MindSpinner

I’m postponing my spring wildflower walk until next weekend.

The weather’s not quite right. First there was the storm that brought the cold.

Today there is the snow.

I had something a little different in mind .

“We need a picture of you when you were a cheerleader,” my student told me, sharing the idea for the feature article. We’re getting pictures of Mrs. M and Ms. S, too. Then we want to take pictures of all of you in our cheerleading uniforms - then and now.” She was all enthusiasm.

I tried to envision me in a cheerleading uniform now, with a little shudder reserved especially for my thighs.

I wasn’t a real cheerleader. I was never a ribbons and bows girl, a doer of back flips, or a death-defying flyer atop a tower of girls. We were a simple lot, we cheerleaders at a tiny school in the mountains. Our mothers made our uniforms, or we did - I made mine - and we jumped and whooped and hollered and performed maybe a dozen simple cheers. I was a cheerleader because cheerleaders got to go to all the basketball games, home and away, and I could jump and yell “Umph! Ungawah! Falcons got the soul power!” better than I could shoot a basketball in a game.

At one time, there was a picture of me in a cheerleading uniform, back in 1974. I can almost remember it. My hair is long and straight, a bronze-streaked blond I will never see again except from a bottle. The uniform is a simple, solid maroon jumper over a gold shirt. I look as if I might have crawled right out from under a collard leaf, so unsophisticated am I in this picture, at thirteen years old.

Dutifully, I looked through two albums tonight, though I haven’t seen this picture in years. Sure enough, it is not there. It may be in one of my mother’s albums, back in the mountains, in her house not a mile from the smallest school in the entire state of Georgia, where I was, for one whole basketball season, a cheerleader.

I noticed, as I scanned photograph upon photograph, that the old Polaroids - the ones we children loved to see pop out from the camera, the images emerging from the smelly film like ghosts to become bright familiar faces - are growing dark now. We are all receding, as if someone is slowly dimming the lights around birthday party tables and some lasting night is falling over the lake, the mountain, the pasture, and the horse I used to ride in midafternoon.

Next weekend, as long as it’s not raining, I’m planning an excursion to the restored Shaker Village that is one of my favorite places to go. I won’t stay the night this time but will just drive up early, buy a ticket, and tell the person at the ticket desk that I’ll be walking the wildflower trail that crosses the fields, winds through the woods, then along the river gorge and finally down to the winter home of the Dixie Belle, the riverboat that offers river tours beginning later this month. Spring wildflowers should be in bloom along the trail and through the village. I’ll be taking the wonderful camera and re-taking pictures I lost last year when my laptop expired. I’ll find the tree that makes a little house out of its arching branches, next to an old stone chimney. Spring will be the same, but the walk will be utterly different, because I will be alone this time. And the pictures will be different, too, because they will be of horses and buildings and apple blossoms and wildflowers but not the companion who walked with me on an idyllic day.

It will all still be beautiful, I tell myself. Spring comes every year. So I’m going for that walk again. I will make that walk my spring ritual. I will don my jeans, my walking shoes, and my backpack camera bag and set off. I will take a sandwich for lunch and Kleenex in case it is the eye, not the lens, that blurs.