Posted on by Jessica Dofflemyer

Solid Streets

I travelled the land of tween-dom over 30 years ago. The roads were rough. Raw and tender, full of emotion. Details from junior high are impressed like a collage. White Ked sneakers, Hostess Ding Dongs at recess, and origami folded notes on lined paper, passed in the hallway between classes. The metallic clang of locker doors slamming. The beating of my heart as Whitney Houston warbled over cafeteria speakers. The hope that one boy would ask me to dance, the fear that different boy just might. The 45 single of Ah-ha’s “Take on Me” spinning on the record player in my room. The hot scent of a curling iron in the bathroom. My first frosted pink lipstick from Long’s Drug store.

Now at 43, I’m driving a hybrid station wagon with three post-school-day 12-year old boys. Backpacks are heavy, piled next to water bottles rolling with soccer balls in the back. Their bodies, damp and sweaty, have shed the morning’s excessive application of Axe or Old Spice deodorant. Hands are now free to pull out smart phones and swipe through text messages between friends. No more paper notes in penciled scrawl. That’s so 1900’s.

I’m so out of my element. I lived this age once, but everything is different now.

I contemplate the streets of Prague. The foreign territory I explored last year was so completely different from the place that I call home. Yet, in spite of another language, and the street signs I couldn’t read, the roads seemed easily familiar. There was comfort in ancient brick and mortar. Something solid that could hold me. Architecture held a promise that it wasn’t fleeting. Despite the time, this would stay.

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Posted on by Jessica Dofflemyer · 4 Comments

Write About an Object That You Coveted As A Child

~the following is part of “Prompted Prose,” a series of posts from the prompts I’m working with during my Spring 2016 online writing course

You are gifted a blanket at birth. A crocheted rectangle of comfort, in pinks, and blues, and greens. After two decades, and thousands of washes, it is a tatter of gray, more aptly described as a ‘security blanket’. Unraveling yarn makes gaping holes in its center, but the edges are what matter most. The solace of this blanket comes in the feel of the familiar, textured softness of its edges through your fingers.

Your rhythmic circumnavigation of the blanket, traces the weave through thumb and middle finger, bringing a solace like nothing else. Its comfort outweighs the awareness, that it is a little weird to be twenty and still sleeping with a blankie.

You realize you’ve got an odd attachment to a ragged bit of cloth, and wonder about why the fingering ritual brings so much peace. Then, a revelation. You watch the tracing of rosary and mala beads through the fingers of the devout, realizing you do the same with crocheted string. Your attachment to tactile tracings is suddenly elevated. Perhaps it’s spiritual. Maybe even past life bleed-through. You continue to keep the blanket.

But then you turn 21, and a hippie from the dark side, named “Many Rivers,” (black cape, and hood, and all) steals your gear at a Rainbow Gathering on top of Mount Shasta- his booty includes your borrowed sleeping bag, which had your spiritual security blanket stealthily stashed in the bottom.

You search all over the mountain’s campsites, asking every free spirit you meet if they’ve seen your rag of a rectangle anywhere. And when someone tells you they think they saw it in a pile ready for burning, you run there just in time to find smoldering ashes.

You find a place to be alone. There, you cry. The deep and sorrowful wailing-kind-of-cry (because you are on this mountain to free your soul, and touch the depth of your beingness, so you know that it’s essential to release every ounce of agony). And after the tears have purged several layers of pain, the color of the sky looks different. You notice the wildflowers waving in sunlight. You wipe water from your face with sooty fingernails, and watch butterflies flit through the grasses. Everything seems to be conspiring to this bittersweet moment, your loss some sordid gift, signaling your growth. Through snot and no tissue, you realize your rite of passage: you have graduated to a blanket-free existence, the remains of your pseudo-security, ceremonious ashes on Mount Shasta.

 

courtesy of megananne
courtesy of megananne