Painted Dresses

The Plain Truth A Commentary by Patricia Hickman I grew up in a household guided by a mother who felt that covering over the past was the best gift she could give her daughter. How I knew as a very young girl that something was off center is a mystery that defies scholarly explanation. Then when night terrors and regressive memories unpacked into my adult life as a terrifying reality, it left me asking questions. Does the human soul possess its own memory, a kind of invisible truth, or does it know things beyond our present consciousness? And if the invisible truth about each one of us is beating its way to the surface, would that explain the compelling power of human yearning? It is certainly that yearning that becomes the story we writers continue to try and tell again and again as we pick through our desires looking for the realities that shaped us. But the yearning that sent me roving out of my hometown eventually dragged me back asking more questions and causing me to wonder if people living all around me were privately asking the same things. Who am I really? Do I have to be in the shape designed for me by human hands or is there some Great Mysterium at work reshaping me, re-parenting me, offering me a respite from a pain-stained life? It took years for me to reach the place that I could live with some obvious conclusions drawn while realizing that most of us have to live most of our lives with most of our questions unanswered. To remember back to the neighborhood where my expedition started and to begin from there to create a narrative worthy of those questions meant I had to resist the temptation to answer them all; instead I wanted to encourage us all to ask out loud the questions inside of us that seem to have been planted in our hearts on purpose, like the tiniest potato seed tucked underground spitting out spidery vines that bud and then root until a spade breaks the surface, the crop finally dragged out. The fact of the matter is that the plain truth is a love child of place and time that can't be birthed one second too soon.Hickman, Patricia is the author of 'Painted Dresses ', published 2008 under ISBN 9781400071999 and ISBN 1400071992.