Driftwood--A Meme!

[dawn_felagund]

I lifted this meme from juno_magic because it made me think. It made me stop and look at the world around me. So many days, I drift to work and back home again and couldn't even tell you the weather unless it meant some annoyance or inconvenience (like foolish people driving in the rain or--gasp! an event akin to Armageddon here in Maryland!--the snow).

The meme:
I want you to keep your eyes open the day after you read this entry and pick something up. A leaf, a twig, a pebble - whatever catches your eye.

Post a comment here and tell me what you picked up, and why.

And if you want, repost the driftwood meme to your own journal.

I invite those who friended me (hugs to all of you!) to participate also. Stop and see your world today; you will be a better writer and person for it.
~oOo~


Lilies--A Meme
I must begin by confessing that I didn't fulfill fully the obligations of this meme. Juno asked participants to actually physically pick up that which caught their fancy--and when the moment came, I could not do it. What I found were flowers, and--call me a sappy sentimentalist (and you'd be right!)--I have great difficulty picking flowers and denying the world of that drop of beauty because I covet it for my own. So, hopefully, it will be sufficient that I write about them and capture their meaning in a much more significant and permanent sense than to have them wither on my table at home, dying from the moment I touched them.

It was difficult to complete this meme also for the environment in which I exist. Many of you are fortunate to live in rural settings where the flowers and stone--and driftwood!--that you find exemplify nature's beauty. I grew up in such a place, in north-central Maryland in the United States, where a walk down the street could introduce you to plants and critters that you'd never seen before. Now, though, I live in Ellicott City, which is an affluent suburban community in central Maryland. Ellicott City is very beautiful--but in a different way from where I grew up. In Ellicott City, the beauty is manufactured and perfect, symmetrical, the work of lawnmowers and landscapers, not inspired chance, as is nature. In Ellicott City, my husband and I pay more than we would other places in Maryland to enjoy this beauty. It is not a gift.

Even so, during the week, most of my waking hours are spent not even in the manicured beauty of Ellicott City but in Jessup, where I work, a small community about fifteen miles to the east. I do not know much about Jessup's history, but I know what it is now, for I drive through it everyday on my way to work. Jessup is squalor; it is ugliness. I work for a warrant apprehension team as a statistician, and we once had a reputable office in Columbia (a modernized version of Ellicott City), but 9/11 and the formation of a Maryland Department of Homeland Security saw our office usurped for more pressing needs than arresting parole violators who missed a few appointments and failed a drug test.

So now my office is based in Jessup, in an old house that has been converted in the mildest sense of the word to an office building. I was telling a friend once about my office, and he was amazed that it is in an old house. "Well," I told him, "there are four houses on our street, and they are all offices now. They used to be the wardens' houses, and so the Division of Corrections has owned them all along," and he started laughing. Not seeing the humor, I asked, "What is funny about that? About old wardens' houses?"

"Wardens?" he said. "As in wardens, plural? Where do you work, Dawn, that needs more than one warden?"

And that is the crux, I think, of Jessup. Most of Maryland's correctional institutions--other than those that are regional, such as county facilities--are located in Jessup. In the winter, standing on the back porch of my house/office, through the trees, I can see the House of Corrections--"The Cut," as it is known in Maryland--with its beige guard towers and the curls of razor wire. The Maryland Correctional Institution of Jessup is here too, and the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women. Within all those places are numerous smaller institutions and programs, like the Toulson Boot Camp and the Pre-Release Unit. Down the road a ways--and I pass it every morning--is the Patuxent Institution, which is a psychiatric institution for offenders. (I suppose we once would have called it an "institution for the criminally insane," but that is no longer PC. We cannot even call them "parolees" anymore: They are now "clients.") Adjacent to Patuxent is the Howard County Detention Center, although if you travel a mile further down Route 175, you are no longer in Howard County. It is as though luxurious Howard County wanted to deny its need for something bitterly practical like a detention center, and so set it as close to Jessup as legally possible.

