My husband and I decided to spend the Easter weekend in Galveston, We planned a little get-away for the two of us, a kind of writing retreat.  We arrived in the afternoon on Good Friday, March 25. We had a big dinner on Friday (seafood, of course), and we woke up early on Saturday to take a walk on the beach before it got crowded.  I was searching for interesting bits of shell when a glint caught my eye.  It was a glass bottle a message in it!  My first thought was that I didn't want to get caught with the bottle. (It's a hefty fine in Galveston to have a glass container on the beach!). I immediately pulled the cap off and used a pen to slide the paper out, taking care not to tear it because it was already wet and fragile.

It was a letter written the previous day by someone in despair. Here is what it read:   . 

Message in a Bottle
Galveston, Texas
Dated: 3/25/16
Found: 3/26/16
 
 
Dear Bill (Not His Real Name),
 
This letter will never get to
you, and that’s good of you . All the
shit you put me through
has changed me in ways
that I should not have
been changed. But Changes
happen because thats life.
I’m not a bitter person,
but this letter is because
I m throwing this in the
ocean because I’m
letting go, because I
can’t keep harboring
all these thoughts, memories,
and emotions because
I am drowning. I cant
keep my head above water
because of you and you
wont leave me along.
Even when you’re not
bugging me in person,
your memory does.
So this is where I
have to let go. Let go.
Let go.  Goodbye,
                Katie (Not Her Real Name)
 
I have changed the names to protect the privacy of the two young people.  I have reproduced it here exactly as it was printed on a piece of torn notebook paper. This message, thrown by someone who was in the depths of a great despair. moved me greatly.  It is clear that she is in a difficult, if not toxic, relationship.  My hope for her is that she will move on, leave that relationship behind and find her own destiny on her own terms.  I pray that she will find the courage to keep her resolve -- to really "let go".  I thought about what kind of person she must be... what might have led up to this moment. I put my thoughts in to the following poem (which is totally my imaginative vision of the circumstances that might have led to the "message in a bottle".

Poem for Katie (Not Her Real Name)
The Girl Who Wrote the Message in the Bottle
 
“I am drowning.  I can’t keep my head above water…”
                                                Message in a Bud Light with Lime Bottle
                                                Galveston, Texas
                                                Dated 3/25/16
 
A young woman walks solemnly to the end of the pier
                on 37th Street, just at sunset.
Incongruously, she’s wearing sandals and a hooded jacket.
It is cold and her hood flares in the wind.
She doesn’t seem to care.
 “Come with us”, her friends had implored.
“It is time to forget him…to let go and have some fun.
A weekend in Galveston is just what you need.
There are always more ‘fish in the sea’.”
 
So, she had packed her swimsuit and her big canvas bag,
and her clunky sandals with the wedges,
and thrown in a Jane Austin novel,
although she knew she would never read it.
She had sat in the backseat the whole two hour drive.
Just so she wouldn’t have to talk much.
Especially not about him.
 
Earlier that evening, she had sat at the pool bar with her friends.
They had had mojitos and talked about jumping in the hot tub.
They had giggled and talked about the latest Hollywood stars,
and tried to pull her into the conversation.
But she couldn’t stop thinking about him.
 
She ordered a Bud Light With Lime and pulled the fake rattan bar stool closer to the bar
so she could pretend she was watching the TVs,
only her friends knew she wasn’t watching because the only things on the screen
were random interviews with athletes in sports she had never even heard of.
Now and then, she checked her cellphone, frowned and erased messages,
or she opened up her journal thinking she might try to write something,
then closed it again.
 
After awhile, her friends wanted to go downtown to a club they’d heard of,
The Square Rigger, somewhere on Post Office Street.
She didn’t want to go,, she had said.  She had to think.
“She wants to be alone” said the tall, lanky friend with the blond hair
 as they waited for the Yellow Cab. “Maybe she’s just not ready”.
 
She stared into the golden beer, like a  mythic Celtic queen, looking into a well.
As she watched, the bubbles danced in the glow of the bars’ neon signs,
backlit by the colors and the flash of the TV screens.
It seemed that every raw and terrible and beautiful memory came back to her:
 
The softness of the first days when he had taken her dancing and bought her a white rose
the way they seemed to grow together over sushi and fish tacos downed by Dos Equis;
the way he had cradled her in a nest of pillows in his king sized bed;
 
Then how all the conflicts had begun;  a jealous comment; a criticism about her clothes;
or about how she tossed a salad, or her taste in movies;
the argument about how he never liked cats and how she should get rid of that cat
and get a dog because he liked dogs better.
 
The bubbles of her beer rose erratically to the top of the clear bottle,
then burst, exploding into the air until there was no trace of them.
She wished she knew how to shatter all those wrenching memories.
She loved him, had loved him, through every tearing, bleeding fight.
It seemed like the more she loved him, the more cruel he became.
Her clothes weren’t right. She was too fat. She didn’t cook the pot roast like his mother’s.
She couldn’t dance, anyway.  And she didn’t need to say what she thought about things
because no one wanted to hear what she had to say, anyway. 
She was just wasting his time.
 
