Family – Nastasya Parker

Weighing Ideas

This Week’s Bit of String: Notre Dame towers and a dog called Unity

Last weekend, we were in Paris. It was a wild idea, the trip planned in less than a fortnight. From 3:00 Saturday morning, when we woke up to shower and catch a flight from Bristol to Paris CDG, until 10:15 Sunday night when we fell into bed back in our own home, we walked 54,000 steps. We stayed Saturday night in a tiny hotel room in the 14th Arondissement, but the bed was comfortable, we had climate control, and there was a full Parisian breakfast included.

We had a bittersweet reason for this enjoyable adventure. When my aunt Laurel died a couple weeks ago, one of my cousins already had a trip booked to Paris. Laurel and my cousin were great Francophiles, so the family was inspired to send some of her ashes over and scatter them in the Seine. I couldn’t be at the full funeral in Vermont–busy though the weekend in Paris was, it didn’t shatter me the way a whirlwind cross-Atlantic trip with a minimum of 16 hours travel each way would have done–I could be part of this goodbye without missing work.

My cousin chose a spot across from Notre Dame’s dome, where we could walk down a cobbled ramp to the river. We found as we approached that as well as a cathedral view, we would be leaving my aunt alongside a weathered wooden statue of a turtle bracketed onto the stone wall, quite fitting as she’d had a beloved pet turtle for decades.

She loved dogs too, and soon after we’d poured her ashes into the river, a dog came bounding in, bucking jubilantly, snapping at her own splashes. Her French owner told us the dog’s name was Unity, and we did feel a strange synthesis at the resting place.

I was happy with this sendoff for Laurel, but my heart aches that all the life erupting around her in this location will never know her or her story. I wonder what other remnants of lives we step over all the time, and what unimaginable events will unfold later.

Interlocking Stories

Paris is particularly suited to such wonderings, with its many plaques honouring students and others who were killed in the Resistance against Nazi occupiers, and other signs memorialising Jewish families that were deported. Behind Notre Dame, there’s the Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation, which I researched for part of a story I wrote in January. The main character spent time in Paris and met his fiance, changing his life.

I certainly didn’t imagine I’d be visiting Paris later, and scattering my aunt’s ashes across the Seine from the same Memorial. Once again, there’s a strange unity of past and present, fiction and nonfiction. As Julia Ormond says in the 1990s remake of Sabrina, one of my aunt’s “Chicken Soup Movies” which she believed had restorative powers: “Paris is always a good idea.”

*Back to the writing work, here’s a picture of the incredible Our Lady of the Workers church in the 14th Arondissement*

I’d actually forgotten about the story I wrote in January, with its Paris turning point, until my cousin told me where we’d take our aunt’s ashes. The story needs a lot of work. I wrote it during my January short story binge, when I slapped whatever idea I had onto paper: new ones, old and previously rejected ones, half-dreamed ones.

Since then, I’ve had a couple short stories I’ve worked hard at polishing, and I’ve started a new novel while still working on the final edits to my book about Eve and Creation. These projects are still keeping me pretty busy alongside my day job and everything else, so the fictional Paris encounter will probably wait a long while.

Ideas to Remember

It’s not possible to remember every idea or story, good or bad. So just because one thing has to wait doesn’t mean it will never get its time. When it comes to assessing our creative choices–and our life choices, really–there are so many possibilities that it seems unfair to judge one as entirely bad or good.

While I’m making up a new novel, I haven’t decided yet whose voice to lead with out of my new characters, and I keep switching. Would 5 points-of-view be too many? Yes, I know. But I decided while making myself write just four days after Laurel’s death, my work-in-progress wasn’t fun enough. So I pried its bars loose, and went back to page 2 to introduce an entirely new character, outside the pages of development I’d explored and planned in the pre-drafting stages.

Have you ever felt the need to do such a thing? Did it work?

My middle-class protagonists who take themselves somewhat seriously needed a foil, or maybe that was just me. Either way, I’ll see what comes of having someone else in the mix. A story undergoes so much evolution and so many rewrites, most ideas turn out to contribute something worthwhile.

I wouldn’t usually slide in an extra character, but it’s earlyish still, and who’s to stop me? In real life, there are people who appear out of nowhere and brighten everything.

I wouldn’t usually spend a middle-of-the-term weekend gallivanting around Paris, either. I don’t know if Paris, is, in fact, always a good idea, but it worked for us this time. And there’s a lot more we’d like to see. Strange to think I now have a bit of my aunt on this side of the ocean, over the Channel. Wondrous to imagine the places and people we have yet to be part of.

