There was an apple tree in the yard ….

Memoirs are tricky: they’re about the past but written in the present. The landscape of memory can be elusive. Did an event happen the way the writer says it did? How faithful is their recollection? And how does the framing in which a writer interprets events change over time?

I’ve been wrestling with this last question for a while. When I was 18, my older brother had a psychotic break and started tearing up our house. It’s true that I called 911 and he was led away in a straitjacket. And it’s true that I was terrified. 

I’ve written about this in past essays. If I were writing about him today, I would add this context: It was miraculous that, given my brother’s profound pain and confusion, he remained so kind and generous as his life moved forward. How courageous he was waking up each morning grateful for another day. 

The page fills out. The story expands.

Yet some stories stay just as they are. I’ve written about my father’s abusive behavior—how he hit me with a belt, washed my mouth out with soap, and made me stand in the corner in order to shame me. All of this is true. That story has not changed.

And it probably won’t. He died when he was 56. I was 23. I will never know how he might have grown, who he might have become. I never had the chance to ask him, “Why”? And so, this story stays as it is, stuck in amber, the father who betrayed my trust and love. 

We tell and retell our stories over and over again. We do this to make sense of them and who we are based on them. In Wild Writing, we give ourselves the gift of meeting ourselves on the page. We tell our stories. We are free to retell them as many times as we choose. Should the telling of a story change, we notice that as well.

Our past informs us but we live in the here and now. We are always in the process of becoming. And that is freeing—an opportunity, and a gift.

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Poem and Practice:

In the poem “Nostos,” Louise Gluck writes that, though we may think of memories as immutable, they continue to shift and transform over time.

Simply enjoy this wonderful poem! If you are moved to write, think about a potent memory, identify an object in that memory, and use the jump off line: 

There was a …. [fill in the blank]

Alternate jump off line: What I do know is ……

Write for ten to fifteen minutes, keeping the pen moving across the page. When finished, read it back to yourself, out loud if you wish. Thank yourself for taking time to write, and if any judgment arises about your words, say, no thanks.

Nostos by Louise Gluck

There was an apple tree in the yard --

this would have been

forty years ago -- behind,

only meadows. Drifts

of crocus in the damp grass.

I stood at that window:

late April. Spring

flowers in the neighbor's yard.

How many times, really, did the tree

flower on my birthday,

the exact day, not

before, not after? Substitution

of the immutable

for the shifting, the evolving.

Substitution of the image

for relentless earth. What

do I know of this place,

the role of the tree for decades

taken by a bonsai, voices

rising from the tennis courts --

Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut.

As one expects of a lyric poet.

We look at the world once, in childhood.

The rest is memory.