After the broken dishes,  after the smashed the mahogany table  he had thrown it at her,
she had left him. 
She had packed up the clothes she had carefully picked out, her most expensive shoes
and her worn out flats,  and her favorite statement necklaces and her journal
and her cat named Sydney, and she had piled it all into her old Honda Civic
and escaped to her friends’ one-bedroom apartment.
 
And then, he had started calling.
And calling.
And calling.
She had erased the calls before she listened to them, but she had to see the texts,
even though she tried not to – all his pleas for her to come back, that he would be different this time.
She knew she couldn’t go back, but she wasn’t sure she could go forward, either,
not with this tearing pain ripping into her heart with every memory.
 
She downed the Bud Light with Lime and watched the colored lights flickering inside the empty bottle.
She tried to breathe without feeling the jagged ache she felt every minute she was awake.
 
Suddenly, she ripped out a page from her journal and began to write.
She wrote her own plea for exorcism, a piece of pure emotion to wrench the ache
right out of her body.
                “Dear Bill (Not His Real Name)
                This letter will never get to you, and, that’s good.  All the shit
                you put me through has changed me in ways
                that I shouldn’t have been changed….”
 
She sighed as she finished the letter.
“Let go. Let go. “ she comforted herself as she rolled it up tight and
pushed it down into the Bud Light With Lime bottle.
She looked at it for a long time  -- nestled in the bottom,
just starting to get wet from the last drops of beer.
She pushed the cap back on with her fingers – hard –
until the indentations almost cut her thumb.
“I know you will never read this.. but …”
 
She paid her tab and crossed the street to the 37th Street Pier.
Her sandals clomped on the cement blocks. 
She walked steadily without hesitation, like a soldier resigned to his duty.
She stood at the very end, under a full moon, with the lights flashing from the ferris wheel
making random kaleidoscope designs in her eyes as if to hypnotise her
as she watched the water and pondered her fate.
 
She could hear the waves slapping against the pier,
the wind roaring against her ears,
the sounds of other waves moving toward the shore.
She peered down, down at the absolute blackness below her,
the surf undulating with the sparkle of foam just visible for a second, then gone,
swept under the continuous movement of the sea.
From the bar, the bartender watched her raise her arm and swing.
The colors of the ferris wheel flashed on the Bud Light With Lime bottle as she threw it.
“Let go. Let go.”
The bartender watched as she turned back toward the bar,
a silhouette against the moonlight on the water,
the wind lifting her hair into a halo.
 
Here is a picture of the pier that morning, just as the sun was rising over the ocean and the seagulls were waking up. I hope that "Katie" returns someday when she has moved past this heart break and on to her new lilfe.

Red Stars
 
Sweet gum leaves are displayed
throughout the forest;
by the little creek,
along the path to the Hobbit tree,
in the ancient roadbed,
at the top of the whitetail gorge.
 
They spark and are brilliant
when the sun glints through
the canopy and they blaze
like red stars or amber ones,
all their points flashing,
golden stars and crimson ones.
 
Red Stars burn through the woods,
enlivening the trails
and the haunts of the deer,
the small turns of the creek,
with elegant beauty
and abounding luxury.

I love seeing the red stars of autumn.  One walk into The Piney Woods on a colorful fall day, and a person is surrounded by so much crimson it is astonishing.  I love my new camera.  It helps me capture the small miracles of the morning.

Yellow Finches
 
Yellow finches flit from
branch to branch,
gilded with Texas sun,
playing behind light jade
leaves and fingers of bark.
 
Jewels of the sky; they play
and sing; tiny beauties that
shy away in bushes, behind blossoms,
that dance between trees
waltzing with each other in midair.
 
Here and there, a single golden head
can be seen peaking from around the knob
of an oak or twisted ligustrum,
waiting with diamond eyes to trace
the path of the sun in search of seeds.

The finches are too quick for me to get a picture of them, but at certain times of year, small flocks of them travel into The Piney Woods area and play among the trees in the forest itself and in the towns that are part of The Piney Woods.  These birds are so small they are about the size of large fig. Their feathers are dark yellow gold and they pop from tree to tree like animated flowers on the breeze.

A Brooch of Maple
 
Dark maple branches, edged
                with morning gold,
                swirl like the curves
                of Lalilque.
 
The red and orange leaves
                sparkle in bunches,
                sprinkled across the sky
                like Rene’s rubies.
 
Beyond, the translucent blue
                stretches  behind the
                winding leaves, a perfect
                setting to a brooch of maple.

It seems everywhere I look in The Piney Woods, I see jewels.  Art Nouveau jewels. My lens focusses in on one treasure after another in colors that cannot be matched even by the best gem engraver.  It is glorious to walk on pathways through branches and leaves and petals even more beautiful than those imitations created by Faberge.