True Colours

This Week’s Bit of String: Jewelled hedgerows and painted roundabouts

The mini roundabout by Tesco has received fresh stripes. St. George’s red cross is now painted over the white, courtesy of an undoubtedly patriotic local citizen. I don’t think it makes much difference to how anyone drives or feels. Do some British citizens in this fairly homogenous town feel safer because someone spraypainted the emblem of a Roman soldier of Greek descent whose worship started in Palestine? Whatever works for them, I guess.

What surprised me was the title given to this campaign of painting and flying loads of extra English flags. “Raise the colours.” Before I remembered the military and scouting origins of the phrase, I thought it odd. The English flag isn’t spectacularly colourful.

As an immigrant (21 years living in Britain this past week!), I have my own perspective on the UK and its colours. They are sometimes dull grey skies and the stifling black or navy blue of school uniforms that I see at work. But they started for me with red double decker buses and purple cross-country trains, the pulsing bright lights of Student Union discos and the green of grass that grows through the winter.

Every late August, when I return to Gloucestershire from my summer visit to my family in New England, the colours of old England are deep purple berry-black and deceptively soft stinging nettle-green. I forage in the hedgerows and make blackberry-elderberry syrups and jam.

This year, the hedgerows are particularly festooned with colour. Dark blue sloes and so many little red hawthorn berries, you can barely see the leaves. Apparently, drought can stress trees into making extra fruit in a more desperate bid to pass on their genetic material. Hopefully they don’t feel too downhearted that some of their DNA is going into a crumble. It’s doing all kinds of good!

Full Spectrum

Ask my five and a half year old niece her favourite colour and she will tell you it’s rainbow. I didn’t know that was an option when I was a kid.

I hope no one nitpicks her and tells her rainbow isn’t one colour, it’s all of them. Of course it is, that’s why people are so enchanted by rainbows. Shining colours melded together more closely than a hedgerow, with far more beautiful range than a red cross on a white background. We all have an innate love of mixture and brightness.

*A baby bear and their great aunt Laurel, 23 years ago*

In my dining room, next to the spiderplant grown from a student’s gift and a felted leaf garland crafted by another student, a prism hangs. It is no tear-shaped slip of a thing, it’s a weighty diamond capable of pitching a whole swathe of rainbows.

My aunt Laurel gave it to me when I was struggling as an adolescent. “Sometimes you just need more rainbows in your life,” she told me, her voice catching on her compassion.

Three days ago, Laurel died suddenly of a heart attack in her Vermont home. On that side of the ocean, my family rallies to honour her and to support my cousin. On this side of the ocean, a friend gives me yellow gladioli at work and another drops an orange-papered Tony’s Chocolonely bar through my letterbox. British colours at work again.

Making Rainbows

More vibrant fruit yields can come from jeopardy, and rainbows don’t happen without storms. My aunt Laurel had her share of storms, but she absolutely sparkled for us.

She loved the lupins that grew in the median strip of Highway 91, she loved candied almonds and jewelry. She gave me my first CD of Les Miserables, and instigated the nerf gun battle that ended in my husband proposing. She invented her own evil twin to blame pranks on, and encouraged all of us to do the same. She was the source of many a thoughtful gift, and constantly opened her home to us, no matter what annoying phase we were going through.

When my baby was born (I mean, they were a baby then…) she was the one with me in the delivery room. Despite the tragedy and horror of the terrorist attacks that day, Laurel always reminded me how she couldn’t stop smiling after the birth. She strove to see the world through the most hopeful prism, and sometimes that’s awfully hard.

Even better than a prism, she’s left us with her wonderful son, my cousin, who will now be even more part of my immediate family. It’s excruciating to know she won’t be there the next time I get back to see my family. But she’s left us so much to be grateful for, especially an undying impression that no person or place is as dull as just two colours.

Wishing you rainbows this week, friends, and hopefully not too many storms.

Taking a Moment

This Week’s Bit of String: Fairies of all sorts

Last week my entire family stayed together in a lakeside house in Maine. This included my 5-year-old niece, who moved expertly from one of us to the next, with wide-eyed invitations for our attention and imaginative assignations for us.

“Want to pretend you’re my mommy and I’m a toddler?” she asked me one morning. I was hardly about to turn that down.

*Our view as Lily Pad and the Moment Fairy*

Later on, she had my brother-in-law at her command in the role of big brother, while her own big brother (actual age 6) was her little brother. She’d gone from being a toddler to being 13 and a half, and her name was Lily Pad. My kiddo’s fiancee was now her mommy, and I was briefly a co-worker. My niece’s job was testing beds, which after various hikes and kayak-paddles and swims, I was more than willing to help with.

In the evening, we all gathered in lawn chairs to watch the sun set over the lake. Then my niece invited me to sit on the dock with her, dangling our feet in “Waterworld.”

She told me, “Sometimes if I need a moment, and I tell my mom I want to go to Waterworld, then I come here and you’re the fairy who meets me. You’re the fairy for people who need to take a moment, so they can talk to you and not be lonely, and you won’t tell anyone.”

