Chicken Scratch: I want to tell you… by Elizabeth Beggins

I want to tell you that I found the stamps I’ve been missing for a month. I want to tell you that I’m wearing sparkly earrings, the kind I usually save for dressing up. I want to tell you how it feels, when I splash my face in the morning and the water gets noticeably colder right before it starts to get warmer.

I want to tell you how these days, if I ask how you’re doing, I’m going to add “despite everything.” Because whatever it is that’s happening, whatever kind of liquifying, life-changing metamorphosis we are experiencing to be able to emerge into a reimagined understanding of who we are capable of being, it’s really, really painful, and I can’t pretend it’s not.

I want to tell you how fascinated I am that the iris tubers I planted last fall, the ones I ignored, left languishing for months in a basket, on a chair, at a table we never use, survived such a hard winter. And that I did, too, that we did, those of us who did.

I want to tell you how grace manifests when a pileated woodpecker who has been punctuating the clouds with his calls finally makes himself fully visible, flying into view, totem wings spread wide, red crest dancing like a bright poppy in a fallow field.

Pileated woodpecker. Photo by the author

I want to help a tender heart past yesterday’s misery and tomorrow’s grief by telling it the story of how, after having our too-green bananas in a paper bag for two days with no evidence of ripening, I add an apple, and my husband asks if I want them to have a friend to play with.

I hope often. I hope. Often.

I want to tell you how this lover of mine rides a unicycle, because he refuses to grow up or grow out of the pursuit of what makes him joyful. I want to tell you how, when he’s out there on his one wheel, he greets the neighborhood, how he knows their names and pieces of their stories, how he gives a little money to the couple who met while recovering from their addictions, because he knows they’re saving up to move back to the west coast.

I think about how we should give them more, and I wonder how often people with a lot of money do that, just hand over a thousand bucks, or ten, to make someone’s life a little easier.

I want to tell you about the man at the gym, the one who chooses a spot in the room as far away from everyone else as possible, the one who doesn’t chat before class or linger after to find out anything about anything, like most of the rest of us do. I want to tell you how a friend tells me she sees him out in the real world, that she nods and smiles but receives no acknowledgement. I want to say that his apparent disinterest in seeing or being seen changes the way I see him.

I want to say I’m astonished when I make an announcement about donations for a food pantry project and he hands me thirty dollars cash, no questions asked, even though I don’t know who he is, even though all he knows about me is what he gleans, once a week or so, from a 45-minute exercise class.

I want to tell you how a full four months after he trusts me to do what I say I’ll do with his money, I finally introduce myself to him as we walk outside into the intense aliveness of a spring morning, my sweatshirt still damp from being doused with rainwater an hour earlier.

I want to tell you how he shares his name and tells me he comes here from the next town over, how he and his wife used to own a business there, and how his mother’s name was Elizabeth.

When he speaks to me again a week later, tripping gently over my name, and I tell him he can’t forget, because it was his mother’s name, I want to tell you how he smiles. I want to tell you how we both smile.