L'aura del Campo

Kindness ... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ... has many names

Kindness ... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ... has many names

Today, write about an experience that wowed you. When was the last time your jaw fell open? Where were you the last time you felt awe and admiration? As best you can, share your experience in a way that your blog reader can feel the same wonder you felt.

Recipient of:

earlierblog

Nothing, I can come up with nothing. Either my mind has deteriorated or it's overwhelmed.

Thoughts:

1. Finding a marigold in bloom as a child and bringing the plant home.
2. Visiting Yale when I was 19 and thinking: this is a university! Then visiting the University of Kansas soon after and feeling at home.
3. Having to stop driving and writing a poem. I had to. I wasn't a writer back then (1999).
4. So many hostel experiences where the host made it worthwhile. (Yamagata, Tainan...)
5. Donna taking me in in Oklahoma so I wasn't homeless.

I think I'm mostly overwhelmed.

The second part of this prompt though demands that I share and take you with me. Last night and this morning I'm not up for that. Maybe later. If so, I'll add to this entry or make another.

Tahlequah speaks in the soft cadence of Cherokee. The Creek burbles over stones where crawfish hide in Sequoyah Park. July's sun fries me as I sit along its cooling banks. I stay in a motel hoping I can find a job and a place to live before my money runs out. I'm invited to visit Sparrow Hawk Village overlooking the Illinois River, a community of esoteric Christians clothed by oaks and populated with deer, ticks and turkey.

I'm not interested in joining but the people are nice. I explain my situation. I need healing. I'm introduced to Donna, a Choctaw with three children living with a rottweiler in a trailer. She decides to take me in. Lord knows why.

My white Volvo, loaded with scraps of a life, heads north on Route 82A past the post office in Moodys, down the winding shady canopy of Long John Hill where I'll know what's hiding by the day's roadkill. I cross Spring Creek with it's dry bed of flint rock waiting for the deluge to revive it. Three trailers sit below the road. Donna lives in the middle one: three bedrooms with a kitchen on the south-west end.

I move into a tiny room and I pack my belongings in the closet. The air conditioning freezes me. I am thankful.

I have arrived in Teresita a nowhere place with an old cemetery where pillars engraved with aguyuh rest covered with lichen. There's not much else. I take a walk. So much is hidden in rocky crevices by green that no one disturbs. The scissor tailed fly catchers and crows cross my path. Occasional gunfire pierces the quiet.

I need quiet. Kindness has many names here. May my healing begin.

Written at the request of Connie, the flash non-fiction is found at:

STATIC

Kindness has many names [124] (287words)  (18+) Flash fiction under 300 words. Prompt: surprised by someone or something recently? #2194495 by Kåre เลียม Enga

102.804