I couldn’t have been prouder than when she led me back to the rest of our family, now doggedly roasting marshmallows around a campfire despite the 30 C/ 90 F heat, and she introduced me as The Moment Fairy.

Ongoing Stories

When I was in second grade, our teacher read us the 1953 chapter book Little Witch by Anna Elizabeth Bennett, about a witch’s daughter who would prefer to be a fairy. This book had me convinced I, too, was a secret fairy, and I eagerly assigned the role of captor witch to whichever family member incurred my unspoken wrath.

*Fairy house at my hometown’s lakeside park*

It might be my mother for making me drink my orange juice even though I said it tasted sour, or my little brother for faking naps and then being allowed to stay up later than me. If you think these reasons are far-fetched, wait till you hear my solution.

I was certain that if I woke up at the right time, and went into my closet with the correct numbers on my little calculator, then the fairies would rescue me. I tried it once and it didn’t work, but I figured I needed a different moment of the night.

Nothing really dissuaded me from that story. It dissolved into new fantasies I nursed in my imagination. Similarly, in my niece’s game, she was constantly accommodating new roles for us. While most were outside making s’mores, she led my husband by the hand through the holiday house.

“He’s the Show-You-Something Fairy,” she explained when I went in for extra ingredients.

Sure enough, she was picking up various objects and explaining them to her engineer uncle as if he’d just materialised from a fantastical dimension (it probably seems as if we do, appearing once a year from the UK). The Something she was Showing him as I went back outside was a flyswatter.

Moments to Remember

I was inspired by my niece’s imaginative efforts, and moved by her confidence that at any given time, at least one of us would want to duck into her world. As she gets older, she will desperately need a variety of people she can slip away and have a moment with. She’ll have so many things to show and explain to us.

Sometimes, as I wrote a couple weeks ago, I worry about my stories getting stuck in my head and progressing no further. But while I value being a writer and long for success, my roles as mother, wife, daughter, sister, aunt are more important. It’s nice to remember that I serve some purpose there, and it’s truly a privilege to do so.

For now, the fairies have flown. Back in the UK, I’m the Moment Fairy for myself. I have to keep going, finding ways to be present from afar for my family while remaining present in the life I sought elsewhere. It means choosing which of the dozens of times I think of them each day are the most valuable to pass on. That’s the challenge, when we’re not rubbing up against each other regularly and experiencing life together.

Sometimes, separation hurts too much. Maybe it’s a pleasant evening with no extra family to share it with, when I have no one to bake for but my husband and me, when it’s warm but there’s no place to swim. I miss the feel of a little hand in mine so much. It’s tempting to dig myself into chores or into writing assignments, but maybe I should surrender to those moments, too, to keep my caring fully kindled.

Which moments matter most to you? How do you make the best of them?

Objects in the Rearview Mirror

This Week’s Bit of String: A library visit and hometown changes

On the first day of my summer visit from old England to New, I went to the library with my mother. It’s recently been refurbished in my hometown. The children’s area boasts a full play kitchen, and a teen reading room features a whiteboard table for doodling. On top of the bookshelves in the grown-up section, a community craft exhibit includes three-dimensional scrapbooked cards, patchwork quilts, carvings of birds, embroidered landscapes, and a whole felted ark full of animals.

What a lovely place. I did wonder, though, as Mom and I left, “What happened to that mysterious cabinet of dolls that used to be at the back of the library when I was a kid?”

She responded, “I keep wondering what happened to the collection of international creches at the Catholic shrine after it was bought out.”

Another good question. The lakeside Catholic retreat in town ran out of funds and was bought out by the Shaker Museum across the street, an ironic reversal of fortunes which I may revisit in a later post because there’s an intriguing story at the heart of it.

For our purposes this week, suffice to say that the Catholic site had a Christmas specialty. They ranged an immense collection of lights along their hillside. Coming home on a December night, we’d see them reflected in the lake from a couple miles away. They also took donations of nativity sets from all around the world, many of them beautifully crafted.

It’s funny how objects that may not have tangibly impacted us can anchor in our minds and resurface later. As writers, we’re often character-driven and particularly fascinated with people. But lately, I’ve noticed inanimate objects asserting importance in my short stories. What does it mean?

Living in a Material World

For me, writing a short story has generally included a central image, which may well be a natural or material object. Mudpies, a book of mazes, lipstick. Usually these are sort of thematic, whereas lately they’re practically plot points.

In the past year, I wrote a story about a fairground tragedy involving a ferris wheel, and the wheel additionally functions as a wider symbol. Another story currently on submission is about a family, each child represented by a colour from the gumballs in a vintage candy machine. Two decades of mid-twentieth century history are magnified through the machine’s glass sphere.

