Sierra V. Fedorko

Swan Song of a Scarecrow has been 7 months in the making, but I primarily composed it through November, December, and early January. However, during the height of the Christmas holidays I put  Swan Song of a Scarecrow aside. It was a time for gingerbread houses, Frosty the Snowman, a long road trip to my childhood home, copious amounts of coffee, the Swan Lake Barbie movie, time with my sisters, watching our children play, and just being together.

It is a gift to have a childhood home I enjoy returning to…and a gift to feel it grow distant and tinged with nostalgia the older I get. The roads are different, the playhouse colors are bright blue and yellow instead of purple and yellow, and so many of our old “stomping grounds” don’t exist anymore.

Time just passes.

Somewhere out there we buried old dishes for our kids to find one day. Couldn’t we have thought of something a tad more clever…like dad’s first aid box full of fake money? Yeah, we found that as kids–it was our inspiration! But our Poor Kids will never be finding those dishes, hahaha! We dug the hole in a ditch, and the ditch is long-gone. Good luck, kids. You’re gonna need it, ha!

Anyway, I took a walk with my sisters and their husbands as we all have had quite a bit of history here at one time or another. When we passed by the lake, the rickety fishing dock had been replaced. But more striking is the color of the water in the lake now. It is a strange, murky Listerine blue. I remember being so struck by it on that walk.

Even the water has changed. How is that possible, you know?

But more than all the changes, the thing that felt like a tightness in my chest, was seeing all the pictures on the walls in our old sister room as if time hadn’t moved at all. As though it wasn’t being allowed to move. That felt sad and hollow. Time had moved. And it had been good. Not perfect, but full of life. That room felt anything but. It felt stale. Tight. Constricting.

For many trips back home, those drawings had been a welcome sight, a fun look back. (And there’s one particular JH comic that deserves a good framing, heheheee.) But I wanted our aged room to continue aging. The story wasn’t over!

My older sister is quite an artist, and during that Christmas gathering you could find her encouraging painting alongside her nieces and nephews, or suggesting grand adventures of which you swing a stick around and point out rocks, and I’m caught on video being SUCH A GRUMP about it. And my younger sister is somehow not there…(or was she?), but she still gets labeled much cooler than me. Hahahahahaa!

Anyway, paintings were painted. And my artistic, adventurous sister labeled each one with the respective niece and nephew names. I set the paintings aside as they dried. Then before the long drive home, I taped the drawings to open space on the old walls in our room. For me. For us. For mom. Most especially for Mom.

Those paintings are the last thing I saw before turning off the light, walking down the hallway, away from our old room, and back to time as it was–grown, growing, vibrant, imperfect, in progress. I smiled. This was right.

The walls felt more alive.

Just like us.

Alive.

With those new paintings (and all the pictures and things we add in years to come), the walls get to come along with the times. They get to tell the life story rather than stay a melancholy shadow of good memories.

Life was and is, and it’s always a bittersweet mixture of both.

I express Swan Song of a Scarecrow in reverse chronology and with that comes contemplative poems on how time moves, how it feels moving, and how I feel in its movement. Soon after returning from our Christmas family holiday, I wrote Stowaway which highlights much of that tension.

Growing ups feels like a fragile business sometimes. But just as it is a gift to watch my children grow, it is a gift for me to keep growing up, too. All the stories around me, the new ones in my arms, and those continued in my life speak of God’s love, kindness, and power endlessly.

You have probably also felt a Stowaway at some point or another in your own story. Life is like that. We’re strangers in it. But I don’t think being a stranger is a bad thing. I think being a stranger can simply mean we are growing up, and the story is going on, and we’ve chosen to get on with the story, too.

When I stowed away sunflower seeds to the desert, I was a woman, no longer a girl. Even the water had somehow changed in the lake I swam in as a child. Taped memories felt like another life. The playhouse like a world away.

But I watched my boy play happily in the place I grew up happy, too. And the faithful wedding arbor, by wind, but not bowed over (us too), there and holding fast while new stories spun in sand angels and bare feet, in laughter on the back porch between siblings turned aunts and uncles, in a mom and dad all grandma and grandpa, in me now a woman and mother.

(Were the seeds stowaways, or was I?)

And I feel the decades sharp into my lungs, a flower gardener knowing secret passageways of desert by heart. Strange how it all feels colliding.

But as I shut off the lights to our old room, to my past life–it is the fresh dried paintings by our own children taped up to our old walls which cheer the story on. 

Nothing had really ended, had it?

-S.V.F. (Stowaway from Swan Song of a Scarecrow)