Dr Dolly’s Mine Your Memories Column #2
Melting Magic – Excerpt from Imperfect Love
By Dolly Haik-Adams Berthelot © 2021
Transcript
Hello, I’m Dolly Haik-Adams Berthelot, also known professionally as Dr. Dolly. I am an author, independent writer, editor and communication consultant, a former professor, daily newspaper editor, and internationally published magazine freelancer.
As part of my March Mine Your Memories Internet offerings to help you with Your Disaster and other Life Stories, I’m about to read a brief excerpt from a final chapter of my soon-to-be-published memoir, IMPERFECT LOVE. The rather poetic prose in this snippet shows my senses awakened by an entirely new exposure.
Let’s call this excerpt MELTING MAGIC.
Close attention to melting ice suggests blessings in the burdens of the rare Pensacola, Florida, ice storm of 2014, during my second full year as a widow after a long marriage.
Loneliness and grief may never be totally final, but I’m glad for every day, and embrace each simple pleasure. Today is all any of us have.
And special moments continue to amaze me, even when brought by an historic and quite intrusive ice storm. Although native Southerners Ron and I had briefly lived in a few snowy climates, I had never before experienced a sudden thaw. Two days after the rare ice storm, with a frigid white coat lingering on my bungalow’s hip roof and frozen yard, I stepped outside into the sunshine that had been hiding for days. Blinding sunlight sparkled on the surrounding live oaks; their sprawling, muscular arms suddenly shook off the foreign substance and dripped like rain. But the sound, the sound was totally different from rain, astounding, musical, like nothing I had ever heard. It was a melting symphony! Has any great composer been inspired by such a glorious cacophony? Had any musician tried to capture it? If only, in that magic moment, I had been Mozart or Vivaldi or Stravinsky or even Glass.…
That afternoon, after days trapped inside by unusable streets and interstate highways, I inched across town for a crucial medical test, the final 3-day EKG process for my Atrial Fibrillation. Near the hospital parking lot, I heard quite different rhythms emanating from the swift melting of three much smaller trees. That commercial landscape is more hardscape and manicured lawn, not a lush jungle like my yard. As these skinny trees shook off their ice, I reveled in the syncopated snap, crackle, and pop. It sounded like some radioactive Rice Krispy’s! My giant oaks had premiered a classical orchestra. This was a finger-snapping jazz trio.
Who knew melting could be so marvelous!