by Garry Spotts

Created on: July 12, 2009

Remembering: MaVila's Silent Dance

Darkness flooded the house like the blanket of slumber. Its floors creeked and walls popped as its wooden frame tossed in its sleep. The rooms filled with people was immersed in silence. All slept.

All slept, but one. From the night shrouded street a lone lamp tossed its soft, supple shafts of light into the living room window. There amid the faintest and familiar hint of stale Nestle crunch bars two dark figures sat huddled together. Ma Vi'la held her boy child to her breast and slowly rocked backward and swung forward.

That child, lie there bundled in her arms struggling for each breath. A biting wheeze filled the silence between the creeking chair that bore their weight. Here in that chair many strangling nights were rocked away as the air that would escape this boychild never to return was held into him by Ma Vi'la's secure, loving hold. Morning would never come on these days and she would remain in that chair rocking, rocking, rocking...

She would not sleep there, his air may retreat and never return. Her waking eyes in the misty blackness of the room witnesses the barest traces, the shadowy outlines of the T.V., the Mother In-Law Tongue plant beside the African Violet and the Wandering Jew near the window, the mantle and the door way to the hall.

In the darkness, a boychild hugged so near Ma Vi'la's chest that she breathed for him. There he felt so near to love that there was no separation. She was that love that bound him to life and there in the swaying of the mid night those rockers that creased the floor became music to him. A love song played on wood, each creek a note, each pop of the rocker a combination of chords so rich with harmony that never would that sound be void of meaning.

The swaying was the dance to the music rising from that sacred place in mother's arms. Love's Silent Dance assured the boychild of his life, when he feared, Ma Vi'la would say "You can't die from asthma." "No, baby you don't have a disease." She sang that song to his frightened eyes as they wandered in the fear that he may never rock in this place again. Bathed in the terror that his wheezes were the melodies of a death song, She washed him with hope for long life. And she kept on rocking...

She rocked til fear gave way to maternal favor... She rocked til the strangled noises of the boychild's constricting chest gave way to eternal winds of peace and he was baptized in the joy of MaVila's scent, the aroma of life, and emerged a man whose life was kept by the safety found in a loving mother's bosom.

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