When Doves Cry

NOT the Prince song...but I do love Prince (like how I love Stevie Wonder--they PLAY all instruments, you gotta respect that-oh, and if you've never heard Prince's song "The Pope" you are hurting deeply and not aware of it yet. It is the most bootyshakin' song EVER.)  Back to doves crying, mourning actually. Today was the first day in what seems like forever that it didn't rain.  The sun peeked out about noon while I was at my sisters' house, listening to her bitch someone out on the phone for SERIOUSLY the entire time I was there. Glad I stopped by. I left there and sort of had this lump in my chest about going home and sitting at the computer again, sending out my resume exactly 62 times and checking my emails for some kind of response, something, throw me a bone for fucks sake.....Nada.  I decide to forego another day of looking up long, cool adjectives to explain to my future employer just why he/she should hire me---and instead I go in the backyard to discover the flat of Impatiens I'd bought several weeks ago, when there was  just a hint of sun. PERFECT! I can spend my afternoon planting those 2 flats--which I believe is like 60 or 70 individual flowers. I get on my gardening gear--which is similar to my workout clothes...I even use my new Nike's to tramp around in the dirt. No kneeling pad (smile), no good gardening tools, just a pair of gloves and a beat up trowel.  I'm a rogue gardener! And listen people, I am also a single woman....who knows when someone might "pop by", some old boyfriend or something, the contractor a few doors down I have been flirting with--HE will not find me in some lame floppy hat with like, a faded pair of overalls on that make my ass look square and really, really unattractive on every level. Nope, I stick with gardening in yoga pants. Does anyone ever come by though? Really, come on? Hell no...nobody but the neighbor who, go figure, happens to double as my landlord. Ugh!
Didn't I bring up doves.....? Yes. "Stay on track" my inner voice gripes at me. I am practicing being really mindful of the fact that I start writing and then spin all the fuck around so that nothing at all, in a creative sense, flows. I am jotting down this fact on a 3x5 card and sticking it to the computer screen. Okay, the doves.  In mid-bend-over-to-dig-a-hole-for-a-flower, I hear the mourning of a few doves that seem to follow me at every home I've had since 2003,  just before my father died. You might ask, "Shit woman, why do you move around so Goddamn much?" Well, see, all that moving around is (was?) tied up with my dad being ill and my mother, having always had her children near her, asking me to "please move in with me, you and the Doodlebug" a few days after my dad died. We did. And doves began to build nests on and around the patio area of our family home. My mother is mourning my dad and doesn't notice them. The last thing on her mind are birds.  But I am convinced my father has sent these creatures to us, a reminder, a nudge maybe..."I am right here". I recall my childhood and how he spoke of "mourning doves" and their incessant lament, "wooo....woooo....wooooo" the human version of "Where are you my dear lover?" Needless to say, now with my mother gone too, I am positively sure that the doves today, on the phone lines above my garden were little guides from both of them. And I just so happen to be planting my mom's flower-bed fave: the Impatien. Here I am, digging holes like I'm a miner, building up a nice little sweat, intermittently chatting with Mr. Landlord about what a good tenant I am (I'll fool him when I break the news that I am OUT OF WORK!) and it all kinda comes together....the doves, the flowers, the fact that exactly a year ago today I had a conversation with my mother about her coming to us, when she passed on, and I asked her to talk to Dad up there about the doves...and to please, promise to come to me through those birds. She sort of laughed it off but somewhere between 2003-and that moment, she had started to believe in the doves, maybe they were a little sign from her husband of 54 years. What was the harm in believing that? Since she converted to Catholicism for my father back when she married him at 16, she had believed in the Church, the absolute infallibility of the Pope, the Transubstantiation of the Eucharist. Why not throw in the magic of a few birds, for crying outloud? Later on in the year, April.... she was lying in bed, confined, she had made her peace with everyone she loved, had Confession, Communion and her Rosary constantly dangled from her wrist; my father's wedding band safety-pinned to EVERY blouse she wore, pajamas included. The house FULL TO OVERFLOWING with friends of hers, friends of ours, her 12 children around her, our children...and our children's children... I look back and I was so....proud? Not sure if that is the right word.....but I was so overcome at the fact that someone could be dying a completely natural death, in the comfort of her own home, with not a doctor around--just her kids, all of us finding a spot on her twin-sized hospital bed right next to her, literally in bed with her, breathing her breath, finding a place on her body that wasn't being touched by another family member. My niece singing "Over the Rainbow". I noticed that the eldest of the family suddenly seemed to me like my mothers' keeper, her bodyguard in a way, as he stroked her golden hair and kissed her closed eyes.
When she passed I walked outside to get some air, and wouldn't you fucking believe it...two doves right there in front of me, on a tree branch, together, singing their song.
Let's see if I can get these damned Impatiens to grow like my mom could. Keep your eyes open...Always.