In real life, I’ve tended to wax sentimental over objects. After moving house when I was 8, I carried a little box of favourite things with me everywhere. A stone from the lake where we used to live, a broken necklace charm from a long-distance relative, I can’t even remember what else. When called upon to correct a sentence on the blackboard, I didn’t leave my seat without my box. I dropped it once and scrambled on the floor in front of my new classmates to gather my treasured crumbs.

Objects stand in for people in my mind. One of the many details I plan regarding my summer trip is coordinating my contact lenses. I wear monthly ones, and I always time the changing of them so that I put new ones in on the last day with my family. That way, I can linger for longer back in the UK with lenses that have “seen” my loved ones. It’s silly, but I’ve not been able to shake that symbolism.

Object Permanence

*Please look after this bear thank you.*

Maybe I am holding back a bit from attaching deeply to characters in a short story, placing a central object between us for distance. Will that impede the reader’s experience? We’ll have to see. It’s a new angle from which to look at characters—how they handle objects in their lives can tell us a lot.

It’s not as if this is wholly without literary precedent. Objects are important in children’s literature. A glass slipper, a golden ticket…A wardrobe becomes a new world, a boxcar becomes a home, dolls come to life. I remember a book in our church library about a penny. Each chapter focused on a new owner of that penny, from a child abducted by native Americans to an enslaved boy running toward freedom.

What could objects say about us, if they could speak? We did an assignment like that in our Journal As Literature college class. A friend wrote from the point of view of the socks she always wore to bed. I wrote about the teddy bear I’d bought my baby from London, to connect them to their then-estranged father. If I’m remembering correctly, I think the bear assessed me as guilty of some misplaced sentimentality, but he felt compassion for me too. Of course he was compassionate; he’s a teddy bear.

What would you write about? If your main character had to flee with a handful of possessions, what would they take?

A Creative Start

This Week’s Bit of String: “What shall we make?”

In our first year of married life, my husband started a Saturday morning pancake-making tradition with our little kiddo. While I hiked the hills, they’d make pancakes from a Jamie Oliver recipe, my husband fluffing up the eggs with a hand-cranked beater. Our preschooler helped measure and mix.

Despite them doing it almost every week, it stirred in our little Bear an almost unspeakable excitement. Early on a Saturday morning, they would plonk next to their dad in our bed and ask, wide-eyed, almost vibrating with elation:

“What shall WE make?”

The correct answer, of course, was pancakes. But it was as if it couldn’t mean nearly as much if Bear asked directly for them. They had to be Daddy’s suggestion, every time.

My husband would draw out the game. “Mandrakes? Bran flakes?” Until at last: “Pancakes!”

I often think of this when I’m starting a new project. That relish, that possibility. What shall WE make, I ask myself, summoning some semblance of youthful vigour.

Whose Idea is It, Anyway?

There’s a perennial hope, too, that the idea I work with may appear from an external source. I mean, to an extent, all ideas do. But as creatives we must at least invite them, if not invent them. We have to wake the muse from her blissful weekend sleep and badger her until she divulges something. When she’s sleeping extra tight, we must remind ourselves, perhaps, that we’ve known what we want all along.

Funnily, a lot of my story ideas materialise in the night. Sometimes between dreams and sleep, sometimes when I’m trying and failing to relax into slumber, a line pops into my head. What on earth does it mean? What sort of a person would think this? What happens next?

“My sister devoured the whole of history.”

“In the boys’ minds you left so fast, you didn’t bother wearing shoes. Just ran barefoot down the dirt road.”

“As a boy, Tom believed every grandpa came with a matching grandfather clock.”

It is possible, when interrogating a line or an idea, to over-beat it. I devise so much backstory, I lose sight of which bit I might zoom in on to convey the pivotal moment that is a short story. At the moment, I’m trying to find my way through that predicament with my third random short story of the year.

Traps and Tricks

Similar to making their dad suggest pancakes anew every single week, our Bear had other funny, roundabout ways. When we went on walks, they’d try to make my husband chase them. They’d stick goosegrass on his clothes or sneak up and tickle him.

Then our kiddo would say, “Do you want to catch me? Do you have any traps for me?”

They’d be hopping in place, not wanting to run away because they loved the game of being tackled and tickled, or dangled upside down.

That’s another great challenge when concocting something new. It must be exciting, but we can’t force the stakes. Sometimes an idea remains just a concept because I can’t work out how to nudge it toward a plausible, engaging crisis. Embarrassingly, I’ve developed and drafted whole novels only to feel the climax falls flat. Does that happen to other creatives? Or do they have more exciting imaginations?

