Little Colored Bottles

It was late Spring when, like birds that fluttered at indeterminate moments, weaving and dipping through consciousness, the words left me.

They had for years formed spirals and images in my brain, but they left more suddenly than they had appeared. Not only that, but the sweet melancholy in which I had rested for my life disappeared, as if it never were.

And I began to understand what it was like to live without beauty.

I had been aware of such an existence others led, but for me, it had been years that I had worked in the dwelling that was my mind.

I feared becoming like she was before she died: a house with vacant eye-like windows, as the master of macabre once said. ********************

I hadn’t been through the doorway in a very long time. Decades.

We went there again, to the house in which we had lived for so many years, years in which we built and smoothed and cherished.

The walls were soft peach, the windows glowed with oak and light, each returned to their natural color, stripped of old paint. Boards were torn out, replaced, made better.

Sometimes I dreamed of it—this warm and happy house we loved.

In my dreams, I returned to it, when the children were small and we rocked them to sleep, softly crooning stories and songs of beasts of the field and the butterflies of the air and the love we had for our babies, the canvases on which we wrote what we valued.

At the bottom of the stair a window of colored glass was built into the wall. Cheery poppies were some early 20th century worker’s dedication to beauty.

The walls of one room were covered with a mad paper dash of wild roses and soft curtains; the wooden rocker sat there, in that room, until the crib arrived in the room next to it. That room had walls gently covered with a stringed plaid and a porch overhung by an old fashioned tin roof. It was nature’s heartbeat when it rained while the baby rested comfortably in her warm dry nest.

But now.

How was I to know when I lived there, that my home, with its sturdy middle class wood and glass poppy, would not last even 100 years?

Now there was a little orange sign on the door of this house; I knew instinctively what it meant without reading it.

It had been nurtured, repaired, maintained, and-now-condemned.

The porch, on which she and I had contentedly swung so many times, was broken, the bricks smashed intentionally, as if some vehicle had gone amok in the drive. The steps were broken and painted with odd foul symbols.

In the attic, a window was broken, the wind blowing through the rafters.

The closet window in the bedroom was also gone; no clothing could resist the elements.

And the roof was torn, as if a giant hand had reached down and scooped away its shingles.

Dark now, the poppy window remained intact. (I had almost taken it with me when we left, but had decide it belonged with the house.)

It was odd. Blinds were drawn over the front windows against the shame.

The destruction had been purposeful, not natural. On the windows sill sat little colored bottles.

When you leave, you should take your little bottles.

Can one reside in a condemned house? But you should take your little colored bottles.

*******************

When she died in the Spring, there was not much left--ninety pounds which had mostly existed on chocolate of late.

Once in a while, a familiar worn word came from those lips, but not in the last few months.

It happens gradually, choosing not to read or participate, withdraw from the world: first forgetting a vocation, then how to cook, boil water.

One day I faced reality. She was sitting there, on the couch alone, her mouth smeared with the chocolate she had just eaten, and her face remarkably blank.

“Mother!” I had cried, kneeling on the floor next to her. It was all I could say as I wiped her face and then rested my head in her lap.

Her words, too, had left her long ago. The lightning had robbed her of what remained.

Her hand slowly raised as I sobbed and it rested on my head, gently stroking my hair as she had so long ago, the fingers no longer able to move their separate ways.

“Oh, my dear,” she murmured. 
 Never had such empathy dwelt in so few words. ******************   stained glass lamp John R. Bergman