It is nice working out of an old house most of the time. Visitors from within the agency always say with envy, upon entering our house, "It is so quiet here," because there are only three of us: the bureau chief, the unit commander, and me, and none of us make a lot of noise. Yet, at the same time, the house is depressing. It is not a nice house. It is roomy and large, but Jessup has seeped into it over the years, like a disease. Although the bosses painted it and made minor repairs prior to moving the unit there, it has no air of institutionalized (in)efficiency, like most government offices. There is no dark glass, no sleek cubicles. We have soiled window shades to keep people from looking in at the computer equipment and a leaky basement. The heat runs off of an ancient oil furnace that refused to work for the first week of winter--the office got so cold that I could barely type--and there is no central air conditioning, so each office has a box in the window. We have a parking pad out back that will accommodate two cars, and the window that faces my space has a dead bird smashed between the panes. It has been there since I started work here, since the unit moved in, according to my boss. It shows no signs of deteriorating. It is the first thing I see upon arriving to work each morning.

Walking to the mailbox in search of an item for this meme, there was a paucity of inspiration: What do I choose? The broken chunk of concrete from our front porch steps? A bit of a McDonald's wrapper chewed up by the DOC lawnmowers the last time they were through? A highway stone? Jessup holds no beauty, I thought. I opened my eyes to it, and shuddered at what I saw. At the parkway, recently released offenders--beards scraggly and tangled, wearing the sweat-stained clothes in which they were arrested--try to hitch a ride. At the sides of the road, there are no wildflowers, as there are along other roads in Maryland, planted in an effort to beautify the state: There is a lot of overgrown brush; thick, hairy vines slowly crawl up the tree trunks. Some of these trees will be strangled, and they will die, and they will then match Jessup.

I drove to Subway for lunch today, being alone in the office and wanting to hear a human voice, even if only the Korean proprietors who are so nice and know me on sight and ask, "Veggie, right? On parmesan-oregano?" I drove through Jessup and tried not to look at the boarded-up windows on houses and the peeling posters in the windows of the liquor store next to the strip club. I looked at the vines that had climbed so high that they began to crawl across the powerlines that spanned the road. It has been very hot in Maryland for the last two weeks, and the steering wheel scalded my hands, and so I thought of that and how my hands are still tough, even after almost two years of quitting my job as a kitchen manager and entering the cushy realm of a statistician. Cushy at least in the sense that I can lock the doors of our house against Jessup, and I have a key to the gun closet. The strip mall with the Subway came up--it leases alongside a lingerie store, a gun shop, and a place called ChexStop--and looked forward to the familiar, perky, omnipresent interior of the American fast-food chain. I made the quick, sharp turn--which I know from practice is easy to misjudge--and my hands jerked on the steering wheel a bit. It was not the heat, though, that made me flinch; it was the lilies.

The strip mall also contains a branch of the Anne Arundel County Public Library, and they were planted there, in front of the library. Heat shimmered from the surface of the parking lot, and I was jolted by their beauty, like they were a mirage in a world thirsty for anything not dusty and squalid: Proudly, they stood, with their yellow-orange heads nodding at me in the scant breeze, the color of the heat of the day. There were hundreds of them, and I watched them as I passed, further down the parking lot, to the Subway, and they seemed to watch me back, nodding: See, Dawn? All is not lost.

If I touched them, they would feel like velvet, I knew. We have a lily on our balcony. We bought it at the grocery store, on a whim--or rather, it was my husband's whim, as we stood in the express line, with the few items I needed for my homemade ice cream project, and he shifted from foot to foot beside me, like I know he does when he wants something. I waited for him to ask; my heart knows my husband's desires, he who loves beauty but plays it tough and bandages my bleeding heart: "Love?" he asked at last. "Do we have room at home for a lily?"

Comments

[juno-magic.livejournal.com]

How beautiful!

Thank you!

[dawn_felagund]

I should thank you for such a wonderful and thought-provoking meme! What I intended a quick response turned into a monster.

I do love when that happens.... ;)