It was my turn, this afternoon, to present at the Bayview Women’s Club. After lunch at Elise’s house, we clustered in her living room, a circle of aging women united by our membership in the longest-lived women’s club in the state, so I am told. This year we are focusing our monthly meetings on Poets and Poetry and I decided to call out the poet in all of us and teach a little workshop on writing.
As Elise led us in reciting the collect - a sort of values-based mission statement - my eyes scanned the circle of women around me. Sunlight streamed through the large picture window, landing in halos over their heads. Lovely, gracious ladies, the oldest in their nineties now. Libby and I are among the younger ones. Many of these stalwarts have been members for decades, having joined when the word “social” meant physically sharing time, space and thought with each other. The word “media” wasn’t even in their conversational wheelhouse. I imagine, back then, a woman would slip off her apron, or work shoes, do up her hair, slide the handle on her purse over her forearm and dedicate her afternoon to interacting with other adult women. It was a reprieve and a respite to be able to go out, and to be together. We women, at least the one that’s me, like to know what other women might be up to, what they are thinking and such. Women’s club used to fill that spot.
I’ve been noticing lately that I get that portion of myself filled by social media, and that physical contact feels less compelling than it used to. I think that’s a problem for me, and I need to address it. In fact, I was thinking this morning when I ran into an old friend and she refused my hug, poking her elbow toward me instead, because of the general panic in the air with the recent outbreak of Coronavirus; I was thinking that we humans will eventually wither up from lack of contact.
Today, when I led my women’s club in a writing exercise, I gave them a couple handouts. In one of them I wrote in bold font across the top:
IF YOU CAN TALK, YOU CAN WRITE.
Writing, for many people, is a scary thing. They think they can’t do it. We stiffen up with pens in our hands and blank paper staring back at us. But simple leading statements make it less daunting. Today I decided to have each woman describe their mother. They all have mothers, though for many of us, perhaps most of us, they have flown heavenward. I jotted down some questions or statements that could lead them in their writing:
I asked them to include all their senses, and to make what they wrote flow, rather than being a collection of statements. It was a brief exercise, but long enough to get the juices flowing. I told them no one else had to read their writing, but a few of them were willing to share what they wrote.
The exercise did a number of things:
1. It accessed the creative within each of us. We are called by the demands of our daily lives to be dutiful, and our days become a series of checked-off obligations. We have to allow that kid in us who liked to look out the window in our third-grade classroom to go ahead and daydream. That’s contrary to our training as responsible humans. But it’s so healthy for us to let this child counterbalance the stuffy adult.
2. It took us to a memory, another place, and a person we love. I had asked for them to picture their mother in a specific place, not just a generalized portrait of her. Picture her in your mind, standing at the kitchen sink, or skiing down a snowy slope, or any other familiar spot. Tell me what her hair looks like, how her skin feels, what aromas you notice in the memory. All these senses create tasty writing. And it instantly transports us to that person and that place being described. It brings the person to life for both the writer and the reader.
3. The exercise awakens in the writer an awareness of everything, allowing us to see the mundane with fresh eyes; the eyes of poets. We take those eyes with us back home to our ordinary places, and we are enriched by the renewed vision.
4. Writing with strong imagery about someone or something brings them to the forefront of our emotions, and binds them to us.
5. Each little snippet of what we write becomes a sort of personal statement, a part of our personal history. I would rather read a series of descriptive snippets than a long chronology of a life.
When we finished writing I asked my sister, Libby to share what she wrote. Poor Lib, she is my safe person. I know she will accommodate me. I expected her to write something that included the gentle, aged eyes of our mother, her white glowing hair, and the feeling of her rice-paper thin skin under Libby’s loving kisses as she lowered her into her wheel chair. Libby lovingly cared for our mother in the waning years of her life.
But what Libby saw, in the memory that visited her today, was a young woman, her dark hair flowing in the ocean breeze at the wharf near Ghirardelli Square, CA. She had rolled her pant legs up, and had come down to the ocean side, clapping her long fingers together, applauding our sandcastle. The smells of ocean air, of seaweed and salt mixed with a whiff of chocolate. The deep, strong voice of our mother called to us over the ocean waves: Race ya to the car!And she took off running, her strong skinny ankles gliding over the hard, wet sand.
My grandchildren never knew that young woman when her legs worked. But they can now, through Libby’s sweet collection of words. In two short paragraphs my sister returned me to a place I had forgotten, where our mother was vibrant and alive and laughing.
Kathy read for us what she had written about her mom, Jeanette, who is also in our club and was seated across the circle from her. As she read, we wiped our eyes, knowing the love that cinched them together, moved by the images she created for us. A few others shared their writing and we finished up. But as the ladies were chatting amongst themselves, I asked if I could read Jeanette's piece. I was curious to see what memories the oldest among us had.
In her lovely cursive handwriting on the paper of a yellow legal pad Jeanette recalled her mom standing at the kitchen stove before a pot of boiling water. Her brother had chopped the head off one of their chickens and bled it out. Her mother’s hair was matted with work and sweat and kitchen steam. She plunged the chicken into the pot of hot water, her hands quickly grabbing clusters of feathers, pulling them away from the skin. As she watched her clean out the entrails, she heard her mother’s frustration. “Blast! We killed a layer. I wanted a lazy old hen.” She said this as she pulled two eggs from inside the chicken.
Seriously now, what girl in Davis County Utah, these days, has such a memory of their mother?
We preserve the ordinary. Then forevermore, when we open the preserves, we realize how extraordinary it was all along.
