ENOUGH ABOUT YOU

ASSIGNMENT: DESCRIBE YOURSELF

VERSION ONE-A BRIEF BI-OGRAPHY
She was at five pounds six ounces innocent and rosey nappy and happily new in fifty nine when women wore dresses , and men wore hats and flicked lucky strike ashes in cuffed trousers.
She cried when her chubby baby body was removed from glacier streams in summer, clamoring and kicking for the feel of cold water and stone.
Tomboy, they used to say.
Rode a white horse, a ghost in the after dinner dark, a tall Tennesee by day, bareback and no bridle in the hundred acre wood.
By five foot six She had got souls saved, married, had two sons, divorced in two years,and in a practical reversal took up sinning.
She cared for wounds and scars, and the aged and those at their end. “LPN, she would say: low paid nurse. ”
At fifty-six she acquires the wisdom of uncertainty. Things aren’t as clear, but she stubbornly prefers being lost.
Partnered again, atheist to her pantheist, two companions; cursed and blessed with the novelty seeking gene, they retire to examine new terrain, escape the low grey rains of Bellingham, tracks cooling here and there, rooted by wonder and awe. Bryces’ bright canyons by motorbike, the fossilized genius of ancient Greece; her hero Hippocrates! The roguish Irish songs of Dingle. Castles of seabent sunlight and coral, the underwater Roatan.
And then…inhale…a brown eyed babys’ purest laugh, happiest dance.

She holds a brush full of wet color poised above thick white paper, and begins again.
She holds a map to the southern constellations for sexual orientation.
She floats like a seal in the sea, or like a compass needle. Her dyed blond hair blossoms on the sunny surface, she smiles to the buttermilk sky, sings about how in this south she found true north.