pain Archives - Laurie Klein, Scribe

A Cure for Regret

My mother entrusted me
with the frayed string
that held Nana’s pearls.

How does a legacy born of wounding morph into what I hold now?

Born on her birthday, I was Nana’s first grandchild, destined to alter her world with my wants and needs. How quietly she would alter the minutiae of mine, task by task.

Picture your grandmother’s youthful hands, rounded and smooth, that cool touch on your brow when you were sunburned or feverish.

I remember slender fingers, nails finely-ridged as grasscloth.

Those hands . . .

. . . counted pennies into my palm for each dandelion I beheaded
. . . patted my back when I slept over and city sirens scared me
. . . rewove the heels of my socks with tender grids
. . . let down my hems, mended my jeans

Each effort glowed with love never mentioned: affection enacted.

But the young and self-absorbed — what do they notice?

Her small, patient labors seemed like busywork, and her folksy, repeated stories chafed, straining my patience. Then, while I was away at college, Nana inherited my bedroom. Resentment simmered. I never rewove things between us, never mended the distance. She kept sending me cards.

After her pearls passed to me, I pushed them into the back of a drawer. Not my style. Nor did I realize frequent contact with the oils in human skin keeps the living gems burnished. Like faithfulness, touch revives the inherent hues — true to the being that once fashioned marvel from harm.

Stashed away, luminosity languished.

If mollusks can spin a history of pain into nacreous beauty, perhaps I can, too. Oswald Chambers writes, “We are not meant to be seen as God’s perfect, bright-shining examples, but to be seen as the everyday essence of ordinary life exhibiting the miracle of His grace.”

So, I tried on Nana’s pearls. The string broke. Half the strand scattered. Tossing them felt disrespectful, so I restrung them, repurposing some guilty gratitude into a bracelet of prayer beads.

Now my fingers, with their inherited nails, ridgy as grasscloth, quietly thumb the pearls clockwise, prayer by prayer, akin to Nana patting my back when worry invades me.

Have you repurposed an heirloom? I’d love to hear about it . . .

Photo by Tiffany Anthony on Unsplash

You might also enjoy Grace: in media res

Make your own prayer beads

Grace … in media res: (in the middle of things)

by Laurie Klein 18 Chiming In

Grace … in media res

“In the Middle of Things”

Between our creaking dock
and the park’s rocky point,
leaching blue
from Fowler Lake’s surface,
the perilous sandbar lurked.

Rowing across it one day,
I spied my future:
strewn across restless sand,
a scatter of strange shells.

Shells meant PEARLS.

And P.E.A.R.L.S. meant . . . CA$H!

Any kid who loves books
can tell you

• Pearls fall from the sky
when dragons fight, and
• Pearls always match the color
of the host oyster’s lips, and
• Pearls are made of moonlight,
trapped inside dew

The part about salt water?—
completely escaped my notice.

What would I buy first?

Sixty Years later

As a kid obsessed with treasure I’d probably spotted freshwater mussels. My schemes of wealth now seem endearing.

But the wide-open heart, the hope and dreaming … this is still me.

Especially in media res, “in the middle of things.”

It is the hour of pearl, Steinbeck wrote, the interval between day and night when time stops and examines itself.

Isn’t this how we often awaken, half-aware

• the dog wants breakfast
• deadlines loom
• chores clamor
• sellers may reject our bids
• loved ones battle disease
• hopes wane
• relationships fray

Where are the PEARLS?

Pain proves annoyingly democratic:

and almost all shelled mollusks afflicted by broken shells, or parasites, or one measly grain of sand can—incrementally—create a living gem.

… the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.*

We mortals, too, must process harm and grit and doses of brine, withstand rogue currents and shifting ground—while keeping our (eventual) luster hopefully strung through average days.

Give me room. I’m trying to make pearls here.

No.

I’m trying to save my self.

And I can’t.

Grace is weightless

(So Ann Voskamp writes.)

And wait-less, I’d add.

Grace is a gleam in the soul. It soothes and guards us against each day’s irritations and intrusions.

Grace is a pulling force, attracted to tacit fear and each relational shard we secretly harbor, or overlook, the mediocrity chafing our days and thoughts, our loves, and lives.

Grace lurks.

And it shifts, as needed, to meet our next breath.

Singular as each whorl
embossing our fingertips,
every pearl embodies
opalescence alongside
insult and imperfection.

Grace waits for us at the imminent, ravaged ends of hope.

Any pearl sightings at your place lately?

*Frederico Fellini, Italian film director and screenwriter.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Oyster Photo by Charlotte Coneybeer on Unsplash

Exposed to Truth, Its Beautiful Sting

by Laurie Klein 3 Chiming In

Held still much lately? Wish you could more often? I do. It’s an abiding passion of mine. And a challenge.

I was the tomboy sentenced to regular “sitting lessons” on my father’s lap. Gripped in Dad’s brawny, freckled arms, a featherweight could only flail so long.

Now I see enforced waiting was meant as a gift. Dad’s discipline established a baseline for social poise through quieter physicality, leaving my mind free to swing through the trees of imagination. To this day my thoughts flit, like the butterfly in overdrive hunting nectar or the rebound of that next silken petal, bobbing under its weight.

So here’s to the mercurial, slightly out-of-focus moment, not so long ago, when something intensely alive alighted on my hand:

My breath stuttered. The fingers inching my camera closer trembled, body on high alert . . .

as if each sense was a radar dish, registering color, weight, movement. Texture. And something else, harder to name, and as fleeting as the shadow of an antennae across my belly (which I would only see later, on playback, after the creature had risen and wafted aloft).

In a moment like this, surroundings dim, attention telescopes on sensation. Have you felt it?

Six multi-jointed legs the size of an eyelash taste with their feet, and when they traverse the human palm, they stab, like a mosquito, or Tom Thumb plying a micro-jeweler’s saw against the skin.

By comparison, I’m huge. How is it that something weighing in at less than one-fifth of an ounce has the muscle to alter my day? My outlook?

Even now, looking back on the photo of that brief encounter, I can ignore how old and homely my hands look; relive, instead, being “tasted,” tattooed by the wild.

“How many are your works, O Lord!” the Psalmist wrote. “In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures . . . living things both large and small” (Ps. 104:24, 25b).

The sudden sting of truth: arresting. Evanescent. On that day, beauty sought me out. My part was to sit quietly, take it in.