The Circle....

I don't know where we got it from or how it started. The peace~love thing. I don't remember a beginning and I hope I don't live long enough to know an end. There are 12 long years, a borrowed make-shift umbilical cord stretched to the max, between us. My brothers and sisters and Me.

The five of us...straight from the pages of The Glass Castle....digging for peace in the damndest of places.....

Chanty boy, my charge from early on.....riding the hump of Million's green van (Long before car seat laws, my friend), rocking out to Deep Purple and Led on the eight track.....unable to speak the King's English then or even now...."How old are you, Chanty?" and at five or six or seven, he would splay two chubby fingers and cheer! ......and we would chorus "Yes! Two! You are peace, sweet Baby!" His china doll face fixed forever in a crooked smile, drooling, sometimes croaking.....His mere presence in a society that still held hospitals for babies of his like, startling. And the beginning of change.

Skinny with her flowers....knocking on doors....."The little angel" they used to call her....the neighborhood shut-ins, the eccentrics, and ghosts..... She'd borrow from the best groomed lawns and the roadway median....bundles of finely pruned roses and wild catch~me~if~you~can's....and pass them out like summer showers.....sudden and welcome. Love. Full of spit and fire.

Kimbies, with her open arms....always, anything, everything. Tadpoles and Mama Frogs, hermit crabs and puppies with patches, conch shells and bait fish. She'd fetch them all home, scooch them into the circle.....Love them until their wings were mended. Or until we buried them rightly in the backyard, popsicle stick tombstones and all.....At thirteen, she started fetching home people.....
And the door is still open.....
Screen door banging in the wind....Crabcakes and cupcakes on the barbeque grill......
Willie Nelson and the Beatles on the hi-fi, blowing in the breeze....

Curty Boy with his big brown eyes, humming. Smiling. Toting luggage ten times his size. Teaching us, if not the world, that "it is what it is". And sometimes you just have to live with it. Be brave. And strong. And fearless. "Peace~love for you" .....his only salutation, his signature devotion.


Peace~love

Everything in between is just a roadtrip......