Maybe I need to add more ingredients. More dark secrets, a love triangle, a dragon? But not necessarily. I might just need to be bolder, to more fearlessly mine the ideas I have, and to get messy with them. Currently planning a new novel, I’ve got my characters’ flaws in mind from the beginning. Sometimes I like them so much I’m determined to keep them blameless–not this time.

Creative habits are hard-won. I’m proud that I sit down at the end of a long day and push myself, wearily, to make up stuff. But it needs to be fresh, too, and that’s one reason why I like remembering our family tan-snakes…scran-bakes… PANCAKES tradition.

What makes you smile as you craft chaos into order?

Enduring Power

This Week’s Bit of String: A pleasant surprise

Sometimes it’s hard to remember in the chilly grey exhaustion of January, but my family had a great Christmas. My husband and I decorated the house all cosy, I cooked many yummy things, and we welcomed our kiddo and their partner for an extended visit from the US. We spent relaxed, happy days together, which became even lovelier when they got engaged.

I didn’t see it coming. They look after each other and live together, but somehow I did not expect an engagement, even when they’ve been a couple for years. I suppose this naivete was largely down to my own self-perception: Hang on, I’m old enough to have an engaged kid?

The surprise has faded a little, but I’m still tremendously excited that my little family is slated to officially grow. Whenever I see someone who knew my kiddo when they were at school, for example, I update them with relish. And I’m not the least bit tired of it yet.

I’ve written before about the worry that a memory’s power might get used up or worn out. And I am thinking about this again, wondering whether I should guard the engagement news to keep it feeling shiny. Right now, I still get sharp pangs missing the kids when I walk past their empty room. Maybe that will fade, but does that mean the happiness about the times we had will too?

Keeping News New

This relates not just to the stories we want to pass on, but to what we take in. As an alarming presidential term begins in my native country, I’m wrestling with how much to let this consume me. Twitter is a mess of partisans either hyperventilating over or ogling Trump, very little use, whereas mainstream media talking about him like he’s normal nauseates me.

This man lacking empathy, intelligence, and morals was elected president, partly due to a lack of information getting to people about him… or indifference of those people to the information that did reach them. When a leader seems constantly to be making things worse for somebody, often for one minority or another, it’s difficult to keep impressing that upon others who have the privilege of just getting on with their lives.

By definition, we can’t be shocked by the same thing in perpetuity. We all know a person or two who’s a last story freak; who always has a prevailing trauma or a story that tops all others. As a storyteller myself, I’m liable to fight fire with fire and hyperbole with hyperbole. Telling stories becomes a bit of an arms race.

My plan for not getting caught up in it when actual current events feel like they’re escalating is to stick with the facts. Let’s monitor and respond to the ruling party’s actions, not their pervasive rhetoric.

Capacity for Astonishment

Recognising that even a glimpse of the inauguration would be intolerable, I sorted myself some alternative programming for Monday after work. I watched one of my absolute favourite films: Spielberg’s Lincoln. It has a Tony Kushner script and a massive cast of incredible actors immersing you in 1865, when Lincoln decided it was time to amend the Constitution to ban slavery–even if it prolonged the horrific Civil War.

*Different from the 13th Amendment, but still very cool. From the British Library.*

“Is this a hopeful film to watch today?” my husband asked.

“Well, it shows that even when our history was cruel and selfish, some people managed to overcome it.”

Although I’ve watched this film at least annually for a decade, it still moves me to tears several times over. From the first scene when a defiant David Oyelowo repeats the Gettysburg Address, to Tommy Lee Jones taking the freshly-passed 13th Amendment home to share with his partner, to the final departure of Lincoln from the White House. Watching this again, I know that sometimes, a retelling actually grows in potency thanks to our anticipation of the best bits. A passion for something can spiral, heightening enjoyment still more.

It also gives me another tip for keeping a story fresh: broaden the cast. The more voices we allow to speak about something, the stronger a story is.

What stories do you love to repeat? How do you maintain their power?

Use Your Words

This Week’s Bit of String: A particularly memorable Christmas gift

The Christmas when I was ten, my family were hosting a gathering for our local relatives. My dad’s brother was a fire captain so kept a busy schedule, especially since he split his time caring for his fiancee’s family. But he stopped by when he could. Everyone wanted some of Uncle Mike’s attention.

As one of 4 kids, I was somewhat resigned to not being a sole receiver of attention, though I occasionally did cringey things to attract it. (You’ll be shocked to hear that, I’m sure.) That Christmas, I was fetching something in the kitchen just as my uncle departed, so I was on my own when he passed.

He took that moment to tell me, “It was good to see you today. Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without you. You make it really special.”

Our Uncle Mike was later diagnosed with a brain tumour, having the biopsy on my kiddo’s first birthday. His illness and death at the age of 54 devastated us. I wish I could remember his face more vividly, without the vague unease of being heavily dependent on photos.

