I write because what if as I began to piece together the first white gossamer shreds of memory, they are ripped away, leaving nothing of my beginnings by blackness, a slight limp and a distinctive laugh?
I have no memory of my original mothers voice, but there were times growing up when a familiar intonation, a wind blown conversation bro…
I write because what if as I began to piece together the first white gossamer shreds of memory, they are ripped away, leaving nothing of my beginnings by blackness, a slight limp and a distinctive laugh?
I have no memory of my original mothers voice, but there were times growing up when a familiar intonation, a wind blown conversation brought on a sharp intake of breath, and an almost unstoppable need to find its origin. I was caught between the desire to follow the voice and the dark shadow of abandonment. It set the rhythm of my days and it took a lifetime to change it.
For the first 40 years of my life, my bloodline was unknown to me, grafted onto a branch of English archbishops, genealogists, itinerant Norwegian weavers , professors, inventors, explorers, restless men, and unhappy women.
But the music of my beginnings would not let me be. It hummed through open windows, piped up through my bare feet and plucked my untamed hair. It came in the drone of the dulcimers strings in the songs of Ann Grimes, an early collector of Appalachia, music, and mother of my best friend, Sally. It came out in a cadence of a Carney man’s call, in the fire lit stories the tramps and travelers told stopping by the Olentangy River on their seasonal journey from southern mountains. It arrived in the bales of freshly shorn sheep‘s fleeces, in the whirl of the spinning wheel, and the sissing sound the threads made as they slipped through the hand set a reeds of a 100 year old loom. All these things were carefully piled at the edge of memory. They so changed the hue of the blackness that abandonment lost its power.
I stepped beyond the carefully laid out prison walls of my beginning to start the journey.
My earliest memories revolved around a black emptiness from whose edges blew a dry, cold ice like mist. When I was older and could use the dictionary, I was able to name this place which lies back of the beyond.
It was oblivion, the state of being forgotten.
My challenges are time, beginnings and endings….
Will I, at 82 be able to put all I found, in readable form.
Hi Susan I've just read your beautiful piece. Your words dance through my mind like lyrics. You've said so much about pain and emptiness, yet your words are filled with hope.
And to answer your question - Yes, I think and feel you are already doing just that.
...and thank you to you, Shazz, for reading and responding this way to Susan's words. Each time members of the project do this for one another, it amplifies and deepens the power of what we're all doing here: having a sense of readers other than me makes it so much more valuable for contributors. xx
Susan... it means so much to me that you've joined this project as a contributor, and especially now in these tender days after the end of our rich Hagitude year. I already loved and admired your writing from what you have shared on that forum, but to receive this very complete and powerful piece of prose here, now? If your last line has a silent question:
'Will I, at 82, be able to put all I found, in readable form?
My answer, without hesitation, is: Yes. Yes. You already are. This is readable. This has form, and force. You have given us a sense of place, and a sense too of a mystery in your life that we, your readers, will care to learn more about. That will speak to similar, differently located puzzles in our own lives.
With regard to age: Do you know Florida Scott-Maxwell's The Measure of My Days? It's hard to get here in the UK but second-hand copies might be easier where you are. Also not easy to get but worthwhile: Hope L Bourne's Wild Harvest (she was a woman who lived alone & self-sufficient on Exmoor). The artist Anne Truitt's journal series also covers her 70s I believe. And May Sarton's published diaries cover her 80s as well as earlier decades. These to give you a sense of peers - but in other respects, I feel your voice and your themes have much in common with younger writers I admire immensely: Melissa Febos, Carmen Maria Machado... one of the joys of writing is that we can write away from as well as out of our age, I think...
I'm not curating responses to this month's theme over on the cure for sleep website as I usually do as I'm wanting to use my time to give more detailed feedback and suggestions than I normally do. But any contributions to themes in the archive that (I hope!) you make will be curated as normal.
Wow! I made sure not to read what anyone else wrote until I posted something because I didn't want to be intimidated. I'm glad I made that choice because this is simply beautiful. The women in my life were not able to set an example of retaining a vitality while aging so I search out examples on my own....and this is just that, reassurance of the beauty in aging and the creativity that remains. This is poetic and heartfelt and and lovely. I want to read more! xx
I owe the elders in my life so much gratitude...both those who continued to do the “one foot in front of the other” dance and those who took to their beds. Perhaps the most memorable one was an artist, a mentor, and in her final years put down her brush and never painted again because her work no longer met her critical eye. And I saw the carving away of extraneous strokes, pure line. And I promised my self that would not happen... that I would die with pen, brush, needle in hand. And so...
Oh my goodness, this is amazing, I would love to read more, it is so rich and intoxicating and exciting...it feels like the first chapter of something wonderful and profound...please go on...
