Writing 101: Day 4

Day Four: Serially Lost
Today’s Prompt: Write about a loss: something (or someone) that was part of your life, and isn’t any more.

What About Loss?

Loss.

This is supposed to be part 1 of a 3 part series of bite-sized blog articles. You’re welcome to join me as I explore this topic. I’m not sure where I want to take it. Perhaps you could give me some feedback in the comments area on what aspect of loss you’d enjoy reading more about.

Anyone who’s read my blog posts dealing with The Land of the Midnight Sun knows I’ve suffered loss. I’m not finished with my tale of the north, heroes and loss. But I must move on, for now, to other losses or loss in general, for this assignment.

There’ve been people I’ve known in life and death that have given me a lot to live up to in life and death. In some cases, because of their sacrifices, I live. Their bravery demands I live a better life. Those no longer living, are they not here? Their legacy lives on. They’ll only be forgotten if no one tells their story. I plan to do what I can to make certain they’re known and remembered for generations to come.

Loss. I’ve lost many things from tryouts to hair barrettes on pathways and keys within wet beach pebbles. But I know those are things I can attempt again or perhaps someday find.

Should we always seek that which we lost? No. Probably not. But we tend to, at least that’s been my experience.

How about finding things that were lost, but not by us? Archeology always fascinates me. Pompeii.

We moved onto our property in 1988, when it was still raw land. We lived without power and running water for five-and-a-half years in a twelve by sixteen-foot cabin. In the back of the cabin was a huge old stump and branch pile left over from logging operations in the 1950’s. My husband and I untangled all that wood and dragged it all onto a burn pile further down on the property. When he was at work, I kept at it. One day all that was left was dirt, beautiful soil. But life interrupted my plans that year and I did nothing to that ground.

The following spring, exactly this time of year, a whole bunch of trillium bloomed in the spot where that log pile had been. I dug around them, searching for some bulbs I could transplant, there were so many. The bulbs those flowers sprouted from were buried beneath two-and-a-half feet of soil. They’d waited over thirty years to bloom. I’m humbled every year when I see them. Perseverance. Resilience. Keeping the faith. A helping hand, or two.

Trillium. Photographer: Lenee Cobb

I wrote a fiction story about a woman who’d lost her mind, literally. She’s a ghost haunting the grounds of an old insane asylum who’d suffered a lobotomy she cannot remember and so she keeps searching for her mind. I look around at all the meth and heroin addicts and think of her. These addicts are not strangers to me. They are sons and daughters my generation raised. Darling babies now in their 20s and 30s. Their innocence still remembered.

Loss. Discovery. Hope.

For Day 2 of Writing 101 I wrote about The Stray Sod. Stepping on a stray sod can be disastrous. In legend, once a person steps upon a stray sod (an enchanted sod) they become lost. This legend happens to be a fairytale based on truth; I know. I’ve been aware of my surroundings enough that the illusion failed to deter me from finding my way out of the illusion and back onto the right path.

Those times in our lives when circumstances combine with once familiar faces to swirl round, a carousel of garishly painted ponies, while we stand in the mirrored middle calling “Stop!” Those times when our internal compass spins crazily. Bermuda Triangle times. Either we need to become grounded enough to find a way out on our own or we need a helping hand, a guide.

Life mangles people and they give up. Many do.

There is a song that I heard during a Bermuda Triangle time. It helped me stay grounded. When the time came, I remembered the trillium.

–Leneé Cobb