Compelling stories are not by accident, lost.
written by Julie R. Neidlinger 3 comments link this postHave we lost our rhythm, our story?
I know I have not. My story is very real, though not as romantic as a war-time love, homesteading or a sod house on the prairie. These things were not romantic during their time; I don't want to spin a false tapestry in telling my story.
My story?
It's in the dog's death, the bareback horse races in the shelterbelt, the cat funerals with tears. It's in canning season, the picking and snapping and cutting of beans, begging to be let out of all the work but loving the smell of brine and the danger of the pressure cooker, loving the rows of glass jars of summer's work lined up on the shelves of the damp basement.
It's in grandma's homemade buns and walking over to her house just to eat them. It's grandpa cussing up a storm over by the grain bins, learning new words we ought not to have heard back in our yard.
It's in hauling water to the 4-H sheep five-gallon bucket by five-gallon bucket at a time. It's fighting over who had to push-mow and who had to take a scissor and cut the grass around all the trees.
It's in the Schwan man delivering big cans of ice-cream for five kids and two parents to eat in a fortnight. It's hoeing the garden and eating raw peas straight from the plant. It's in bottle fed lambs, watching them live and watching them die.
It's sneaking into grandpa's childhood house, abandoned, sagging and pink inside, against all orders. It's crab apple fights, forts out in the trees, sleeping on the deck all night, crying into diaries, and lonely summers when animals became more.
It's in piecing together old bits of harness and twine and tying the pony to a wreck of a cart. It's in walking down the road to my sister's trailer to borrow milk. It's in picking tall grass and feeding it to the cattle when the came up to the gate.
It's in clearing up storm damage and inwardly crying over felled trees that had initials cut into them. It's in the small building in the cattle pasture, a secret fort and retreat from the bull with made-up ferocity.
It's in hand-me-down clothing from older sisters. It's in pancakes Christmas morning at grandma's.
It's in buckets of oats and an hour of patience to coax haughty horses into their halter for a ride. It's in helping mom make the lunch to take out to the men in the field.
It's a small-town play in the loft of a barn on a makeshift stage with sheets and safety pins for curtains. It's homemade brownies and cookies and lefse sold out of an old cook car during the threshing show.
It's the local cafe and store where everybody really does know your name and the cookies and pie are made from scratch. It's the small, drive-up coffee place that knows what you, a regular, want before you even pull up to the window fully.
It's in the chapter I wrote today, hoeing and raking black dirt, dumped on an eyesore with the old bobcat, thick and clumped, forced into submission, blistered thumbs, shovel, potato fork digging up perennials, irises from my grandmother's mother, leave the rhubarb plants, buckets from the rainwater barrel full of mosquito larvae, spade, aching back, field stones, black hands and chipped fingernails, and finally, beauty.
The rhythm that makes up a story that matters is not gone because the One who made it is not gone. It is there, but has to be seen! The seasons, the wind, the grain dust in the air when harvest begins, the smell of the thawing sloughs in spring, the ache of a new crush and the knowledge gained when it's over, the death of a pet and the collapse of a barn.
Nostalgia can't be my story; I have already written the past into my story and now I go on. I can't revive the past without killing both it and the future. The absence or presence of machines, the fear and distaste of modern change, can't be my story. What I didn't have, didn't experience, nor ever will, can't be my story. I can't wish or envy another's story without hurting my own. If my story is only seen as worthy through the glass of time, I will never have a story because I will only wait to see what it might be instead of writing it now.
Many have lost their story but only because they never set out on purpose to find it. Do you want your story? Then find it, on purpose. It's not too late.
Hat Tip: Girl Friday.
Labels: essay
Copyright (c) Julie R. Neidlinger 6/13/2006 10:32:00 PM
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3 Comments:
No comments as of yet? Quite a surprise.
Well, I've read your entry here, and those it links to. Your view used to be completely my view. We are born into the time we are born in, and live it. To those who live in any one time, that's their time, and it is rare, I thought, for most to realize a time is extrordinary or special when they live it.
But later I became uncertain about that. Maturity? Boredom? More likely the grind. Much of modern life is not very fulfilling, and, in my view, the more devorced we become from our rural roots, the more true that is.
You have a point, and a good one. But I'm afraid I'm unconvinced. The other posts speak towards a yearning towards a simpler, more connected time. It was also, however, a more desperate time, which is why those who lived then built what we have now. That doesn't point towards going back, but going forward, towards something, perhaps, resembling what we left behind in some ways.
A Wendell Berry sort of view.
By 
Yeoman, at
14/6/06 22:01
I guess my biggest fear is finding myself in the mind trap of imagining my "story" can only be good if it happened in another time or in another place. This either gives me an excuse to not do the hard things I need to do to make my story worthwhile, or it sets me up to be discontented my entire life.
Both are just as bad.
By Julie, at
15/6/06 21:38
"I guess my biggest fear is finding myself in the mind trap of imagining my "story" can only be good if it happened in another time or in another place."
That is indeed bad, as it can be delusional. It's one thing to hope for a better present, perhaps with elements from the past, and quite another to believe you should have lived in the past. We can't get to the past any way, so while we can admire a prior era, there's no sense in dreaming that we ought to be in it.
And, generally, when people do that, they do of course imagine the best of the past. Nobody imagines, for example, that they wished they'd lived in 1832 so they could have died of smallpox at age 12.
By Yeoman, at
16/6/06 16:21
