Writing Spaces

 

I would sit on this bench beyond reach and write of autumn things.  The burnt colors:  burnt umber, burnt sienna.  The wistful downwards triad of a golden-crowned sparrow.  The lucent hundred-year-old catsup bottle on a windowsill facing the sunset, offering something hard to express, something elusive about time and loss and bubbles caught in glass.

 

Tom Stoppard puts it perfectly, in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead:  "Autumnal—nothing to do with leaves.  It is to do with a certain brownness at the edges of the day . . . Brown is creeping up on us, take my word for it . . . Russets and tangerine shades of old gold flushing the very outside edge of the senses . . . deep shining ochres, burnt umber and parchments of baked earth—reflecting on itself and through itself, filtering the light.  At such times, perhaps, coincidentally, the leaves might fall, somewhere, by repute.  Yesterday was blue, like smoke."

 

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Sheffield Park and Garden

Santa Fe, Lilacs, and Writing Tips

 

I am grateful to be welcomed into the Heartland Society of Women Writers—perhaps as more than an honorary member because of my connections to the midwest on both sides of the family.

 

And this is what I have to say for myself, as an initiate.

 

 

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Lilacs, Kew Gardens

A Lilac Year

 

This is very much a spring story, a story of a precise time and place.  There are many details which I've borrowed from my past, altered as I saw fit (one of the privileges of being a writer), shined up a bit like tarnished old silver with a soft and forgiving cloth.

 

Lilacs always transform me.  I trespass if I need to, enter strangers' yards to stand and smell for a long drunken time, my nose nestled into the luxuriance, a loopy smile on my again-twelve-year-old face.

 

"The smell of lilacs idled heavy in the air before and after, as they talked and talked.  The purple of the Pyrenees, of wisdom, mystery, and magic; the bruised powerful Tyrian color; the doomed sails of Theseus color, a shade royal and doomed, forbidden in Japan, treasured by the Mixtec, scorned by the Roman poet Horace in describing prose.  The color of thunderstorms in the canyons of the cliff dwellings at Bandelier, in the storm-bruised mountains nearby, in the sky to the north on summer opera nights when passions were alive and danger in the air."

 

 

image:  Gustave Baumann, A Lilac Year

Commentary on Creation Stories

 

For my reflections on how this story came to pass, see Twelve Winters miscellany, here.  

image:  Akira Kusaka, illustrator