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Michelle's avatar

Tanya,

Thank you for generously sharing your success and providing space for the words of others.

Michelle

Choosing Then & Choosing Now

Glossy brown, smooth in the hand, I eagerly housed the conker on my childhood shelf. But oh, the disappointment to see it shrink and shrivel and grow dull. I learned you cannot keep the shine of the horse chestnut.

Two decades later, now a mother a continent away, I sat beneath the chestnut that spreads its shade in the Arsenal picnic grounds in Watertown, Massachusetts. My two toddlers played on the blanket. Conkers lay all around. Holding one warm in my palm, I remembered the childhood lesson and saw a choice.

Keep the seed but lose it, or let it be buried and fulfill its promise. Beneath the surface, in the secret soil, a seed splits open, one shoot and one root push aside the earth. Give it time and time and more time, it rises and deepens, fruits and shelters, an exponential generosity. Which to choose? Hold tight to my life, my time, my now, or sink down beneath the daily deaths of motherhood. Yet grow and fruit and put out hundreds of hopeful seeds, a rooted life?

For twenty-nine years I have made this choice. Tall around me are the saplings of six young adults: a new college grad, a newlywed, a young mother, and still two teens. Also, one a recovering addict and free from anorexia, an excruciating decade of believing in someone, holding them by the roots, tangled in your heart. Things I did not know I was burying myself beneath or would be called on to do.

I keep a photograph of a late fall sunflower husk, a horse chestnut seed, a dry grass head, in my room next to where I dress. Spare, rich beauty. And now, in the fall of life, near spent, I yet hope to polish seeds of words that shine.

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Sheila Knell's avatar

I long for the days before perimenopause when my body did not feel every emotion as if stung by a jellyfish, as if it was bound in electric wire, both exhausted and thrumming with energy, a woodpecker inside, tapping on each nerve ending. I am in this land of mixed metaphors, no certainties. Human skin sheds dead cell by dead cell, millions a day, but still, just a patchwork, change unseen, leaving one essentially the same. Mid-fifties and change must now come snakelike.

Snake skin does not grow with the snake and the snake eventually cannot abide being contained. To allow this change the time it needs, it will hide away, days, weeks, vision impaired, alone. When ready, the snake will rub against something abrasive to shed, to crawl out anew, enlarged, old skin left there, intact but empty. I was that, but now I am this, that old skin reminds.

Women, too, know the itch of wanting to crawl from one’s skin, past lives no longer fit. Snakes who do not do a complete shed risk infection, blindness, death. Women, the same. Women forced to shapeshift in public, if they dare.

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