Velvet Moss
 
The forest floor displays a
carpet woven of velvet moss,
and jade green and sienna leaves;
all braided haphazardly
into an abstract pattern,
rich in color and texture.
 
The moss is a deep, peridot green,
lush and thick; the new leaves
are glassy and polished;
the old ones are textured,
every shade of russet and cocoa,
orange and crimson and purple.
 
The handicraft of Nature creates
an artful showing of the
latest in breathtaking art;
the elegance of creation,
reworking and revising itself
in an eternal, ethereal design.

There are so  many types of "carpets" on the forest floor.  I try to capture as many as I can through photography.  The colors are so vivid. So many shades of green, and blue, and purple. I remember a favorite book when I look at these pictures -- Green Mansions by W. H. Hudson.  In it, he describes the different "rooms" in the forest.  There are rooms -- dark rooms of enchantment with carpet such as this; sunny rooms where there is a break in the trees and lively yellow daisies the size of pea, gray rooms where the gray trunks and gray vines have covered the forest like a canopy. That's the wonderful thing about a walk in The Piney Woods -- you never know what exotic room you will end up in.

The Dark Buck
 
At dusk, my father and I
wind through the thick yupon,
find the remnants of deer paths,
and make our way, slowly to Fawn’s Creek.
 
We pass through the sweet gum
and the low pines and the
wild grapes until we stand
at the edge of a ridge
to gaze across the rivulet
to the far bank.
 
Suddenly, the sounds of hooves
echo in the woods, and a
dark buck leads a herd of deer,
at least seven does and fawns,
across the old lumber road.
 
He stops.  He doesn’t move a muscle.
His eyes pierce. His ears are twitching in alert.
He stares us down as if wondering
what kind of creatures we are.
 
Suddenly,  he bounds after the others,
his curiosity satisfied.
He knows we cannot follow.

The first year we had our farm, we saw many deer. My father and I saw the ones in this poem and The Dark Buck one evening at twilight.  We watched as he sized us up and then shook his head as if to say " you are just piddling little creatures and no threat."  On another occasion, I saw a younger buck who ran alongside me as I walked down the trail, then leaped across the rivulet and stood where an old logging road had created a break in the trees.  He shook his antlers from side to side, scraped the forest floor with his hoof and then raced away..  I made the comment to my father that I thought maybe the deer was saying "hello".  "No", my father said, " he was letting you know he was ready to fight"  I still like to think we made some kind of peaceful connection if only to satisfy his curiosity.

R.A.D.
 
A wrought iron arch looms above
the tangled underbrush
and the gnarled vegetation that grasps it
in a strangely contorted embrace.
 
Rusted now, but still gleaming
with a soft patina, the metal glints
in the afternoon sun.
 
Intricate letters form “R.A.D” –
a declaration of power,
long gone now;
a presence of authority and prestige
like the visage of Ozymandias
abandoned in a vast and twisted
wilderness of green.

The "R.A.D" sign appears to be an abandoned gateway to a ranch that no longer exists.  The vegetation has reclaimed the road that once welcomed visitors through this gate.  I tried to research the letters to figure out what the letters referred to, but I found very little.  There are archways like this one throughout The Piney Woods -- some for operating ranches, both old and new, and some for ranches that have been abandoned or sold off in parcels.  Each time I pass this gateway, I feel sad for what once was and curious to know who lived there.

The Tree With a Face
 
The gnarled face grimaces
at those who pass on the
ancient whitetail trail –
a curved and twisted nose
above a solitary frown,
two eyes, not quite level,
branches that grasp like arms.
 
The Tree With a Face guards
the old path between the forest
and the creek, casting
a shadow of a doubt
on meandering strangers
who do not understand
the ways of the forest
and what is at the end of a trail.

There are many trees in The Piney Woods that seem to peer at strangers.  Some are twisted, some are bent.  They have branches that seem to move when looking out of the corner of the eyes, but are frozen in mid-dance when they are seen with a full gaze -- like some company of folk artists in an ancient performance.

The Perfect Tree
 
In a field of lush wold grass,
underneath a diamond sky,
the Perfect Tree grows;
its umbrella of finely shaped branches
curve down and over the meadow
and its cloak of amber jewels
glints in the sun, like lost treasure
discovered in the blink of an eye;
a momentary lush hoard of wonder,
and then, with one storm,
one blow of wild wind,
the vision vanishes.

Perfect Autumn Tree
 
A perfect autumn tree –
a sweet gum now turned
from peridot and emerald
to citrine, ruby, and amber,
 
It pierces the gray green of the forest,
like the jeweled brooch of a queen,
sparkling, luminous, full of
elegant seasonable fire.

This was a perfect tree... even if it was lopsided.  I have a picture of another one, too, which I will upload when I win the battle with my computer.  There were several perfect trees -- full of totally golden leaves, or red, or orange. ...blazing the the sun, waving in the breeze like flowers 30 feet tall.