We all have people like that whom we think of particularly this time of year. I know I’m lucky to even have the pictures, and I’m spectacularly lucky that he bestowed kind words on us long before he knew that his chances to give them would be curtailed.

Christmas Treasure

The holidays can heighten sensations and emotion, packing extra power into our words and gestures. I always think of the line from the book of Luke in the Bible: “Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.”

You would, wouldn’t you? Everyone from redneck shepherds to esteemed astronomers turning up to pay tribute to your child…

*Knitivity, Gloucester Cathedral*. *Note there IS an octopus present at the birth of Baby Jesus, bottom left…*

As you can see, I’ve preserved my Uncle Mike’s words in my internal Christmas treasury. I’ve also preserved that verse, Luke 2:19, because it was recited toward the end of the Christmas pageant every year in the little town where I grew up. The verse is tangled with memories of candlelit windows upstairs in a New England church, of the choir singing “O Holy Night” and elementary school students dancing in angel costumes. And then knitted blankets in the car, hot chocolate and my mother’s Christmas cookies at home, and Christmas lights reflected across a lake.

If You Can’t Say It Now, When Can You?

Christmas films have programmed us to expect great emotional fanfare at Christmas. Confessions of love, heartwarming reunions, the sudden cessation of being taken for granted. It doesn’t usually end up this way, as we’re still busy and stressed and full of ourselves at Christmas. But how much better are our holidays, how much more comforting and lasting are our memories, when we do take time to share moments and kind words with each other?

These are, after all, the true things to treasure. Because I’m somewhat cut off from my family most of the year, the interactions I have with my siblings and parents are generally focused on the present, or the near future. We don’t get much time to reminisce over lost loved ones, and I wonder what memories they treasure which could augment my own. Then there are my cousins who I barely manage to keep in touch with, and I’d love to better know even what’s going on for them currently.

So, in addition to my extremely important (and incredibly taxing!) hot chocolate challenge, I’m doing a little version of an advent calendar. I’ll write a relative or friend’s name in my planner for each day remaining in December, and send a message to see how they’re doing, and let them know that although I’m rubbish at showing it sometimes, I really do think of them. And that when I do, they help make my memories special.

I hope you have some treasured memories of kind words at Christmas, and that you’ll join me in creating more.

Preserving

This Week’s Bit of String: Jam from the hedgerows

The acers behind the school were already blushing scarlet when our new term started on Monday the 2nd of September. It felt too early, as if I’d missed out on something. Shouldn’t we already have got to know our new students and settled them into routine by the time the leaves turn?

There’s no time like autumn to remind us of… time. School starts, orienting students (and those of us working with them) toward exams. The garden outdoes itself and nature accelerates toward harvest. There’s my little Bear’s birthday–they just turned 23 this week. I’ve definitely missed out.

There are new writing deadlines and many special needs care plans to learn. I must jumpstart my diet and catch up on reading while my energy’s still depleted from the summer. Then family crisis strikes, and I’m glad that while I was home I stayed up till midnight scribbling the memories and got up at 5… Preserving things takes a real time commitment.

And yet, or perhaps therefore, I blew off the writing and reading progress I’d scheduled after school and went foraging for berries instead. For one sunny afternoon, I berried for 2 hours, and the following day I collected for over an hour, ending up soaked in a rain shower. The stormwater pooled in the seed-dimples of the blackberries.

Conserving Strength

I’d done this already. In the brief interval between visiting my family and restarting school, I spent hours picking blackberries and elderberries, then making jam. This was all on my to-do list, a great big planned chunk of time: to gather berries, cook it all down, and brutally sieve it smooth. This gave me 4 medium-small jars.

For a fair bit of money, you can get an elderberry concoction at the chemist’s to combat sore throats and infections. I made blackberry-elderberry jam last year, and I swear my horrible, 19-century-consumptive coughs didn’t stick around very long. This could be sheer coincidence, but in case tasty jam can help curtail illness, I’m not taking my chances without it.

This week’s batch of jam came to only half a single big jar. Not very good, is it? After a fair bit of effort. It uncomfortably mirrors certain writing projects once I’ve read through critically and realise the piece isn’t getting anywhere.

But having spent afternoons outside, I felt better than I had since school started. Sometimes the act of choosing what to preserve is as useful as the result. Foraging, alone in a back lane or field, my mind streamlines to one purpose and the many other commitments feel lighter for a while.

And I enjoyed rustling through the hedgerows again. I have great respect for these ecosystems, towering above me at this point in the year. Bright red rosehips like beacons along the top, bindweed buds like kisses and the sun glowing through their flowers’ white petals, the jumbled jewels of blackberry bunches mixing black with still-scarlet. Elderberries are particularly beautiful in my opinion, the delicate network of stems connecting shining berries: black, silvery-red, or pink-flecked green.

