Jane Hulstrunk and Mary Nicol Lucas

Cloud Dance at Sunset
By Jane Hulstrunk
Made using Mary Nicol Lucas’s story (below) as inspiration

Summer Knights
By Mary Nicol Lucas

Evening arcs over the northern Virginia horizon like a bun lovingly lowered onto a steaming, grease-bedecked cheeseburger. Smells of sun ironing vegetation into submission give way to the damp freshness of evening. Sounds of rush hour diminish as a click-fest of cicadas launch a celebration of night.

Evening. Full-on summer. Fireflies taunt us from the bushes at yard’s end. The sight tugs my mind back to peanut butter jars, holes punched in lids with a worn, oak-handled ice pick to create firefly jails.

Summer’s warm nights are eagerly anticipated through the lingering twilight. Dog walkers pass each other at late hours unheard of in the frost-fed chill of other seasons. The long darkness of winter night is cheap. We lose our appetite for evening when it comes too early and stays too long. The stretching shadows of long summer afternoons stretch out like long welcome mats for the belated dusk.

Ironic that dawn is praised as the fresh start, a “new” day. Yet night brings freedom, quiet, cool relief. Arriving on a fast black steed it frees us from the must-dos and opens us up to the what-could-be’s. Delicious plans are hatched in darkness and tucked into the sheets beside us, where we protect them from the harsh skepticism of light.

There is hope in the warm night. Born at day’s end. Inhaled at work’s pause. Eternalized at life’s completion.

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Untitled
By Jane Hulstrunk
Inspiration Piece provided to Mary Nicol Lucas

Tock, Tick, Tock
By Mary Nicol Lucas
Response to Jane Hulstrunk’s photograph (above)

This fall our daughter threw off the cloak of her childhood, tossed it down with an abandon usually shown toward wet towels and just-worn clothes, and headed off to college. After eighteen years of denial that one day that helpless, squirming infant would leave us, she was gone.

As a child I was always surprised to discover shoes that were suddenly too tight; pants grown inexplicably short; toys abandoned under my bed in favor of new interests; or new people moving into old houses down the block. The realities of change eluded me.

Days placed side-by-side were deceptive in their sameness. In a small town perched on the central Illinois prairie nothing seemed to change. Christmas to Christmas, winter to fall, the chrysalis still enfolded my family in world made safe by its predictability.

Pencil marks on the basement door’s edge captured the upward progress of my brothers and me. A higher slash mark was cause for celebration. “I grew!” And again we failed to read the tea leaves. Hear the voices on the wind. Get it.

All those little changes were transformation in disguise. Our childhoods were being stolen away one new grade at a time. Greeting a new day meant saying farewell to the old. Time wasn’t a giver, it was a barterer taking away much of what we found precious in exchange for the as-yet-unknown. A big loud “tock” was following up every “tick” but somehow I couldn’t hear it.

As a child I thought my home would always be there. Of course I would move on but that haven would always welcome me back. Photos of firsts and lasts would line the walls and mementoes would remain trapped in scrapbooks by crumbling, yellowed strips of tape.

That childish fantasy gave way to a real adulthood. I built a life. Made a home. Raised a child. And once again I thought I’d found my life, as if I would always be caught in a firestorm of parent’s meetings; filling out first day of school forms; and laundry.

And now released from the cocoon of day-to-day parenting into the dusk of middle age it’s time to reinvent yet again. Build a life. Make a different kind of home. The future is still filled with possibilities, tomorrows, newness. Once again I can go in almost any direction I choose—except back.