True Confession: I Hoard
Listen, I have a problem with letting go. I’m a hoarder, but not of things, no, I’ve whittled my life down to what fits into a modest storage space, plus about 10 boxes of clothes, books, and manuscripts, plus what I can wedge into my car. No kidding. That part has been freeing, although I will tell you if my mother were still around when I was unloading stuff six years ago, she would have threatened to “skin me alive.” (For real, somehow I had ended up with a box containing a pair of her underpants from when she was three years old that had been handmade by my great-grandmother. They were pale pink silk with tatted lace around the leg-holes. My mother was a little hurt that I didn’t want to keep them.)
No, my problem is different. I hoard moments. I want to lasso time and rope it in, keep it to take out on a dreary winter night when the world feels dead — here is the first just-picked summer strawberry as it hits my tongue and bursts into floral ruby-red goodness; and here is the smell of new-mown alfalfa coming to me like someone just put a fresh-baked pie of green on the sill of the open window of the world; there is a muskrat that splashes under the river’s dappled surface as the raucous voice of a crow sounds through the tall sycamores.
And now, in autumn and with the primal awareness of the coming dark, I am greedy with each and every second that the sun lights up a tree full of red-gold leaves, and I pull off the road and take yet another picture, but the pictures cannot capture the fullness of the moment, the pictures can only remind me of how fleeting the moment is. How fleeting all our moments are.
The baby, four weeks old now, grows and changes daily. I look at my daughter, the mother, and remember her at the same age. Wasn’t that just yesterday?
In truth, our moments are already gone the instant we notice them, but I try to capture and hold them. I use words to do so, my sad little arsenal of letters, curious line-and-circle marks a group of someones once agreed should mean something, so the marks were drawn in sand, in mud, then etched in stone, then scrawled on papyrus, then written on lined pages, then typed onto a paper-covered platen, then clicked on a keyboard, the words now appearing on this screen at this exact point in time.
In the end, though, even words are not sufficient to hold the moment. The moment can’t be held. But I try. Lord knows, I try.
And sometimes, very briefly, it is as if I’ve stepped back over the barrier of the past, as if words can lift me and guide me to touch, just for an instant, the real thing. I suppose that is what keeps me going as a writer, the notion that through noticing and documenting I can cheat time.
Have a good weekend, everybody. And I’d love to hear some of the moments you’ve saved up and filed away.
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