Memoir Haze

Where I've Been for Weeks

I’m so sorry for my absence from this newsletter. The weeks have flown by as I prepared for and left home for a long writing retreat in the home of friends who’ve escaped to Paris. I’m still there…more days ahead for writing.

Writing this memoir has been a five-year commitment with lots of ups and as many, or more, downs. It’s far more challenging than I imagined it would be to create a well-written account and most life-altering moments and times in my seventy-seven years and counting.

I lack content for this newsletter so I’m including a brief passage from my early childhood, hoping it will inspire your own connections with the miracles in the natural world with all manner of Beings.

I was born at 8:12 on Sunday morning, January 5, 1947 to a mother who had no interest in babies or children. I was her fourth, a post-war baby. She was in the hospital for the customary three days, I suspect it felt like a respite from my father’s regular assaults; on the third morning he picked her up, drove her home to our second-floor apartment in a tenement building owned by my father’s employer, S.D. Warren Paper.

 I imagine my father gave her a hand as she stepped out of the car’s passenger seat, her galoshes landing on snow-covered ground. I imagine her wearing a thread-bare woolen coat and a fancy going-t0-church Easter hat that likely didn’t offer a bit of warmth. She held me, likely wrapped in a faded-yellow blanket with pearl-sized fuzzy nubs created by years of washing, wringing, and drying.

She paused for a moment, regaining her balance while a snowflake, probably falling from a branch of a snow-covered maple tree, landed on my pink, crinkled up, doll-sized nose. She didn’t speak words of comfort, hum, make cooing sounds, or bend to press light kisses on my forehead; I couldn’t smell her face, black curly hair, or feel the warmth of her breath.

Rather, what first awakened my heart and soul were the scents of wet wood and freshly fallen evergreen boughs, the distant echo of joy and love from within the cold air, and my heart heard songs rising from the nearly Presumpscot River; I breathed the same air as that which had filled the lungs of ancestors who’d live on this land in centuries past. They are the Wabanaki who, hundreds of years before my arrival, had settled where my mother’s snow-covered galoshes now stood.

It was the spirit of the land, its early inhabitants, the nearby waters of the Presumpscot River, and the sweetness of the air that first greeted me into this lifetime; for that I will be eternally grateful.

Please accept that this is a draft and may not appear in the final memoir, especially after it’s gone through my editor’s hands and eyes!

I hope to be here more regularly in the coming weeks; we’re experiencing extraordinary times nationally, globally, and within the cosmos. Let’s all stay aware and awake as we venture into an uncertain future.

Have faith, though, and remember that our ancestors didn’t know what was ahead of them either, and look who they created, decades and centuries later - the fantastic and beautiful US!

Blessings, Dory