"Searching for Archibald" by Phyllis Castelli
– “Where are all the old people?”
Churchyard burial plots were first-rate storytellers.
Phyllis Castelli returned home to Henderson, North Carolina, after retirement from her music career. She spends time with her lifetime special interests: writing, music, photography, a pollinator garden, and Black Labrador Retrievers. Phyllis loves to create projects that knit together the beauty of those favorites.
Phyllis’s poems and essays have appeared in Quillkeepers Press, The Avocet, Scarlet Leaf Review, and Tar River Poets, among others. As a young poet, she published Gentle, I Think, a book of poems with pen and ink illustrations.
Author’s Talk
Phyllis Castelli
Through the lens of my camera, I learned that Eastern Bluebirds have blue feet. I have always been an attentive, memorizing sort of girl, yet I was 65 before I looked closely at a Bluebird. I remember all kinds of things: the silkiness of my first dog’s ears, the coolness of my pillow when I lay down to sleep, the smell of rain on pine needles, the echoing harshness of yelling, the bright redness of apples, being stung by a bee on my bare foot, and the sting of broken trust, on and on, an accumulated catalog of my daily life. Now, as an older person with a zillion sensory images safely stashed in my memory, I have learned to lean into what I hope to experience or to listen for a sound I expect to hear: thunder, wind, laughter, or the voice of my granddaughter. I also know this: I have missed or forgotten as much as I have noticed and remembered.
Uncle Durwood died this year in the early spring. Before his death, he asked that I sing two simple favorite hymns at his funeral. The community gathered in the sanctuary of Durwood’s home church, old Union Chapel in Kittrell, NC. From my seat in the choir loft, I watched the facial expressions of our family and Uncle Durwood’s lifelong friends, each a heartfelt memorial of lives shared in a tight-knit rural community. As one, we stood and sat and responded and prayed the familiar rituals of death, people with their own private griefs and fears moving through the service until we spoke together the last amen at Uncle Durwood’s grave.
With every pivotal change in life, there are lessons to be learned. Sometimes, those lessons need to be drilled into our bones, like spelling words in elementary school. With Durwood’s death, I am reminded yet again to listen, to watch with eyes wide open, to allow myself to be saturated with life, and to remember.—Phyllis Castelli