Preserving Memories

I realised too why I feel particularly myself when I’m caught in the rain. It’s an unmistakable impression that I’m seizing the day, regardless of the weather. Maybe I’m conflating vitality with inner self, but it’s something worthwhile, either way.

When we’re confronted with the changing of seasons, it can feel as if time picks up tempo exponentially. Every ball we juggle is flying faster, and which one should we chase first? I’m going to work and keeping my house just about clean, and checking in with my family and cooking meals and entering writing competitions and sending out critiques for other writers.

But those hours outside might stick with me most. I scribble daily to recount how I’m building relationships with my students, and my dreams in broken-up nights. Spending quieter moments in the fresh air, focused on hedgerow microcosms or the fine vistas beyond, keeps me in a mindset that livens other descriptions, such as of my walking commute to work. Becoming more aware, I have more to preserve.

I’m probably not the only one who rushes at tasks, clamouring to tick a good variety of them off my list, assuming that the whole will be greater than the sum of the parts. But making jam this week, I realised this isn’t always the case, nor should we wish it to be. Sometimes the act of gathering is more important than the fruit.

This can be true of writing. Staying open to ideas may benefit us more than toiling to write every single one down. It’s definitely true of families–preserving memories is important, but making them will always be the most precious time. And maybe slowing down briefly can be the key to keeping on.

What do you like to preserve, and how do you find the best ways to do it?

Learning Abroad

This Week’s Bit of String: On the way to somewhere else

I’d never have got into this whole immigrant fix, splitting myself between two countries, if I hadn’t done a term abroad while in college. My major was English/ Education in New Hampshire, where contributing to class discussion was key.

In the UK, on the other hand, professors seemed flummoxed when people turned up. They didn’t even expect us to read the assigned literature: “If you didn’t do the reading for this week, I hope you do at some point in your life. It’s a great book…”

*Twin American spires: church steeple and rocket*

I had read each book, as it happened, and was unimpressed having it summarised in a murmur for 3 hours. Screw it, I decided. I’ll do the reading while on the train to somewhere more interesting.

And off I went, to friends in Glasgow, Bangor, Wolverhampton, and especially London. I read, and listened to new-to-me British music (Texas, Robbie Williams, Steps), survived on Kingsmill rolls and Edam cheese and Smirnoff Ice, and fell for three different guys in quick succession, the final one being my now-husband.

I also wrote a wacky but fantastic story about a girl whose heart, in the form of a cookie, is eaten for breakfast. I got an A for that class, after only attending 1.3 lessons. I did the reading!

What I Wrote This Summer

*New England idyll: Billings Farm Museum, Vermont*

It’s always interesting to see other writers post about their vacations in the summer. Some catch up on reading, and many are busy with their children during the holidays anyway. For me, I spend 4 weeks out of the 6-week break going to see my family in New England. There are definite vacation aspects to this—the lakes and rivers, the mountains, the ice cream.

It’s also very busy as I condense a year’s worth of interactions into 1/12 of the time. Half my family are too busy to keep in touch when I’m not there, so I run around trying to help people out and make memories. They are all I have, and they are precarious without me recording them. When not Doing Things, I’m scribbling about them.

This leaves little reading time. I have writing commitments—promised critiques, etc, and also students I check in with even in the summer, so I squeeze those in. What I do find, though, is that the travel, the hiking and driving and swimming and reflecting, open me up to learning a lot of random things. Without the more rigid structure of work and long-term writing projects, my brain relaxes just enough to sponge up new information.

What I Learned This Summer

There were my discoveries while hiking, which I researched later:
The rather formidable Argiope aurantia (ok, yellow garden spider) keeping watch from her web in the lake bridge. It’s also known as a zigzag spider because of that uniquely thick central line. The purpose of this unique pattern is still unknown to us.

The Warren Rocket: My family got together in Warren, NH, near the White Mountains. While other towns have Civil War cannons on their greens or in front of their schools, Warren (population peaked in 1860 at 1100-something) has a great big Redstone missile rocket. (Pictured at the top.) It was funded and transported by a local veteran hoping to encourage interest in space travel.

Signs around the rocket tell visitors about SS Officer Wernher von Braun, who supervised concentration camp workers to manufacture missiles that killed 1400 Londoners. After the war, Americans smuggled von Braun out of Germany to design even deadlier rockets over here, but also realise his childhood dream of sending rockets to space. I wonder what the childhood dreams of his captive labourers were, or those civilians killed in airstrikes.

*You can see why the Morse Museum caught my eye…*

The Morse Museum: Another early morning Warren hike discovery, a building with granite plaques advertising Curios of India and China, and African Game Trophies. Now-vacant, it was dedicated in 1928 to house the collections of Ira H Morse, a local shoe store mogul and game hunter. There’s a colourful bio online of IH and others, written by affectionate family members. They include his adventures but also quirks like how he would “ream out” uncooperative salt shakers, at home or in public.

