Being the Blog of Rebecca Kuder

I am interested in shining light into dark corners.

Sometimes in dark corners you find something you thought lost forever, something smaller than a half a dime…like when I lost my horse charm in a corner in the kitchen, between the cabinet and the plywood under the vinyl tiles.  I thought it was gone, fallen through the floor, into the invisible tunnel that must exist under my house and continued, where else, to the center of the earth.  But my husband Robert put on his caving helmet, turned on the headlight, and found my tiny horse, in a space I didn’t know existed.

That horse was from a junk store.  I was nineteen.  It cost fifty cents.  I was born in the year of the horse.  Fourteen years later, patina of years on myself and on the horse, this half-dime-sized charm bore poetic weight.  The horse was lost.  Then there was the light.  Then the horse was found.  It was romantic; Robert was my hero.

Those vinyl tiles covered a floor I’d had installed after my last Christmas with my ex-husband, after he had moved three thousand miles away…I was able to choose my own floor, black and white tiles, very hard to keep clean, someone warned me.  (They were right.)  The previous floor had gotten squishy under the cat food bowl; I was so absorbed in the break-up, it was awhile before I noticed, but a small leak under the sink had pooled until it saturated the sub floor.  The floor’s structure and the vinyl sheeting needed to be replaced.  Like the marriage, but infinitely less heartbreaking.

I didn’t know, couldn’t, that thereafter, I would be haunted by flood dreams.

Robert shined a light and found the horse, in a place I didn’t know existed.

**

I think in metaphors, and stories.  I think about things like:

raindrops and how they collect on the car window; sitting in the back seat as a child, I would watch raindrops cling to the window, and I’d name each drop, as it ran down to meet the others and became bigger and bigger and they all merged into a blob, a community of raindrops, joining, then diving together, collaboratively, into the well at the bottom, where the window goes when you roll it down, back in the days when you had to turn a handle to roll down a car window… and when one of the raindrops would begin its descent, it seemed the raindrop had become brave, and started the eventual adventure to the place it ultimately had to go, gravity being non-negotiable, but still, each drop seemed to choose when it would go, pick a path to follow.  Some ambled, some sped ahead, fearless.  I’m sure it was simple science, the water in the drop would reach a certain mass and the wind outside the car plus gravity would act upon the drop, and it would run down the only path it could, based on its specific calculations.

Okay: one, two, three, go!

As a child, I would spend time, in a sense, with each drop, by naming them.  It seemed important.  Watching, witnessing their courage.

It occurs to me that this watching and naming of raindrops as they flow down the car window is one way of being an artist.

So observe the tiny poetry of nature, of physics, and mark time as it passes.