I write because what if as I began to piece together the first white gossamer shreds of memory, they are ripped away, leaving nothing of my beginnings by blackness, a slight limp and a distinctive laugh?
I have no memory of my original mothers voice, but there were times growing up when a familiar intonation, a wind blown conversation brought on a sharp intake of breath, and an almost unstoppable need to find its origin. I was caught between the desire to follow the voice and the dark shadow of abandonment. It set the rhythm of my days and it took a lifetime to change it.
For the first 40 years of my life, my bloodline was unknown to me, grafted onto a branch of English archbishops, genealogists, itinerant Norwegian weavers , professors, inventors, explorers, restless men, and unhappy women.
But the music of my beginnings would not let me be. It hummed through open windows, piped up through my bare feet and plucked my untamed hair. It came in the drone of the dulcimers strings in the songs of Ann Grimes, an early collector of Appalachia, music, and mother of my best friend, Sally. It came out in a cadence of a Carney man’s call, in the fire lit stories the tramps and travelers told stopping by the Olentangy River on their seasonal journey from southern mountains. It arrived in the bales of freshly shorn sheep‘s fleeces, in the whirl of the spinning wheel, and the sissing sound the threads made as they slipped through the hand set a reeds of a 100 year old loom. All these things were carefully piled at the edge of memory. They so changed the hue of the blackness that abandonment lost its power.
I stepped beyond the carefully laid out prison walls of my beginning to start the journey.
My earliest memories revolved around a black emptiness from whose edges blew a dry, cold ice like mist. When I was older and could use the dictionary, I was able to name this place which lies back of the beyond.
It was oblivion, the state of being forgotten.
My challenges are time, beginnings and endings….
Will I, at 82 be able to put all I found, in readable form.
.
Hi Susan I've just read your beautiful piece. Your words dance through my mind like lyrics. You've said so much about pain and emptiness, yet your words are filled with hope.
And to answer your question - Yes, I think and feel you are already doing just that.
Thank you for sharing
...and thank you to you, Shazz, for reading and responding this way to Susan's words. Each time members of the project do this for one another, it amplifies and deepens the power of what we're all doing here: having a sense of readers other than me makes it so much more valuable for contributors. xx
Shazz. My author self felt heard by your comments and encouraged! A shy smile escaped from this wrinkled old face. Gratitude
Susan
Susan... it means so much to me that you've joined this project as a contributor, and especially now in these tender days after the end of our rich Hagitude year. I already loved and admired your writing from what you have shared on that forum, but to receive this very complete and powerful piece of prose here, now? If your last line has a silent question:
'Will I, at 82, be able to put all I found, in readable form?
My answer, without hesitation, is: Yes. Yes. You already are. This is readable. This has form, and force. You have given us a sense of place, and a sense too of a mystery in your life that we, your readers, will care to learn more about. That will speak to similar, differently located puzzles in our own lives.
With regard to age: Do you know Florida Scott-Maxwell's The Measure of My Days? It's hard to get here in the UK but second-hand copies might be easier where you are. Also not easy to get but worthwhile: Hope L Bourne's Wild Harvest (she was a woman who lived alone & self-sufficient on Exmoor). The artist Anne Truitt's journal series also covers her 70s I believe. And May Sarton's published diaries cover her 80s as well as earlier decades. These to give you a sense of peers - but in other respects, I feel your voice and your themes have much in common with younger writers I admire immensely: Melissa Febos, Carmen Maria Machado... one of the joys of writing is that we can write away from as well as out of our age, I think...
I'm not curating responses to this month's theme over on the cure for sleep website as I usually do as I'm wanting to use my time to give more detailed feedback and suggestions than I normally do. But any contributions to themes in the archive that (I hope!) you make will be curated as normal.
Txxx
Wow! I made sure not to read what anyone else wrote until I posted something because I didn't want to be intimidated. I'm glad I made that choice because this is simply beautiful. The women in my life were not able to set an example of retaining a vitality while aging so I search out examples on my own....and this is just that, reassurance of the beauty in aging and the creativity that remains. This is poetic and heartfelt and and lovely. I want to read more! xx
Sheila...
I owe the elders in my life so much gratitude...both those who continued to do the “one foot in front of the other” dance and those who took to their beds. Perhaps the most memorable one was an artist, a mentor, and in her final years put down her brush and never painted again because her work no longer met her critical eye. And I saw the carving away of extraneous strokes, pure line. And I promised my self that would not happen... that I would die with pen, brush, needle in hand. And so...
Oh my goodness, this is amazing, I would love to read more, it is so rich and intoxicating and exciting...it feels like the first chapter of something wonderful and profound...please go on...