Dreaming of Silver Roses

     I am sure there are others with a more detailed history with her. I’m sure there are others with more rivoting stories connected to her. All I know is that she made me feel at “home” at a time when I was really struggling to define that word. Even long after I had moved on to others, I would sometimes walk by her and smile or sit on a swing or bench beside her and reconnect with the feeling of “home”.

     A few years ago, I took my kids to stand in the places I stood. Beside her. I told them stories. There were some memories for me too precious and too “grown up” to relay. Some so dear to me still that the aches and longings that she inspired when I walked away in 1997 have never healed. Those emotions, learning experiences, periods of growth, momentary back slides are part of the fabric of who I am. They unconciously and purposely shaped me.

     When one of the most special people in my universe sent me this clip :

http://etbu.edu/Media_Resources/merleBruceDemolition.htm

I wept like I did leaving La. to stand beside her for the first time. Like so many beautiful things in our memory, the clip plays faster than real time. So piece by piece, I watched her be surgically removed from that landscape… and mine. She was old. It was time. I fault no one. I just am reminded of the old cliche’ “you can never go home again”. I can’t.

Her face gazed out above the upright

Her avatar in a frame of gold

I passed her open visagedaily

Gray haired shelter from the cold

She has safeguared so many

New lives moved within her womb

She birthed me as surely as my mother

I wept at her ruin

She was part of home to me

Flights of stairs and basement parlours

Aged carpet bare and worn

Halls of visions, prayers, and laughter

Sounds from girlish lips were born

While but a year our romance lasted

For a life time she will be

Part of who I am becoming

Always a part of me.

Years may not have been as tender

And perhaps it was time

But I pray hearts will remember

This passing friend of mine

She was part of home to me.

 

Good-bye Merle Bruce Hall, East Texas Baptist University campus… Marshall Texas…1927 -2010

http://www.etbu.edu/News/news_item.jsp?NewsID=915

Filed under: Uncategorized on January 14th, 2010