Five-Minute Freewrite: Remember

It's been ages since I offered a writing exercise--not for lack of desire, but because my life, tutoring, photography, and writing (big writing projects in the works that I can't tell you about just yet)  haven't left me time.  I want desperately to keep going with The Magpie's Pen, but the reality for now is that I cannot, so I'll toss some exercises in here from time to time.  

Some of my favorite writing exercises are quick, five-minute ones you can do anywhere, anytime.  I find that there's never an excuse for not writing when I can always find five minutes in my day to pull out my pen and writing notebook.  I find some of my favorite raw material this way.  Here's the instructions, followed by my own freewrite.  If you give it a whirl, please let me know how it goes! 

The Exercise: Find a photograph you took two years ago.  Choose one that evokes a very particular memory.  Study it for a minute or two, then open up your writing notebook (if you don't have one use whatever paper you have on hand, but then go out and find a notebook to make your very own just as soon as you possibly can!), set your watch/phone/clock/kitchen timer for five minutes and go.  Don't stop or edit or worry about grammar.  Just write what you remember about that photograph, that day, the mood, the light, the smells, sounds, and sights.  If your mind leaps from the memory to something else, follow it.  Just keep your pen moving until the five minutes are up.

My Photograph and Freewrite:

The feel of cold sand against the palms of your hands, the rush of wind between untucked shirt and skin, and then the wish for five more minutes of daylight.  This must be what it feels like to die.  You imagine there is never enough time for the search, treasure map in hand, pocketful of nothing but a washed and dried receipt, palimpsest of inked purchases, of wants and perceived needs--when all around you there are plates and bins and trays of time that you leave behind, never taste, never try.  Your feet grow cold, shadows on the snow turn blue.  From somewhere at the edge of the marsh comes a wild cry.

   

I'd love to hear about your freewrite.  If you try this, feel free to share a favorite line in the comments.  I promise to share more exercises very soon.

Wild

Summers when I was a girl I'd travel in an ocean liner with my mother and sister to visit my mother's parents in the tiny village of Beaver River, Nova Scotia.  The ship was grand for such a humble destination, but over the years I grew accustomed to the many decks, the slot machines, and the lounges with polished brass railings to grab onto when the seas began to roll, something that happened often in the tempestuous Bay of Fundy.  

My favorite childhood books always had a portal of sorts that led to a magical place: the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland, the hidden door in The Secret Garden, the wardrobe in the Narnia books.  Looking back, I realize that on those voyages the sea itself was my portal.  We booked a passage through its waves, carried our bags up the gangway under the light of the moon and stars, and then spent ten-hours tossing and turning,  cradled in the great vessel's hull.       

And when we arrived on the other side of the bay--the other side of the world as I knew it--there was the confusion of customs, the hugs and exclamations about how much we'd grown from my grandparents, and then what felt like a long drive down a road that hugged the coast--the Evangeline Trail in fact.  The destination was a little white farmhouse with a steep-pitched roof in front in the traditional Nova Scotian style.  Here's what I loved most about visits to that house:

• the wood stove in the kitchen where my grandfather cooked pancakes, the smell of which pulled us out of bed before our eyes were even open;
• the dark anadama bread made by a woman down the road--we had it with nearly every meal, but my favorite way to eat it was sliced thick and smeared with butter and homemade raspberry jam;
• the grand old barn behind the house jam-packed with antiques and treasures;
• the fire pond beside the driveway, surrounded in summer by thousands of purple lupine sentinels;
• the old washing machine with the crank handle we turned to wring out the clothes before hanging them on the line to dry;
• the acres of fields and forest, and the sound of the ocean's roar muffled only by the mounds of sea-swept stones piled on the beach.

The one thing I loved the very best, though, was the short dirt road to the beach.  The air there smelled like salt and hay and scrub pines.  The pebbly road satisfied a child's need to make noise with each footstep, counting out the rhythm of our pace as we walked, singing all the summery songs we'd learned on 45's by the Carpenters, John Denver, and Carly Simon.

