just some words

I wrote this little story while sitting at Arsaga's last week. I don't know that it has a place in any existing story, but this was inspired by the music in The Civil Wars "My Father's Father" and I liked the opening paragraph. The rest of it doesn't really feel worth much, but this is what I have just the same.

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I'd walked this path every day of every summer for as long as I could remember. The familiarity of the path, lined with Autumn's first fruits of red, orange, and yellow, gave me a sense of peace I hadn't found anywhere else. The world seemed to be coming apart around me and nothing I could do would help to prop it up again. I had decided to let the facade of my life fall to pieces, just as the dry leaves crumbled under my feet, like my dreams, like my hopes of ever knowing that kind of love I'd known here with my own family.

There was a summer afternoon, long ago, that still nagged at the back of my mind. I'd just turned thirteen and had been ushered into the mysteries of womanhood; my grandmother so delicately covered the horrors of puberty in that phrase. I had been thankful to be away from home then, to be away from my brothers, away from my childhood crush, away from my mother. But somewhere in the midst of my confusion and the mundane joys of summer, I had joined Granny for a walk.

We had been fairly quiet along the way, I hadn't much to say for several days, but just as we'd turned a bend in the road, the question had slipped out of my mouth, "How did you know you loved Grandaddy?"

She was quiet for a while, her eyes narrowed in focus as we walked along the path. "I knew when he broke my heart."

The words didn't seem to make any sense at the time. I tried to make her elucidate, but she had nothing else to share. We always were a family of few words. As I retraced our steps so many years later, I smiled as I thought about how those words passed through one ear and dribbled out the other ear. They didn't make much of a mark, I suppose, because boys were still for Valentine's cards and pulling pigtails. It was another six months before the neighbor boy asked me to the school dance, and then made me cry when he danced the slow-dance with Tessa Martin. I still didn't remember Granny's words when my high school sweetheart, my first real boyfriend, broke up with me. Or the boyfriend in college. Or the one after that.

I don't think I would have remembered her words at all unless I had finally had my heart broken and fled to the family farm. Following the rough dirt path, it seemed plain to me that she was right. How else did I know that I loved this man other than the pieces of my broken heart? Was there any hope of putting things back together, just as Grandaddy had with Granny so many years ago? If nothing else, I could cling to her words: she had loved him and done the hard work of love and forgiveness because of it. She had taught me well in my youth, perhaps I could do the same now. Perhaps I too only had to have my heart broken in order to know the reality of my love.