“Marie Curie in Easton”
Whether
the children were enjoying the space, she had little doubt.
Still,
she felt a curious dread as she wandered the museum,
filled
with posters, screens and virtual spaces.
It
all seemed so busy, so frivolous.
She
recalled with fondness her humble shed, not a proper laboratory to be sure,
hot
in summer, drafty in winter, leaky when it rained,
but
suited to the tasks of a curious mind,
quiet
and full of possibility.
What
she wouldn’t give to be back in the Warsaw of her childhood
at
her beloved Flying University studying in secret
simply
for the love of learning. “If simplicity is the sign of truth,”
she
wondered looking around, “where had it flown?”
Out
of the side of her eye she spied a show set in a picture frame
hanging by itself in a corner playing to no one, the dulcet tones of a minister’s voice
explaining how crayons are made. She watched mesmerized as hot wax, hardener and
pigment popped up into handfuls of bright yellow sticks.
Could
it be that it is the noise of the past that shames us;
the
present requiring nothing more than our faith? This moment,
she
thought, rolling a crayon in her palm as she once rolled
a
slender cylinder of radium, is volatile, violable waiting to be discovered.
“Linus
Pauling in Schnecksville”
After
a long day of toying with the quantum mechanics
of
chemical bonding, nothing hit the spot quite like
fresh-made
ice cream, so Linus put on his beret
and
set out for Crystal Spring dairy.
Past
baseball fields and playgrounds
past
the community college and the diner
the
elementary school, the fire hall, the post office, and the bank,
past
the bison grazing on game preserve lands
He
did not call at the parsonage, though he knew
the
minister would be at home, nor at the Grange,
the
hardware store, or the IGA. He slowed as he passed
the
cemetery by the church but kept on going.
When
he got to the farm, he ordered a cone, the perfect emulsion--
milk,
cream and sugar overrun with air and whipped into a dense, cold foam
that when consumed too quickly constricted then warmed the blood vessels, sending
signals of pain along the trigeminal nerve.
As
he stood by the fence looking at the wide open acres
where
wind would blow snow into wild, white dunes come winter,
he
thought, “The best way to have a lot of ideas,”
“was
to give the mind plenty of space.”
Just
then a Maltese cat jumped onto his shoulder
snapping
him out of his reverie. He was sure that vanilla
was
the best flavour but headed back inside to get a second cone
this
time a chocolate to account for subjective error.
Lara Dolphin is an attorney, nurse, wife and mom of four amazing kids; she is exhausted and elated most of the time.
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