Scraps of Mother and Son

1996. Teaching English at Morris Schott Middle School, coaching the volleyball team, and parenting sometimes in between.  One way that my sons and I reconnected with one another with our crazy life,  was by taking long walks. We lived in a Goverment built community in Beverly, WA. Lovely solid homes, across the highway from Wanapum Dam--built in the 1950's by the workers for whom these homes were built. Lava craggy, Eastern Washington desert hills running  parallel to the Columbia. Rattlesnakes everywhere--we once counted 8 in our backyard at once.  Black Widows here and there, even scorpions. We could see the river scape from our living room and the wind pounded most of the time. A beautiful and eerie sound and sight everywhere we turned.  This was one of our temporary adventures.

As we walked, ten year old Kevin, my smallest angel, picked up small bits of scrap iron and rocks and handed them to me for safekeeping.  I won't paint this rose-colored. We were uncomfortably hot, we were sandy, we were partly bored, partly putting distance between us and anger.

We were making our lives bearable, one moment at a time. Together.

And this is a remnant from one of our walks.  I call it Mother and Son.

There is something about a rock and some iron that puts daily life into perspective. Our troubles are as fleeting as our joys. Our material life will one day be scraps that a mother and son will find, and decide how it fits in their lives.

Elements, forged intentionally

It's true that my longing for scrap iron has nothing to do with this young man.  OR DOES IT?

In this blog, I hope to begin to understand why I am obsessed with scrap iron.  I believe it is connected to the cycle of life, and the mystery of extracting it, using it, and tossing it aside to either forget it, or turn it into something new.

That's kind of like the cycle of human life, too.  Nathan was extracted from my sister, molded into a baby, a child and adolescent....all natural, theoretically, but  formed intentionally, shaped into a swimmer, muscles forged by the water, for the water.  Are we really that different from Iron? Well yes, we are a different material. But maybe it’s the process of life that I can see in iron that draws me to it?