Lost and found is my eureka! blog, my rediscovery of my short fiction and poetry submissions published in literary magazines and university literary journals some decades ago. Interspersed, occasionally, with more recent, hitherto unpublished pieces.
She has become magnificently adept. She is, you see, the supremely polished, accomplished confidante of many muses. When she assigns herself a task, perfection results. She moves quietly in sunlight city streets, and solemnly through nighttime forests. Her talents? Manifold and superbly unsurpassable. She is the Jill of all arts, unlike Jack mistress of all. She speaks in tongues unfamiliar, conferring and communing with the animals who approach her confidently for haven and for love. Her peers regard her grace and beauty through slit-green eyes of envy. Friends she has none. Men lust after her unapproachable chastity, wish her the ill of their frustrations. This odd creature, is she your daughter, or a feverish figment of my wayward imagination?
A month-long pandemonium of hopeful aspirants to parliamentary office recklessly promising gifts of choice value to the electorate paid by the taxes extracted from that very constituency listening with bored, half-cocked ear is finally culminating in the denouement of rejection and heartily reluctant ballots.
A bird in the hand, old wisdom would have it, is worth two in the bush. What if that bird won't fly, can't sing, refuses to lay eggs and proliferate? Does it make sense to encourage its uselessness? Promises flow from politician's crafty mouths like melodies from a robin, heralding rain. Our signal to pull on rain jackets as protection from the downpour of dissatisfaction certain to follow as sun does the rain.
The sun of promised relief albeit temporary, from the useless, misguided travesty of poor choices by elected government enabling weary voters to bring in alternate aspirants represents the anchor of democratic action. Behind that day pompous, misbegotten public relations reign; telephone lobbying, door-knocking, slurs and veiled slanders.
Damning political adversaries when all else fails tediously irritates the public, but has become as predictable as never-ending, prognosticating poll results, diagnosing the forewarnings. Enter the voting chamber, with its election officials eager to serve the process. Survey a scene of calm before the storm of final results in a strange place where you are the sole voter present to exercise your franchise.
There were we, of a perfect blue-sky autumn day, out in the woods fragrant with the changing season, breeze ruffling dry leaves, the orb of the sun sending brilliant fingers of light through the thinning canopy, marvelling at the changeable moodiness of Nature.
There were we, in our grey haired dotage, struggling uphill on challenged legs. Beside us, no swifter for their four legs, our elderly little dogs as attuned to the colourful rapture of the day, certainly as we. An oriole sang sweetly from a nearby copse, and dragonflies lifted over still-fresh purple asters.
For all matters in nature there is a season and a reason. A maxim abundantly clear, as a trio of lovely, lithe young women abloom with health, in the morning of their lives, dressed as lightly as we were tightly against cool temperatures, passed us by.
There were they, smiling beatifically, their long bare legs in perfect unison as they glided in an ecstasy of freedom and their youthful display of dew-damp freshness. They greeted our eyes as though we had ventured upon woodland nymphs nimbly pacing uphill; we on our way down.
Her primary faculties have inexorably, over the passing years, drained and diminished. Her sight and her hearing have fled with the years, her memory defaulted, her brain's reasoning dissolved into steep chaos and obviously distressed confusion.
What remains is of comfort to her, and to us. Residual recognition of her favoured resting places remain a vestigial reminder to her, those places hers, and hers alone. She still succumbs to the temptations of treats to enhance her reluctance to eat, but once engaged proceeds to satiation. Yet not an ounce is gained on her spare, bony frame.
She forgets to lap at water and to ensure hydration must be led to it; like a horse she can be led, but only she decides when to drink. She must be guided by leash and harness on woodland trails for confusion readily advances without that assurance. And when she halts and gazes sightlessly she must be lifted and carried under the forest canopy.
Her memory of the interior parameters of her home of almost two decades no longer intact, she will lurch from one impediment or barrier to another, incapable of heeding. When cold arrives she must have cover to shelter her newly temperature-sensitive body.
Asleep in her place at night we hear her dream and whimper. We recall her as a shy, standoffish young pup given to occasional raving enthusiasms and we wonder now what she in her final time recalls to give her sleeping distress; perhaps premonition of the long sleep from which no awareness of being is capable of awakening.
The day's steady, penetrating rain has cast its gloom on the landscape. The sky, like a vast perforated strainer, pewter and transparently sodden, has turned its unrelenting faucet to the fully discharging setting.
Misery sits drenched and apathetic within the cool, shuddering dens and nests of Nature's creatures unwilling to venture into the fur-and-feather-damping scene. Watery forest runways are mud-brown and rank in swamp gas.
Willow leaves, speared and green, have formed a spiral island on the swollen, turgid stream. The forest soil can absorb no more, the hills are slick with tumbled leaves, luminous-wet.
Pine needles, orange-bright, carpet the forest floor, punctuated by cones, sticky with sap adhering to soft paw pads, picking up dried seed pods, furthering Nature's faultless distribution system.
Please be advised, this is an alert issued for the public good and as an advisory to those in the adult world seeking the advantage of pre-warning on a timidly personal level.
Do take care when pursuing conversations with the young, emerging into mature adulthood, insecure on the perilous shoals of self-doubt, mired in the teen pathology of painful self-awareness.
Be informed that innocent observations on your part may be intolerably offensive, that what you may take to be sage advice to be imparted, is really controlling, gross interference; that any and all assurances of support you may muster are worthless irrelevancies.
That, in fact, you may no longer exist but as an annoying delirium of the past. Restrain your impulse to be helpful, it is an inflammatorily inappropriate misguidance. As with the responsible stewardship of some exotic plant, water frequently, feed as directed, expose to light, then retire gracefully from the scene.
The vast bowl of the autumn sky, glimpsed through the patterns of wind-ruffled leaves attaining cheerful shades of primary colours as their familiar chlorophyl-green recedes, glows silver-grey, dappled with dark grey clouds that loosed upon last night's sleeping landscape a veritable flood. An eerie light filters through the forest, strange and beautiful, illuminating the colours in a transparent hue. Crickets bow their high-pitched fall screed as a breeze ruffles the forest canopy, and dried leaves tumble like snow, assembling a crackling-thick compost of discarded matter to enrich the fecund forest floor.
