By Pat Chapin
Both parents dead and then widowed suddenly in the same year, for the next two I wrapped myself in a gray cloud. Don’t make any big changes, people said – ha! The big ones had already been made without my consent; I insulated myself against feeling any others.
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| Rocks by Pat Chapin |
Oh, I functioned – sold a business, made household repairs my aging sea cottage needed constantly, etc. But I kept outside everything; as a freelance artist, I put away my paints. I saw no new horizons but trudged through days, weeks, months. Hurricanes advanced on the coast where I lived, and as I realized my physical inability to cope, knew I had to go elsewhere.
So, I made the well-known move closer to family – my son Chris lives in Las Vegas. Still on automatic, I sold out, packed up myself, my dogs and my parrots, and left Texas beaches for the high mountain desert in Nevada. No excitement or anticipation – just one more duty to get through.
In the high desert valley of Pahrump, winter winds send tangled chains of dust and tumbleweed leaping across roads and over the desert like manic children; when there‘s no wind, the clarity of the air is like diamonds. Cold, I stared out my windows as I unpacked through the next months; when I took my dogs walking, my nose often bled, my lips and hands chapped, cracked. The rocky scenery towered over me, the air was crisp, but the dirt was soft, like talcum powder.
There are few clouds here, and no waves – instead, mountains rear up like huge frozen breakers. They begin at dawn looking like gray cardboard, but as the sun rises they morph into a kaleidoscope of color starting at lavender to blackberry, bleeding crimson, scarlet and a burnt tangerine as the light plays on them through the day; they disappear into the dark at sunset.
And the silences – the desert night is usually still and quiet as a stone, with thousands of stars winking against indigo sky. Desert dawns and twilights have bird noise and lizards; days are scoured clean, as hawks coast through the cobalt waiting on prey, and wild things stay under cover if they can. I could think calmly in desert stillness, which magnified everything surrounding me.
My mind finally came out and shuffled its deck, comparing sunsets and dawns, memories of so many places and people, and their times in my life. Reflective and panoramic in scope, I surveyed my last thirty years from the vantage point of distance in place and time. Now suddenly I could look at and deal with events; I could reach for peace in the pockets of memory, and it didn’t hurt or frighten me any longer even when I knew I was groping. Light came back.
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| Phoenix by Pat Chapin |
No, I don’t know what’s next. There’s no market here for my work, and since it is mostly marine in nature there may not be one; I haven‘t become rejuvenated or filled with a new purpose. There is little about my change that was easy, and a lot of it painful, but I see now you have to go on until you see your next step. Instead of huge hibiscus flowers, you may look for the tiny but equally lovely desert poppy.
There is one important difference now: it is the hope change grew in me. I want new vistas to open, and know I can walk or run to meet them as I please. I don’t have to hide in the gray safety of routine. I’m ready for new things when they will be there, confident I don’t have to hide in the safety of old things.
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