by Andrea Stuart
Seated on the warm, red bricks that unevenly blanket three quarters of my backyard, my face is drenched in sunshine for the first time this spring, and my ears buzz with the songs emanating from the Brazilian pepper tree rooted in my yard. Unencumbered by nagging phone calls or the slightest urgency to complete a task, I let the sun’s rays wash the chill from my toes. As I melt into the tranquility of the morning, I’m caught up in a web of nostalgia.
Growing up, my mother used to repeat this daily mantra to me: “You’ve got to toughen up, kid.” My natural heightened sensitivity forced my mother to be very cautious about how she handled any misfortune that involved me. Had she been an over reactor like so many parents I’ve observed, I might have wound up retrofitted to a straight jacket, pleading for the men in white coats to keep the “voices” silent. Luckily, my mother—despite her uncanny ability to create a tornado of worry within herself—always maintained her composure in times of distress.
If I tattooed gravel into my knee by falling off my bike, my mother would simply grab the hydrogen peroxide, kiss my forehead, and say, “It’s not the end of the world. Falling is part of learning to ride a bike. Bet you’ll be more careful next time, won’t you?” It didn’t matter that uninvited pieces of the driveway were indiscreetly protruding from my knee. She remained the unruffled mother hen that I found so comforting. And her lessons spilled over into the sentiments of life as well.
I had always been taught that with age comes the ability to shrug off the smaller things in life like insults and emotional pandemonium. Yet, as I snaked my way through childhood, I noticed that my sensitivity only seemed to grow more intense. Once I reached adolescence, my emotional delicacy reached unimaginable proportions. One afternoon while I was driving a friend home from school through the suburb neighborhoods of Danville, a Monarch butterfly collided with my windshield, making a Jackson Pollack of itself on the sun seared glass. I stopped the car and began to weep. My friend — sweet thing that she was — talked me down with a story about how the butterfly grew new wings and flew away to Heaven.
This sensitivity was the impetus that translated my emotions and thoughts into tangible forms. Writing became a therapeutic and artistic medium for me to release both the beauty and the wickedness that consumed my thoughts and the world around me.
Friends and family encouraged my writing obsession. One friend remarked that writing “made my spirit shine through my eyes.” A nice sentiment, even if it was just an exaggeration embroidered into a compliment.
Yet as therapeutic as it was, writing could not block all of life’s bullets. In an ironic twist of circumstance, the one trait that kindled my writing flame also came close to extinguishing its blaze.
One semester in high school, my English teacher rewarded me with a D grade in writing and poetry. Her reasoning was that my style was too esoteric; that my poetry was unstructured and erroneous: “You should really stick to what you know,” she told me. Her comments unraveled my self-esteem. I felt like an un-swaddled infant placed in an open field during a thunderstorm. But, my mother, unnerved by this teacher’s audacity, was determined to bandage my wound by secretly entering one of the poems that the teacher criticized into a national contest. I received an editor’s choice award and was published in a poetry compilation; a modest yet effective accomplishment. The teacher’s voice finally began fading into the background, where it remains most days.
While I’m certainly no Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson, and I’ve not achieved a fraction of the success as acclaimed writers Dean Koontz and J. K. Rowling, I’ve involuntarily thrown myself into the daedal practice of interlacing words until they form patterns that harmonize with whatever emotive corsets I may be wearing.
Nostalgia fades. I’m waiting for the finches’ encore musical performance before I put this ink slinger’s musings to rest. A breeze cools the sting of impending sunburn as I remain on the bricks and think to myself: The world is my tablet. My written words are merely thoughts incarnate, healing my sensitivities while giving birth to intimacy through shared experiences.
