#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream
Late summer fern
Well before I need to be awake, I am up, into the cool and fresh of changed summer weather, heat waves have passed. My youngest has been reading her diaries. She typed a passage and sent it to me. In the early morning I read it and begin a new poem. When I began writing Before You Forget, it was the year she was born. To write the book, I re-read years and years of her sister’s and brother’s diary entries. Many of hers had yet to be written. So, I haven’t re-read them. And she’s reading them for the first time now. We are both charmed by them. And they are poignant, too: her struggle with dyslexia and going to school. I started a poem about her dyslexia. And then I went for a long walk with a dear friend who drove out. Masked, with the dogs and our bathing suits, we traipsed the woods to my friend’s dock and took a swim. Suzi cozied herself as usual, well hidden in the rhododendrons at the edge of the pond. The water was cool, fresh, clean and intoxicating. Then we climbed the steep rocky path back up and were about to leave the yard. Charlie was distracting me, and then I realized, “Where’s Suzi?” I trotted down the path to find her fast, fast asleep in the damp earth under the rhododendrons! She cheerfully woke and followed me up. I spent the morning in a Playback Theatre workshop that my daughter was co-conducting with adults and children, stories of summer. I didn’t tell a story, but I got to act in one, a a story told by a teller from Hong Kong. It was amazing, wonderful, to see adults and children from around the country, around the world: India, Turkey, Canada and Hong Kong. All of our summer lives impacted by the pandemic. In the afternoon I dug back into the poem. It’s so so rough. I think I finished a first draft. My poetry workshop was canceled for tomorrow, and that was kind of a relief; I could have brought this poem, but now I have the week to make it stronger. No, I think it’s really that the poem has a week to work its influence on me. What I’m feeling, sharing these diary entries with my daughter, is a renewed tenderness of those early, tough school days. What a fine writer and teacher this dyslexic daughter has become.
