Five.
“The shortness of light makes it
that much brighter I remember the yellow
paint on a chair and you never did
clean it though you promised you would and now
it is evidence of your only mistake.
Late one December, one long December I waited
for you on the porch with the laundry.”
All week I have been planning on writing one of those titles that makes everyone click your post:
- A One Step Plan for Happiness
- Three Secrets to Raising Successful Children
- I did (fill in blank) for a (continuous amount of time) and this is what happened
That last one is my new favorite. I may still use it.
But since my audience of potential clickers is still quite small, I haven’t yet figured out the SEO thing (but I know what the acronym stands for now) so no one is searching for me, and I really like one word titles, I figured I could keep with what works for now. Five.
It is my favorite number. Of all the odd numbers, five is the most odd but it divides up nicely--2 for you, 2 for me, and we’ll share the last one. It provides a satisfying transition between the stab of 4 and the bloat of 6. Always looking forward and rounding up, 5 is balanced, attentive, and confident without looking over its shoulder at who might be creeping up behind (I’m talking to you, 9) or going all akimbo to make sure everyone notices like A.
Even though I called this post Five, it’s not really about five, but about 5 things that caught my attention this week. So, I should have called my post, “5 Things that Caught My Attention This Week” but I already wrote half a page unpacking the number 5, so I will not.
Poetry. God. Yoga. Children. Metaphor. This is my list of 5. In the order in which they spilled out. Five of what? Not sure. It’s just 5. My 5. Given my investment in five of anything, it should be enough to say this is 5.
Poetry connects.
Poetry makes anything + anything = something. Before there was an app for that, there was a poem for that. Poetry is not glue, it’s a carabiner. And it is a carabiner not only because carabiner is a great word but because it is strong, mobile, changeable, and practical. A carabiner connects anything to anything securely and handily. Until you want to let it go.
God guides.
I don’t want to talk about God; I want to talk about guidance, but God is the best word I have for it. There’s a pattern, now half woven, that looks like my life but assembled with such fine detail that no matter what stitch I use or which color thread I’ve chosen, I’m still following the pattern and it still looks like my life.
Yoga clears.
I feel a little strange putting yoga here--especially in the fulcrum of 5--but here it is. This is the one we’ll share.
Children prioritize.
I am not an unselfish parent. Compared to many of my mom friends, I’m quite self-centered--I have no problem with putting the oxygen mask on first before helping others. I’ve missed their sports, performance, social events to attend my own. I’ve told them the cookies are gone because I wanted the last one for myself. But I also stand in the street while they are crossing because I think if an inattentive driver hits me first, I’ll absorb enough of the impact to save them. My children’s activities are not my priority, but my children are. I’m allowed to be absent for a couple of hours in a day if it means I’ll know how to be present for the other 22.
Metaphor explains.
What’s a metaphor for metaphor? There are lots of good words that fill up metaphor--vehicle, tenor, metonymy, synecdoche, allegory, simile, parable, trope, conceit, portmanteau. I’ll stop. I would like to frame each one of those words and hang it on a wall. The value of metaphor is not in knowing those words but in being fluent in them to translate me to myself and to others.
That’s 5. I’m struggling with the instinct to let 5 stand on its own to denote this list. I want to give it a more familiar metaphor--the five keys, cardinal directions, primary colors of me. But that ruins it, and not in a cool, crumbly-Roman kind of way. Now 5 is just another name for something you already know. I would rather build new ground than displace old. That’s too grave-like.
The quotation above is a poem I wrote in a silent afternoon about 20 years ago. Polaroid #5 in a series of one. Nothing about it really happened. Its truth is that I had about as much time to write it as it took to write--a few minutes on break from work. It filled the space I had to fill. William Carlos Williams was a doctor who made a lot of house calls. He used to drive as fast as he could to each appointment and use the time he saved traveling to write poems in his car. That’s why his poems are so concentrated. They fill the space he had to fill.
My son is reading, my daughter is drawing, my husband is planning his next home repair adventure, and I am writing. We are so deeply in our patterns that I can hear the metronome of the clock in the next room. It is not the sound of time passing or of waiting for something to start, but an audible version of “this page intentionally left blank.” A space filled.
