Chapel at First Night
Sandra Florence

Night. Stars surface overhead. A dog barks. I've heard him howling into other distant places. A smell of cold air floats behind me into the room. I've been here once before old clothes hung on a line, boxes of books, chairs, old things, the chapel working. The high windows filter in the dark night-old juxtaposed against new. Track lighting and a Mexican chandelier made of tin.

The chapel has offered sanctuary-solace and peacefulness at the edge of the Catalinas. Even in the dark they stand imminent. Other churches far from home, other pilgrimages. There is no sound but the scraping of pens on paper, a button on the wrist of a coat scratches the table, sharp white walls are a boundary of this effort.

My breath comes out in silent waves. I am lucky? Blessed to be here? Jeanne tells me the other foundation supported the original church, blown down by a tornado in 1929. What girl crossed this terrain then-blown across a landscape of creosote and prickly pear.

It is still now. Other voices are quiet, the hard, tough stories of that time. Outside the chapel, cars speed by on the left over dust of the tornado, the dismantled altar and the heart of someone very young. Lights blink in the hills, the occasional red neon. The stars we can see hide more stars that our time and civilization cannot reach-not with speed or even flight.

The remains of a rummage sale-metal chairs, a lamp, old photographs, the chapel working. Who will claim these things? What lives have they served? Fran says, "I have a lot to say about aging but we aren't talking about that." Perhaps we are. Perhaps we will each outgrow this time and place, leave our bodies and take flight into the curve above the adobe walls.

Acknowledgments


1. Jeanne Turner. "The chapel working" was repeated several times in her own work and was very provocative. I liked the ideas it evoked of a living working center to a neighborhood.
2. Fran Weissenberg. Her ideas about chips and cracks were nice and I wove them into my descriptions of the old and new set side by side.
3. Carol Cribbet-Bell. I used her photographs idea and the "hard, tough stories." I imagined that these older stories of people's lives would be hard.
4. Penny Spicer. I used Penny's "walls" holding us and giving us a boundary and a sense of protection. That idea seemed right in the context of the chapel. 5. Bill Plapp. I took his "peacefulness and solace" as well as "the imminent" Catalinas to give a real sense of where we were and what "physical" presence was there.

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