Pablo Michaels Week 94: Spring Solstice

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Pablo Michael’s Picture Choice: Both

Title: Spring Solstice

I returned to the family acreage I once called home during the billowing bubble of construction defined by the prosperous economic times. I gazed on the newly planted corn fields, the seedlings light green almost chartreuse. I had been summoned by my sister to sign the appropriate papers to the last plot of our farm, previously held in trust. It was to be sold to a developer of exclusive custom built homes. She wanted money not memories from our youth. I on the other hand regretted this sale. Too many secret stories occurred in my formative years; the seed sown here, the origins of my dreams. Today when I relate my tales, people question whether they are fact or fiction. My family and few friends when I was growing up chose to think I was lost in a den of self-indulgence hogwash.

It was too appropriate the papers were to be signed in April, the month my stories began to germinate, like my fantasies with our new hired farm hand, Jamison. He was hired early in the season as extra help when my parents underestimated the demand for corn from the market. My father couldn’t rely on his less than physically athletic son working before and after school and weekends to get the crop in. My dad still refused to teach me how to drive the tractor, citing my clumsiness and immaturity, compared to the other fourteen–year-old boys my own age adept at operating farm equipment. Hiring Jamison as a year-round handyman was his solution to my incompetence and increasing the farm profits, but the new help also spawned my enthusiasm in life for the first time.

I walked towards our deserted house. From a distance it was not in shambles yet but looked more like a house from a different era. I heard chimes blowing in the breeze. Could they be the chimes I coveted until I left? I ran closer to find out. Yes. There they swayed in symphonic motion to the spring breeze. I counted and inspected every set. Some were missing the pendulums or individual pipes but all twenty-one sets reflected the growing sunlight of the longer days. Every time I bought a new one, Jamison helped me hang them. My disgruntled parents hated hearing the sound they made late at night. I received countless complaints from my older sister, Elena, too. But Jamison thought they were cool. So I started hanging out with my father and him when they did the chores, even helping for a change when Jamison asked.

Describing Jamison through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old boy is not easy when it’s your own emotionally full-charged eyes. He looked like he was ten years younger than my dad at age forty, absent the potato sack belly from eating too well or indulging in beers after a hard physical day of work. Straight, sun-bleached auburn hair, long enough in length and powder-puff fineness to rise from a lift in the wind. Bronze skin, slightly textured from the elements. Light green eyes the color of new leaves on the black oak tree, shading our house. I relished in the clothes he wore, tight 401 Levis, his crotch neatly defined against his inner left muscle toned thigh, his butt perfectly billowing two firm half-moons. He wore his blue denim work shirts opened three buttons from his neck, displaying a small patch of dark curly hair. The manner in which he walked and his posture did not fit his status at all. He walked and behaved like a gentleman or a prince to my mother, Elena and my dad. Only to me did he reveal a part of his mystique, a sixth sense intuitively building in me but not fully developed at the age I was. But more than his physical appearance was how he noticed me whether he was supposed to or not when my parents weren’t around. It was something in his glance, the likes of which I live and love by now.

Every year, after the last acreage had been sown with seed and when Spring Solstice had arrived, our family celebrated this event, taking Elena and me to our favorite place for a celebration. The first year Jamison joined us, he crafted a white daisy garland to adorn Elena’s soft auburn hair and a kite for me of near rainbow spectrum. While Jamison placated Elena’s adulation, I flew the kite in the meadow, my fantasies soaring in the sky when the wind carried it to lofty heights. I wished I was as tall, handsome and charismatic, like Jamison gliding high above the valley where we lived, free to travel from ocean to ocean, like in the stories he often detailed.

I safely preserved the kite to fly for each Solstice for the next four years. When I turned eighteen I asked Jamison a question I thought simple. “I always thought the colors of the kite represented the colors of the rainbow until this year. But it’s missing purple. Why is that color not there?”

“I thought you’d never ask.” Jamison spoke, a playful tone in his voice. “Purple is a special color to be revered with admiration and treasured by only a select few. Many people think this color is one of confusion and mystery, or you could say god. But there is also a meaning originating in the chakras color scheme. Purple is your personal oneness with the universe, wisdom. I have known some men like me who live and die to protect purple as the color that flows in their blood, guiding them in pursuits to love and be loved. I left that color out specifically with you in mind. Because I saw you had purple blooming in you when I first arrived. Now that you’ve arrived at an age of physical maturity, you might be able to comprehend that color was flying with your kite since you were fourteen.”

Elena interrupted, begging Jamison’s attention.

He started walking back to the grove of trees where Elena waited. “And that is one reason why you fly a rainbow kite.” He left to placate Elena’s amorous crush, leaving me unhinged with more questions needing answers than he had time for that day.

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Pablo Michaels writes LGBT fiction and has published with Naughty Nights Press, http://naughtynightspress.blogspot.com You can follow him at @bell2mike

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