Time Will Tell...

 

Time Will Tell

As I ran the other day, I decided to put a wiggle in my running course. I made a few different twists and turns, listening to my soul wherever it took me.  I do that every now and again. More now than again though. It’s my creative essence in knowing to create my own freedom, even when I feel caged in. We all feel that you know. Caged in. I see being caged in, like not the bill paying part in life, to me that’s natural. Not the work part, because that’s natural to me, as well.  I love to work. I hope I drop dead working, that’s one of my dreams. Just be working, planting, running, lifting, something and then it happens… Well, it’s either that, or I’ll decide to pick a fight with a big bear in the woods when I know the end is near.  For some crazy reason, it just sounds like the way I should leave this earth. Although, I’ll have to find a restless, unfriendly bear. Tough to do, because I love nature and have respected it when meeting up with a bear in the woods. Another story for another time.

Caged in, is when you want anonymity… You want to help people, but you don’t want to be known. Being known for me is difficult.  But yet, to earn a living in the areas I desire to do so… well you kind of need very little anonymity.  And that sort of sucks if you’re me. For I find people, quite often to be cruel and inept at basic human decency, which I attempt to erase with my own sense of humor and self-condemnation. It seems, I’ve always known what horrors human beings are capable of, but for some reason I find my own innocence in others.

As time passes, and I ponder thoughts daily on my runs, praying, thinking, not thinking, moving along. Traversing through other’s neighborhoods and lives, delicately always attempting the unassuming essence of what it’s like to be someone else. It happens. My guts get twisted and ripped out of me. Sometimes for a second or two, many times much longer…days, weeks, months, seemingly forever. When it hits the hardest, is when someone else suffers or so it seems. Probably because I know my pain, but to watch theirs’ its most difficult. So, on my run yesterday, the course I sauntered through was slightly premeditated. Yet, it was my soul that brought me to a mid-point of my morning run. And then, it arrived. What? The loss of someone else’s love.

Love, is a funny thing. As I approached a road I’ve seldom ran down, yet driven down bukoo times. There she stood, blackened beyond belief. That sad sight. The sight most times not knowing if someone died, someone was injured, someone lost something dear, that they will mourn forever.  And that the pain will never leave them, because the wound is so deep. But there, stood Love, blackened, seemingly lost forever. The fire that must’ve raged through the little stand-alone building with two shops and an apartment that I know the name of the family who lived there. The one shop I always wanted to visit, was a tea place or had been.  The other was my now deceased husband’s favorite place, a shop.  The shop, “Time Will Tell”, is such a classic name for a clock repair place.  It was my husband’s Love. That kind of shop. He liked that type of stuff. We had our 100 plus year-old grandfather clock we inherited fixed there, still works. My youngest and I were trained on how to wind it, take care of it before my husband’s passing last year. I try not to let it die.

So, as I saw the blown out, some boarded up windows and black-charred remains of the still standing building, it hit me. Will the family be okay? No clue. Was anyone else in there at the shops? No clue. Won’t ask. I saw three men, apparently in the middle of ready to inspect the damage, outside the building. I waved, two smiled, talking, one waved. I nodded. And said to myself a half block down the street, “Oh God, Norm. You’d be so sad, right now.” For the next remaining miles as I ran, thoughts of all that has been dug-out, grounded down, taken down, burned out, crapped up, messed with, raped, pillaged, and now burned, arrived. It was much in just under seven months since his passing. So much has occurred. And I have to say, I’m nearly glad he didn’t see it all. Because that blackened building of the loss of two shops and the family’s dwelling is a microcosm of the vile nature of the hatred, and the defacing of our freedoms brought by the wealthy, known mostly men in allowing unconstitutional acts and their deplorable words to dictate fear over our freedom… by either not having the gozoncockles to stand up for what’s right, or because they are truly racist bigots. And that they have blackened their souls with their backward self-righteous bigotries, along with the lies they spread. So, as sad as I am for such local losses, when I feel this… I eventually take a step back and try to see the world in its entirety. A global perspective.  I do that every day, and I realize time moves on. Things live, things die… only Time Will Tell. ---Jody-Lynn Reicher