Speaking of museums, there are a couple in the area which I like to visit.
Billings Farm, a late 19th century agricultural reenactment site. It’s great for learning about cows and dairy, edible plants and farm life (see above). When we visited this year, they were making pasta in the farmhouse kitchen. I hadn’t realised how long pasta has been a staple in the US (it’s much more recent in the UK), but in fact Thomas Jefferson sampled and loved it in Europe, and by the time of the Civil War macaroni was very popular.

The Hood Museum at Dartmouth College: I always stand in awe before the incredible, ancient Assyrian tablets before moving on to the current exhibits. This summer, a diverse selection of art including Musasama’s elaborate arrangement of textiles and natural objects across the floor, part of the Maple Tree Series, made me aware of the maple tree abolitionist movement. Did you know that in the 1790s, free people of colour, white settlers, and native Americans advocated substituting maple syrup for cane sugar, to starve the economy propping up enslavers?

My family creates a good learning environment, with our eclectic interests. Dinner discussions might be about what’s the oldest continuously-used language in the world (Hebrew, Tamil, Sanskrit… Lithuanian and Icelandic appear in the top 10, too). My dad found an 1884 encyclopaedia in our AirBnB and read passages out loud to us. There was no entry for childbirth, but lots of details on “Brawling in Church” and the various statutes against it.

Even though I didn’t do much writing work over the summer, the feeling of my mind loosening to hold more is not an unwriterly sensation. New stories could develop from here!

Do travel and family time inspire your writing?

Incorporating Wildness

This Week’s Bit of String: S-curves under Main Street

Like many former mill towns, my parents’ town in New Hampshire is built on a river. To be more precise, it is built between a series of riverbends. The Mascoma River threads beneath Main Street twice, and beneath another principal artery around the corner of an intersection.

We moved to this town when I was a somewhat irascible 8-year-old and its charms were lost on me for a decade or two. The town wasn’t really feeling itself for a while there, either. When I visit now, and walk early in the morning to avoid the worst heat, I know to look over both sides of each bridge for heron, deer, and bald eagles. And I’ve started wondering at the river itself.

The town buildings of Main Street, mainly originating in the late 1800s or early 1900s, are built right next to the river but a fair way up in elevation. The banks are unbreached walls of leaves. Boulders stand in the water as if swept there by glaciers, just a car park away from the former laundromat (future microbrewery). There’s a heavily wooded peninsula in the middle of the river section near the Lutheran church. I’ve never seen a person down there but have seen a pair of deer drinking.

I’ve started wondering about all this. What was the river like before the town was built? Was it a great deal wilder in its natural state? Did boats travel down it when the mill was functioning, somehow steering around the boulders?

Inner Wilds

While contemplating how closely we can live with wildness in nature, I began drawing parallels to inner life. We grow up civilising ourselves, so to speak: building various blocks we deem useful or desirable within our minds. As we develop our mental landscape and moderate our personalities, what torrents gush, untameable, between these blocks?

*This is actually right in the middle of town.*

An interesting analogy as I traipse through the grey-gold dawn in my childhood town, and reflect on different incarnations of myself. I wonder at which point I was the most wild, the most untamed. It’s the moments when I feel most unique that I feel most myself, like when I used to run outside alone into thunderstorms. But there are so many shared characteristics among us all, equating identity with individuality may just be another societal pressure.

As an oldest child of four, and in a religious family, I’m not sure how wild I’ve ever been, really. Who knows what my natural state would be, and whether my eagerness to conform affects my writing. Most likely, my writing is where I break free from it a little.

Defying Expectations

After all, the problem with trying to conform is that there are so many standards to meet from others, and often they are contradictory. It’s cool to be non-conformist, at such times when society expects it from us. It’s equally challenging with writing: be clear but don’t over-reveal. Ensure your characters are unique, but recognisable and likeable.

*Even the built-up bits won’t last forever. The mill upriver from town.*

Writing a happy ending is practically an act of rebellion these days. Allowing a villain to be truly villainous breaks the writing mould (and I don’t think I have it in me to do that, although I’m happy to read it). Similarly, opting for quiet, non-busy moments in real life may be the ultimate subversion. Am I at my wildest when I’m out hiking or when I’m curled up reading a book?

By linking the word wild to its root of natural (with connections to wold; woodlands), then it’s easier to accept these contradictions. After all, nature can be both calm and then fierce. Sometimes at the same time—tonight I tried to connect with my wild self by going out in rolling thunder and glimmers of lightning, but it barely even rained. Well, I was there even if the storm wasn’t quite.

What wildness have you built your life around, and how do you reconnect with it every now and then?