Clarity finds words spreading in circles, stretching across the canvas of my life. I am the artist and poet as I open to be heard writing another story where life has taken me. I release without expectations; only hope! Yet now I am being defined by my memories, Bonnie passed in January,2021, after a long and painful 2020. The Pandemic had gripped us all. She wasn’t taken by the virus yet, a battle still Kidney disease. I was knowing how my grief had stretched across my whole life. Her life found a new layer of who I was, never really knowing how deep it was going to find me. My tears were as if she had reached inside and said goodbye. I didn’t want to be held only feeling her power within my loss as my husband asked. I know now that when we continue to grieve the many feelings of our losses appear. I am grieving for myself, Still I must.
I thought about our many experiences, sitting at her home on the front porch. Bonnie and I sat on that porch instead of in her mothers garden. We would sit looking out at the world of her neighborhood, waiting for the family across the street to come out and play. Playing was what we were about, experimenting into our world, sneaking across the street to a woman's back yard to climb a giant tree. Bonnie would always climb higher. That was where we tried our first cigarette. I choked and that was it for me. Not yet wanting to scale the branches of life before us. I don’t know if Bonnie took up smoking I did not.
We were sisters, without blood, as our childhood was meshed together, I spent a lot of time at her home. She had a family; mother, father and two brothers. My mother and I spent many a family dinner there. She ate everything, I picked and gagged on green beans. As our progression of life moved further into her life of boys and life. I was immobilized yet I continued to learn from Bonnie. As we entered our teen years we sat in the bathroom exploring our bodies, separately. Hiding there, sitting on the floor, we looked and giggled. This was a time when it was all considered that anything below our waist and above were private parts. As preteens we were going to break the rules. Oh there were so many of them.
I look back and at some point Bonnie’s adventures were stopped as she was sent to live with an Aunt. I don’t remember why yet I would venture to say her fun was being tamed by her parents. I don’t know for sure I just feel her warmth as part of me and the truth that I was on my own late adventures and I couldn’t keep up. The years brought us together here and there and I stayed with her once. I was taking a workshop and complaining as I often still can do, she looked at me and said Donna did you think of the word, “WORK” shop. Now I wish I could have learned from her more.
