June 11, 2007
a flower child in the seventies....
for Brit...
She stood there in her sandals and bell-bottom blue jeans... widely flared legs covered in dozens of hours of painstaking hand embroidery depicting rolling hills, trees, flowers, a boy and girl running hand in hand around the bottom of one leg... and a hill dotted with tiny figures at the feet of three crosses on the other leg... wearing a man’s thin white cotton tank tee-shirt... the old-fashioned kind that her grandfather wore... her blonde hair hanging nearly to her waist in two Indian braids ... red bandana tried around her head like an Indian head-band... silver and turquoise bracelets and rings adorned her wrists and fingers... huge hoop earrings with home-made peace signs fashioned of brown wire hung from her ears... skin browned with the sun... no make-up but the glow of youth and a touch of mascara to darken the eyelashes that were naturally as blonde as her hair... a coloring book in one hand... box of crayons in the other... leather wine-skin filled with water hanging over her shoulder... and she waited on the curb for a taxicab that only charged 50 cents to take her across town to where she wanted to go... her destination the grassy wildflower-filled median that separated the two lanes of traffic going into and leaving town... who can say now why that spot appealed to her... but it did... and when she arrived... she settled herself down on the grass... in the midst of an ocean of summer color and the buzzing of honeybees... and gave herself over to the simple pleasure of coloring the pages before her... feeling the breeze brush over her arms and face... the sun warming her and painting another layer of color on exposed skin... glancing up now and then at an occasional car going past... with the delight and pleasure that came from a mind at ease with herself and the world around her... her mother said she was the original flower child... minus the drugs....
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