And then there were the wildflowers.  The road was edged with every kind I knew: Queen Anne's lace, wild sweet peas, rugosa roses, daisies, Indian paintbrushes, lupine, black-eyed Susans, clovers, and buttercups.  There were many I didn't know, too, and for those I invented names like curly purples, whiz-bangers, and tiny starlights.  Every afternoon on our way back to the farmhouse, my sister and I picked armfuls of wildflowers to bring to my mother and grandmother who helped us fill vases and pitchers and jelly jars with flowers for the whole house. 

I seldom have the chance to pick wildflowers anymore--at least not in such great abundance.  I always steal a few roadside Queen Anne's lace each year or a handful of rugosas, but nothing can match the wild and sweet excess of those childhood bouquets.  

I had a taste of that memory yesterday at Jordan's Farm in Cape Elizabeth, where you can pick a large bunch of farm flowers for $4.  They may not be wild, but the feeling of having hundreds of blooms to choose from, the butterflies and bees whirling around me as I cut the stems--it was its own portal of sorts.  I felt that if I just kept walking down that row of black-eyed Susans, I might end up on a dirt road in a place on the other side of the world I as I know it, my arms full of blossoms, my heart and mind full of people long since gone.

The Journey Back to Quebec: Part II, How to Recover Four Years of Forgotten High-School French in Four Days

My last post ended with Monsieur Magpie and me hightailing it for the Canadian border, singing, "We got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout.  We been talkin' 'bout Jackman ever since the fire went out . . ." at the top of our lungs.  Once we'd made it over the border though, the singing stopped and the serious practice began.  One of the many painful truths we have accepted after twenty years together is that our combined knowledge of the French language puts us at about the level of a five-year-old native speaker.  This isn't such a good thing when one considers that between us we have studied eight years of high-school French.

Interestingly, too, we each have very different sets of skills.  Todd knows his verbs--how to conjugate, how to use tenses, how to string them together to show actions that happened yesterday or that might happen tomorrow.  I, on the other hand, have managed to maintain a large store of nouns and other vocabulary words in the old metal file drawers of my brain.  I can tell you that la bougie means the candle (or the spark plug), but I can't quickly tell you to blow la bougie out before it catches the curtains on fire.  Needless to say, after two decades of studying, teaching, and making a living as a writer, I know which tools are most important to have at one's disposal when communicating.  It's easy to look up a noun in a dictionary, but the ability to craft a sentence that makes sense is not so simple.  Todd is thus a much faster and more fluent French speaker than I am.  I, with my brain for minutiae and lists, fumble along, spouting nouns and colorful adjectives, and gesticulating wildly.  I do sprinkle in a verb or two from time to time, but my sentences lack any sophistication.

So, what to do about this problem?  

For us the answer was--and is--simple.  Dive right in and talk.  So talk we did.  We had conversations both long and short with locals everywhere we went, and we found that every single person we met was more than happy to talk with us.  Armed with a pocket dictionary and a book of common phrases, we spoke as much French as we possibly could.  We also asked countless questions about words, expressions, and turns of phrase.

I found that the more I spoke, the more I wanted to speak . . . and to listen.  Whether discussing medieval illuminations with the owner of one of the best pen shops I've ever visited, Quebec politics with a fantastic graphic artist, or great local neighborhoods with a man we met on the street, I loved listening and discovering new nuances of this beautiful language along the way.  By our fourth and last night there, we didn't need to resort to any English when we chatted with our waitress at Chez Victor (the best burger place ever, including veggie burgers).  It sounds silly to be excited about speaking very basic French at a restaurant, but the fact that she didn't automatically switch to English as soon as she heard our American accents was heartening for us.  Many folks will politely shift over to English if they know that French is hard for you, but we learned that if we asked them to use French with us, most people were happy to help us stumble along.  

As an American who loves talking with people visiting my country, it was a thrill to meet so many like-minded folks in Quebec.  It was also a thrill to think so hard every day that my head hurt.  Even when Todd and I were just talking to each other, we tried to speak in French as much as possible.  Now that we're back in the U.S. we're still at it, messing around with sentences and looking up words.  

I kick myself for being such a lousy student all those years ago in high school.  I couldn't be bothered to learn the language of my own heritage, my father's first language, and one that carries me back to some of the best memories of my childhood.  The motto of Quebec province, which can be found over the main entrance to the Parliament building and on every Quebec license plate, is something one can't help but feel, especially within the stone walls of Vieux Quebec.  Je me souviens.  The French may have lost to the English on les Plaines d'Abraham in 1759, but this is a deeply French place.  It endures.  Et quand je suis à Québec, je me souviens aussi.

