The Great Balm

It was the first week of June, in the year 1993. I remember crabapple trees blooming speckling the Appalachian hills with their myriad blossoms of white and pale pink. Insects whirred in the summer air. Nature displayed it’s cyclic presentation as it always had, year after year, but for me, that particular day June 6, 1993 was monumental because the prison gates opened discharging me into the world - sending me to the teeming wonders - all that I had missed for ten years. A decade behind the same walls that once held Tokyo Rose and Billie Holliday- The Federal Penitentiary for Women in Alderson, West Virginia loathsome to my memory and yet, the irony of it is in the landscape- so stunningly beautiful, such serenity, in the midst of so much pain. Now Amtrak was to take me home, to my mother grown old and frail - the only family that remained of the ones who cared; my wise father and grandmother - dead. Looking out of the window I saw the familiarity of cornfields and Illinois prairie and I knew that this was home. Jaded, but at the same time naïve, (always the paradox.) I believed as so many convicts do that all troubles are left behind, and that old patterns are broken on the day of release. I believed that I was the proverbial butterfly (metamorphosed) from my cocoon. I was totally unprepared for the institutionalization that set in, the aftershocks of captivity bringing with it the fear -consuming, overpowering. The fear with it’s feelings of inadequacy and unacceptance. And so, I became mired in the ugly wreckage of a life most bizarre believing nothing was left worthy of salvage loneliness and self-pity became my only companions and I left all hope far behind shunning it as a ludicrous thing, unattainable. My perspectives seemed zero, and I believed that only my body walked free and stepped out from Alderson, while my spirit stayed behind a phantom, among the ancient brick and those halls that I mopped thousands of times. But then, I remembered, from all my reading that once a poet had written, “Hope is a tattered flag.” And now I know of what he thinks, for tatters can be mended not only “time” but “LOVE” the great balm. Unannounced and unexpected light permeates the blackened regions of a despairing heart. Suffocating fog lifts and sufficient good fortune comes to sustain faith- longer and longer. Thus, I sat at the bar a familiar place, immersed in a dreadful quagmire despairing. Then, from the kitchen- bringing my food an unlikely illumination unnoticed by everyone- plain. Yet somehow, I could not comprehend- I knew... This, my clinched angel in disguise - a cook in a greasy shirt, greasy cap, his entire countenance speaking of poverty and of a young life truly hard. He, a man without glamour, but with eyes radiating purity and with an uncanny power to uplift smiling, always smiling, in spite of it all, unpretentious, undaunted by realities harsh- My saviour. Now, we have been married for several months, months of dramatic changes, my husband no longer a slave, to sixteen hour days captive to a stinking hot kitchen. No longer one of the disenfranchised kept down and regarded as good for nothing only cheap labor. No longer a poor wetback without papers, speaking only Spanish no longer uneducated and an outsider. He is Pedro Rodriguez- Muñoz a man, with a worthy position in life, and now a legal resident of the U.S. And I, myself, no longer alone no longer afraid of my station in life, having been burdened so long by one youthful mistake many years ago, no longer unable to bear repercussions the ones felt for sixteen years, no longer pressed down by that awful label, “ex-con.” No longer feeling like a leper, unloved. No longer paranoid as to everyone’s opinions of me, and bitter about that large gap in my life, what should have been my best years wasted and unfulfilled. I am Annette Rodriguez, a woman with a worthy position in life. My civil liberties regained, I now focus on possibilities not loss. Now, my husband and I feel emancipated. Our gift to one another love, much more than a green card, and an appreciation for culture, the opportunity to finish high school, and the ability to drive that I taught him. And this gift of love, to me, is more than security, respectability, friendship, and the filling of a void. Because now we venture forth without trepidation embarking on a new direction, an adventure exciting and fresh. Now, my husband and I are the proverbial butterfly soaring and unfettered,. He, no longer the barefoot, hungry child in the slums of San Luis Potosi, Mexico the one who had to leave school at the age of 13 and help support his family. And I am no longer #38725-066 owned by the government, mere property of the Bureau of Prisons. Now an invigorating cheer fills our days for we are free to pursue life as we choose, collecting fossils by a riverbed, romping with our Labrador pup, Pachuco and listening to a blues band no longer groping but grasping that thing so often elusive called happiness. * An older poem from the 1990's - largely autobiographical at the time, but so much more has happened since, this is mere memory now.