txt: collect
There is a place on the pond's bottom where we wait.
Multiplying with every birth, and death, and song.
With time, and trade, decisions made. We are three for a storm and four for a war.
In the hollow place where a belly might be we hold onto memory.
Becoming buoyant with tales for the telling. We rise. One at a time to the water's surface.
All knowing, all of nothing. Our time is indian-given, and our minds are growing soft.
So, players take your places. Take your mark. Get set. Get ready to collect. Our stories before we forget.
About seven years ago, when I was living in Central Pennsylvania with a large garden in the backyard, my mother came to visit. Her thumbs are both very green, and she brought with her the gift of a few dozen gourd seeds. She plunged them into the ground after a heavy rain and told me that when they sprouted they should be transplanted and given space to grow and something sturdy to climb.
By the end of the summer my garden was full of bottle gourds. They hung heavily from their vines, almost snapping the stems. They were light green in color and fecund. Now, my mother told me, they should be harvested and allowed to dry out. My basement was full of the things- molding, rotting, smelling, oozing. A few of them did dry out, and all I could think about was what I could make with these extraordinary objects.
Seven years, and several attempts later, I think I have figured it out. You can't really make anything out of them, they are too amazing in their own right. With minimal intervention I have decided to allow the gourds to be the storytellers that they intrinsically are.