The Journey Back to Quebec: Part I, Go on Up to Jackman

Bonjour, mes amis!  I'm sorry I have been away for so long--from my own blog and from yours, too. This is the longest blogging break I have ever taken.  It wasn't expected, but it was necessary. Summer swept me away this year with weekly visitors at our home in Portland, lots of work, and then, at last, a long-awaited journey to Quebec City avec Monsieur Magpie.

We are lucky here in Maine that Quebec is our neighbor to the Northwest.  This means we have a little taste of Europe just a short drive away.  Still, it had been many years since either Todd or I had been to Quebec City.  In fact, neither of us had been there since we were children.  We suspect that perhaps we both visited during the same summer back in the 1970's.  Maybe we passed each other on the same street, no?  A romantic thought, and one I choose to believe.

This year it just felt right to both of us that we make a pilgrimage there to celebrate our 17th wedding anniversary, summer, childhood memories, and life in general.  My heritage on my father's side is French Canadian, and Quebec City is the place where my own parents spent their honeymoon 50 years ago this summer, so what better place to visit?  And what better time to do it?  

When I was a girl, my parents packed us kids into the back of the faux-wood-paneled station wagon, and we headed up to Canada during a heat wave.  Back in those days nobody in our part of the world had air conditioning in their cars, so it was a sticky, grumbling trip through logging towns and the low mountains of the Kennebec River watershed.  Moose country.  Lumber country.  The maple-sap and pine-scented world of my roots.

Then we hit Jackman, Maine, the last real town before the Canadian border, and even my eight-year-old self knew we were at the edge of anything familiar.  Border towns tend to be edgy in more ways than one, and Jackman didn't disappoint with its diners, roadhouses, and ramshackle motels.

And all these decades later, Jackman feels nearly the same.  I won't lie.  For me it possesses a slightly ominous air that was only enhanced on this trip by the fact that when I walked over to take photos of the abandoned train station, a young man pulled up next to the station and stared at me from his car.  He just sat there in the empty lot, watching me, one finger tapping the steering wheel.  I edged as far away from his car as I could as I made my way back to the convenience store where we'd parked, but he never took his eyes off me.  It wasn't until I met back up with Todd at our car that the creepy guy finally drove away.  This, coupled with the motel in Jackman that doubles as a place for all your taxidermy needs, lent our fifteen minutes there a distinct Hitchcockian flavor. 

Once we were on our way, though, our temporary case of the heebee-jeebees disappeared as we sang songs about Jackman to the tune of the Johnny Cash/June Carter Cash song "Jackson," dove back into practicing our French, and tossed around possible plans for our stay in Quebec.  Other than our B&B reservations, we had no firm itinerary, for Mr. Magpie and I are avid travelers, but not very good tourists.  What I mean is that we bristle at itineraries and pamphlets listing the requisite "attractions," preferring to stumble upon wonderful surprises as we go and to strike up conversations with locals and fellow travelers alike.  Quebec, we would discover, is one of the best places in North America to do just that.

Next Installment: Part II, How to Recover Four Years of Forgotten High-School French in Four Days

What to Save

The photos in this post are ones I took more than a year ago, but I've just gotten around to processing them tonight.  They are of peonies and sea thistle on the windowsill of our old loft.  When I look at them now, I vaguely remember the day I photographed these.  It was nearing sunset.  I was sad, so I'd bought myself flowers, and I snapped shot after shot of them as the sun slid down behind the old brick mill across the canal.  

I have blocked much of that spring from my memory, I realize now as I skim through old photographs.  It hasn't been a purposeful forgetting, just a failure to remember, a failure to hold on.  I let whole days fall away, sloughing off the calendar like dead skin.

Memory and time feel different to me now.  I gather up moments, days, and press them to my face like blossoms.  When they finally fall from the stem of my weeks, I scoop them into bowls and jars and drawers to save, letting their scent linger.  

Let the sun slip from the sky.  Let night's heavy lid close over my dreams.  I remember all that I need, all that is good, all that my heart can hold.