, along with most everything else they owned, was lost...

Starting with nothing again was extraordinarily difficult. Everything had to be remade: the house, the beds and chairs, the clothes... even the wicker laundry basket.

And all was, eventually. Everything, except the book. Life with laundry, and dirt, and cold drafts was back, but now without any escape...

Many months after the fire, when sheer survival was no longer in question, she received a gift. Her children presented her with a package, wrapped in a bow, and carefully saved up for and purchased from the nearest town. Inside was a book.

Only... it was full of blank pages. She was, the children told her, to write down the story from the burnt book, the one she'd told them so many times, the one she loved so much.

She was afraid that she wouldn't be able to do it. But the children (and her husband) persisted, and so, as the kids were learning their letters (with books borrowed from the school in the town) she sat next to them and wrote. And wrote. She filled up all the pages, and still she wrote.

But now the stories were her own...

Cont'd Part 2