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Meet me at the podium.

Today, the writers at Harwood Place held their annual reading showcase. Spending time with this group always inspires creative thought and conversation.

The Harwood Place Writers of 2023. Bottom row (left to right): Jean, Toni, Carolou, Mary, Ruth.
Top row (left to right): Warren, Milton, Carole, me.

I WRITE. In journals. On screen. In countless notebooks. I WRITE to-do lists. Plans of action. I record the date and the day of the week and where I am. Some days the page is filled with notes on nothing. Still ….

I WRITE for some of the same reasons Margaret Atwood writes:¹ To set down the past before it is forgotten. To excavate the past because it has been forgotten. To produce order out of chaos. To say a new word. To cope with my depression. To bear witness…

TO BEAR WITNESS speaks to why the Harwood Place Writers and I meet once a month.

Harwood Place is a retirement living center in town. It’s been several years since the we have held the annual reading event. A small pandemic got in the way, cut us off and kept us apart for months on end. Kept us hidden behind masks when we did return to routine. Kept us suspicious of anyone with a slight cough or sneeze or clearing of the throat. (We were never so suspicious before!) The fact that we are still here is a testament of miracles.

I’ve been spending time with this group for a while now. The first time I met with them, in the summer of 2012, I was very green and very uncertain as to how I might teach men and women of a different generation – of several generations apart. But I quickly learned that there is no great divide when it comes to writing or to telling our stories.

Stories bear witness to our experiences and in turn, no matter the age, they pave the way to connection and community. I’ve seen it happen so many times: when one person shares a story they have written, and the group sets off on a discussion of similarities and reminiscing and (more often than not) laughter. That connection and community and laughter! is the reason I return again and again.

Today’s event was a celebration of all their stories and poems they have written over the past year. Reading their stories aloud reminds them — and all of us who listen — that their stories matter.

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Listening, Writing, Thinking

from Ojibwe.net, Traditional Songs, sung by Margaret Noodin

There is a place, there is always a place, to which you return, in mind or in spirit or in the movement of your own two feet, where you rest a moment and appreciate the quiet, the solitude. Just you. And the water.

The yellowed leaf from a cottonwood tree, its tip pointing south, the whole of it — blade and stem — riding the current between this stone and that, until it comes to rest beside you, between rock and moss.

Granddaughter.*
The water can hear you.
The water has memory.

The water trickles by. The sun warms your back. The wind on your neck, relief.

Oh I am thinking.**
Oh I am reminded.

How far you have come. How far you have yet to go.

*Granddaughter …. from Sing the Water Song.
**Oh I am thinking … from Nindinendam

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Begin again.

I might have cried, but for the moon and for the thought of you tracing the places we once had been, the person I had promised you I’d be.

~ from Journey: a traveler’s notes by William Sulit and Beth Kephart

On the flight home to Texas, you realize just how long it’s been. Since you’ve flown. Since you’ve seen your father, your sisters, your mother’s sister, those who know you best. Of course, it feels like forever, but it’s only been two years. Still, you are not the same person you were when they saw you last. When you last saw them.

Of course, there’s the pandemic, where you’ve been forced to slow down and take in more of what was right in front of you. But in the last two years, you lost your footing in a few places, got back up bruised, fractured, heart worn and weary. The bruises heal. The fractures dredge up an old pain you thought you had put to rest. Where weariness sets in is during the weeks of stepping gingerly, barely breathing. There was the month of anger. Of course, anger. And to measure it by a month isn’t entirely correct; anger, like grief, comes in waves and is marked by varied lengths of intensity.

This pandemic was nothing.

When the weather warms and the restrictions ease, you open the door, step outside. The yard is beat up, in front and in back, and full of dandelions. You gather your spade buried somewhere deep in the garage and begin carving out each one that has taken root, like you might cut around a festering sore. You pray for forgiveness. Dandelions, after all, have merit. This simple act of attention becomes a meditation so, of course, you stay outside longer than you had planned. You dream about summer, schedule a long visit with family, buy the plane tickets.

You are greeted at the airport by your sister who looks just like your mother, so much so that your heart skips and you whisper, Thank you.

She chauffeurs you for miles to each cornerstone (because there is more than one). It’s strange to feel lost in the place where you grew up. The roads have changed – names and directions, are still changing. But when you take the wheel, you take your time and drive with the windows down.

The rush of the Texas heat, the sound of your cousin’s laughter, the spirit of your kids and the joy as they tap into your roots (why have you kept them away for so long?), the wide-open spaces, your father’s tender heart, the words of your aunt who says, Your mother would be proud.

There it is. Everything you need to begin again.