Got a minute?

I know, I know, I'm always talking about how I don't have time to write. But I came across this site on the Blogs of Note list and thought it was a neat idea. Read the prompt; write for 60 seconds. A great place to find writing "exercises," as they call them around here, when you've got writer's block.

Lots of good reading for my classes of late. Most recently, I finished Patricia Hampl's The Florist's Daughter. I can't say I loved the whole thing, but the frame that introduces and ends the work is lovely, poignant, and also disturbing: a daughter keeping vigil by her dying mother's bedside, holding her hand in one of hers while writing her mother's obituary on a legal pad with the other. The memoir is about a place and time that are no longer available to the writer in the present, but her attempts to look back and plumb what's contained in her memory of them are commendable. It's so hard to disentangle yourself so you can write about those things sometimes -- I think that's the problem I ran into in the last week and a half while working on my own essay. There's the problem of attachment that makes objectivity so impossible. As Hampl writes:

Nostalgia, someone will say. A sneer accompanies the word, meaning that to be fascinated by what is gone and lost is to be easily seduced by sentiment. A shameful undertaking. But nostalgia shares the shame of the other good sins, the way lust is shameful or drink or gluttony or sloth. It doesn't belong to the dessicated sins of the soul -- pride, envy. To the sweet sins of the body, add nostalgia. The sin of memory.

Nostalgia is really a kind of loyalty -- also a sin when misapplied, as it so often is. But it's the engine, not the enemy, of history. It feeds on detail, the protein of accuracy. Or maybe nostalgia is a form of longing. It aches for history. In its cloudy wistfulness, nostalgia fuels the spark of significance. My place. My people.

My essay gets workshopped on Thursday, so we'll see what people think. I sent a few drafts to D before I turned it in, and he was helpful in pointing out how to fix some things. It's nice to have a reader with fresh eyes -- not just eyes that haven't read this particular piece but eyes that haven't been looking at tons of other essays all semester and are getting a bit glazed over! (I don't blame them.)

I unwound from all the craziness of the week last night by talking to my sister, who is in the fall semester of her senior year in college (also the one involved in the Cork Incident that I mentioned last week). Talk about being nostalgic -- where has time gone? We've been scattered across the country, this sister, my other sister, and me. I miss being silly with them and finishing each other's reminiscences and speaking in the code that only we share. Perhaps another essay will come of that idea.

In the name of nostalgia for silly moments, here's one from a visit that one sister made to Seattle during our first summer there. Clearly, Midwestern girls do not see hills like this one very often. D's driving, Sis is shooting the video, and I'm in the back seat laughing.