Piper, Once & Again
Page 26
Piper said hello to Kayla without waiting for her to look up and acknowledge her, and gave John a hug. She held him close and felt that he had lost weight since their last visit.
“You look great, John,” she said as she stood back and held him at arm’s length.
He looked bashful then and said, “Oh? Thanks!”
Kayla forced a smile on her flawlessly made-up face. Piper had hoped that Kayla would soften, and learn to see life as something to enjoy rather than something to conquer. She also remembered what it took for her to soften, and knew that not everyone sees second chances as miracles. John informed Piper via email a month before to say that Kayla’s cancer was back, this time in the liver.
“Hi. Beautiful day,” Kayla said without looking directly at Piper.
Piper responded, “Yes, it sure is.”
Their conversations were never more than small talk and false pleasantries and so she led them toward the stable, noticing that Kayla had worn high heels to the farm. She invited her to take a seat in the heated observation room, which had a coffee maker, a television, and a sofa, luxuries most stables didn’t have.
The boys relaxed a little bit and stood on tiptoes to peer into the stalls of the giant horses they were excited to see. John watched Piper as she admired the curiosity and eagerness of the twins. He knew how she had longed for children of her own, but knew that her riding school provided for lots of relationships with little ones whose lives would be forever bettered for having known her.
“Can we ride now?” one of the boys asked.
Piper nodded and took two lead lines down from the hook on the wall near the rear door of the twenty-five-stall stable that had for a short time been the winery building.
“Let’s go get you a couple of ponies your size, like we did last time. What do you say?” she asked them. Their little faces brightened as they nodded their approval. She handed them each a cotton lead line and instructed them to go into the feed room and get a scoop of grain to put into the coffee can that hung by baling twine on the wall. They hurried inside and quarreled over which one would scoop the grain and which one would hold the can.
She looked at John who said, “Kids!” They shared a laugh and a bond that was obvious to everyone who saw them together.
After the kids caught the ponies in the paddock, she talked them through a thorough grooming and helped them tack up; tasks that should only take ten or fifteen minutes, instead taking a half hour.
“Living in the moment. You should try it sometime, John,” she teased.
“Interesting concept. Did you come up with that on your own?” he teased back.
It was a defining moment in his career—a concept he pioneered back in the early 2000s which created a movement in the holistic healing world to help people take control of their lives, their anxiety, their pain. It was the very concept that had transformed Piper’s life and helped her fulfill her dreams.
The boys mounted Cheerios and Triscuit, two Chincoteague ponies Piper had bid on while attending a pony-penning day auction in Virginia on a trip with Sharon and her daughters two years earlier. She told the children they could ride out in the meadow if they promised to keep it to a trot. They nodded their helmet-clad heads and she led the way. John followed with his camera, the fall foliage the perfect backdrop for pictures he would share with the boys’ mother.
As they watched the ponies trotting in zig-zag lines for the inexperienced riders, John said suddenly, “I almost forgot, geez. They say the memory is the first thing to go.” He reached into his coat pocket and took out a folded piece of paper.
She took it from him and asked, “What is it?”
“It’s something you inspired me to write.”
Her furrowed brow begged for more information.
“It’s a poem, for you.” John handed her an envelope with a single folded page inside.
“A poem? For me?” she asked, genuinely surprised.
He couldn’t help himself then. He said, “Maybe it’s the hearing that’s the first thing to go.”
She lovingly pinched his arm and unfolded the paper. He watched as her eyes moved from side to side while she read. When she finished she looked up at him and said with a nod of heartfelt approval, “Thank you, John. It means more than you know. When did you start writing poetry?”
He looked up at the sky as if he was searching far back in his memory.
“When I learned that Kayla was sick again. I remembered how writing helped you get through everything and look what it did for you. I wrote a lot for Kayla and my mother. I wrote for myself and this one I wrote for you.”
She thanked him again, refolding the paper and putting it into her coat pocket. “It’s really quite good, my old friend.”
Chapter 31
Piper, Once & Again
By J.A. Corcoran, Jr.
Love settles on wisdom’s shoulders like a cloak
She wears with pride, so familiar, a dear friend
Each line on her face a story untold
Every tear cultivating a tale
Youth sneers at their elders so sure are they
“Time will never catch them,” she whispers
The widow at the gate watching
As children catch ponies in the meadow
Her own never born
Memories of a lost love fill her
She hears him call her on the wind
Time, she knows, stops for no one
This journey a beautiful gift
He has waited lifetimes
But she will not make haste
“Have patience,” she laughs
It’s Almost time, my love,
Almost
Piper placed the sheet of paper she had read a hundred times over the years in her nightstand and gently closed the drawer. She touched Paul’s face in the photo that sat by her bed as she had every night over the last 30 years. She crawled under her covers and settled on her side. As she lay there in her bed, the moon a nightlight outside her window, she thanked God for all the blessings in her life and drifted steadily to that state between waking and sleeping, feeling the hand on her shoulder. I am here, love, and I am so proud of you. My beautiful Piper, my heart of hearts. I am waiting.
No! No! Wait! Piper sat up straight in bed and felt her heart beating in her chest, her hair hanging down in her face. She grounded herself. She drew a deep and gratitude-filled breath. She wasn’t an old woman. She hadn’t allowed the solitude to seep into her veins so deeply that she closed herself off from living.
No. She decided that life didn’t happen to her. Indeed, she happened to life. She had become open to all the surprises the universe wanted to show her.
Thank you, thank you. Thank you.
She eased herself back down onto her pillow and rolled onto her side. John’s warm hand slipped into hers and she felt a tear slip down her cheek as she drifted off again into that ceaseless ocean that sometimes gives and sometimes takes away.