Prompt #19 - Who Do I Miss?

Prompt #19 - Who Do I Miss?

Who do I miss? I miss my mother.

A few weeks after she died in 1993, I wrote this piece, imaging a final farewell hike. The feeling of abandonment was and is still very real.

Bridal Falls

Through arching green boughs draped with silver moss we ascend to the granite rockface washed with whitewater cascading in tiers from invisible Source to the tumbled boulders below. The rustle of this billowing train whispers in the echoing nave.

We have hiked this trail before. Skirting the Pixie Cups and Fairy Slippers. Tending the Shooting Stars. With child ears I still hear her telling me the understory—Five Fingers, Maidenhair, Bracken and Swordfern. With her eyes I first did see bruised white blossoms 'neath the canopy dappled with growth and decay.

In this box of polished cedar I carry the woman who carried me. Defying the signs, I leave the path, break a pungent trail through fallen timber. Beneath the nurse log suckling twins, I sprinkle her into beckoning Ghostfingers, onto pallid Angel Wings. With the mist rising from Bride's veil, she vanishes into the tapestry of the grove.

I step through the falls into a shaft of light and return alone to the plain.

My mother is not. She is moss. She is cedar. She is jade. I am no one's daughter. I am a space in the lace of Bride's crown. I am shadow dancing in the shimmer of brocade. I am willow pining, water winding home below the falls. I am dogwood centred from all the trees—in a rush of confusion as the nails enter. Say you have chose, not forsaken me. Tell me this pain is ecstasy.

Photo is from Windows Free Background images, photographer unknown.
This looks very similar to Bridal Falls.

"Bridal Falls " Copyright J.M. Bridgeman