The Līgo Haibun Challenge is hosted by  Ye Pirate and Ese – Penny and Nightlake are taking some time to work on other projects – it’s great to be busy!

This week’s is word prompt week, either:

Treasure or Despair

Ye Pirate has requested that we use the word itself in our haibun, as well as including a concrete location! Such a challenge must be met! 🙂

I am choosing Treasure – but what kind, I hear you ask…? Read on to find out!

Please do go and check out the other entries by visiting the co-hosts’ blogs and finding the InLinkz linky thing! There are some very talented writers out there… I will visit each and every one as soon as I can!

*****

– Beyond Measure –

Sometimes, we don’t truly comprehend how unanswered questions torment us, until the mystery is solved. I speak from experience. I speak from hauling myself up, what seemed to be at times, an almost perpendicular learning curve this year. I speak from the standpoint of recognising what it means when we talk about not knowing what lies around the corner for us.

If a soothsayer had warned me on New Year’s Day that I would have lost my lovely dad to a sudden and unexpected illness, that I would have had to watch him die over 12 excruciating days, that I would have been there to witness his passing, that I would read a eulogy at his funeral…. well, I would have asked if his crystal ball, runes, tea leaves and the like had suffered a malfunction. It is good that we don’t know what is coming.

This is not a plea for sympathy. We all experience this kind of loss, these sorts of awful situations – the only certainty in life, is death.

But there are upsides that have come my way, over time. For all of my life, I have wondered how, and when, my parents met. I never felt I could ask, since they divorced when I was so very young. I didn’t want to poke sticks in a hornets’ nest (see, I was imagining the worst). But I plucked up the courage to ask the other day. The worst, after all, had already happened.

My treasure is two-fold. I learned that they met at a dance, at the Walker Hall in Edgbaston, Birmingham. It still exists. It’s a beautiful place. It suits what I continued to learn about what brought them together. It makes me smile. I also, completely by accident, found a book of poetry that my dad had kept for almost 44 years – a gift from my mum to him, on his 17th birthday. I am struggling to describe how much this means to me. To know beyond doubt that for a brief and sparkling time, they were in love.

I have felt that my history has been so full of mist and fog – and I had grown used to the not knowing. Now it feels as if a weight has been lifted.

 

secrets are revealed

in words spoken, scribed and read

no more shadows here