Scars: Some are visible, some are not
I.
The first scar I remember was a good one. It is my smallpox vaccination. I don’t remember how old I was but the vaccination caused a blister to form and then scab over. When the scab fell off, it left a round bumpy scar. I thought it was kind of neat. Mine is on my left shoulder, and although it’s barely visible now, I can still feel it.
I received my second scar when I was seven. We had a big back yard, and my sister and I delighted in catching lightning bugs in the summer.
Daddy had built a concrete ramp from the backyard down to the basement to make it easier for him to get his equipment from the car to his basement workshop. This was the early 1950s, and my dad built radios to sell as well as a television for us.
One evening my sister Carol and I went out to catch lightning bugs, mayonnaise jars in hand. As I walked along the curbing of the ramp, I slipped and fell. The jar broke on the concrete and I fell onto it. Carol screamed and Mom came running out, grabbing me up and taking me to the kitchen sink. My left wrist was badly cut. I was wearing my new Cinderella watch. Maybe you remember that watch. Cinderella in her blue ball gown, blonde hair in an updo, just like in the movie. Mom wanted to cut the silver expandable band off (there must have been a lot of blood) but I wouldn’t let her. After I slipped it off over my wrist, Mom handed the watch to Carol and told her to rinse the blood off. Carol put the entire watch under a full stream of running water. Amazingly, it still ran after that.
I don’t really remember the trip to the hospital but I do remember Daddy sitting with me when my wrist got sewn up. I was lying on a table with my arm stretched out to the side. I wanted to watch the doctor sew it up but Daddy kept holding my head, restraining me from doing that. It was probably a good idea at the time. The glass shard had barely missed the tendon.
We moved when I was nine to a house on two acres, with half of it being a pasture at the side of the house. We had three horses, a little brown Welsh pony for me, a palomino gelding for Carol, and a beautiful 3-gaited Morgan for Daddy. He was regal on that horse! Lady was black with four white stockings and a beautiful black mane with a white streak in the middle. Her tail was a mix of black and white that touched the ground as she ran. And run she did.
One time Lady slipped out of the fenced pasture and began running up the hill behind the house, an area which was not fenced. I tried to cut her off at the pass and succeeded in chasing her back down the hill toward the house. Not on my mind as I ran after Lady was the small barbed-wire enclosure that had recently been erected outside of the pasture fence, and I spotted it in barely enough time to duck, my shoulder just skimming the barbs. A memory of Lady etched in my arm.
The rest of my childhood and youth seemed to escape any serious scars. It was not until about ten years ago that I managed to sustain an injury that left another indelible reminder on my skin.
My husband Sam and I had bought a farm and built a house on top of the hill. Sam was impatient for shade trees, and against my horticulturist uncle’s admonition, we planted four hybrid poplar trees. Uncle John said they would be weak because they were fast-growing but Sam ignored his advice. The first tree came down after a large limb broke off during a storm in the late 1990s and landed on our second-floor bedroom roof. In 2012 we decided to remove a second tree, located in the middle of the front yard, which was slowly dying.
We hired a tree company to fell the large tree and lay it out in the front yard. We had the workers cut the bottom section of the tree into chunks since it took a very large chain saw to get through the 3-foot diameter. We figured to save money by cutting the rest of the tree ourselves. Sam really enjoyed using a chain saw.
Once the tree was cut into large pieces and the smaller branches cleared out of the way, Sam borrowed our neighbor’s tractor that had a front bucket. He drove the tractor up to the log, lowered the bucket, and I rolled the section of tree into the bucket. I’d step back, he’d raise the bucket, back up, and turn to take it over to the edge of the woods and dump it. He’d then come back and we’d do it all over again. About twenty times.
All was good until we got near the bottom of the tree where pieces were laying closer together and no longer in a straight line. After I had rolled a rather large section into the bucket and Sam had lifted it, the bucket tilted forward and the heavy chunk of tree rolled back out. Onto my left leg. I had not left enough room between the logs to make a getaway. The log tore my cotton pants and took a good portion of skin off my shin. I looked down through the gap in the cloth expecting blood, but there was none. My skin was in shock. I slowly turned and walked toward the house, and by the time I sat on the edge of the bathtub and started the cold water flowing, the blood was beginning to flow as well. Not enough to go to the hospital — there wasn’t any skin to stitch back up — but enough to leave a very thick scab and eventually a long scar. Another reminder to always be aware of one’s surroundings.
My next two major scars were by choice, one on my hip to address the signs of years of experiences, and one on my throat, to address one of the mysteries of life.
II.
All these scars, results of intended or unintended inflictions on our bodies, are seemingly important when they happen but fade with time. But there are scars that go much deeper than the skin. They are scars inflicted on the soul by the tongue.
We sometimes say things that we wish we hadn’t, perhaps in a moment of anger or frustration. We might talk about the faults of another person, thinking that they’ll never hear what we just said. Often, we forget those words but we never know if the person receiving those words can forget them as easily. Sometimes these become spiritual scars or, if you wish, emotional scars.
When speaking of idle talk and negative comments, Bahá’u’lláh said that the tongue is a smoldering fire, and excess of speech a deadly poison. He noted that material fire consumes the body, whereas the fire of the tongue devours both heart and soul. The force of the former lasts but for a time, while the effects of the latter endure a century.
These are words of great wisdom. Let’s remember them as we strive to avoid inflicting scars of the tongue on the heart and soul of others.
Nancy D Harris
