Writer’s Weekend

I got out to the garden on Good Friday. In years past, I would plant potatoes that day as part of remembrance of my grandmother’s gardening folklore. Potatoes are an inexpensive food, readily available at the grocer, year-around: a simple carbohydrate in a life when I need to reduce my number of carbs. I enjoyed having home grown potatoes, yet skipped it in favor of other uses for the home made potato-growing containers.

Most garden work lies ahead. The weather forecast this week seems dicey for outdoors work. Such uncertainty is caused by our unpredictable, changing climate. Garden plants are resilient, however. If I protect against the last frost, chances are good there will be a crop.

I managed to move some brush around on Good Friday.

Celebrating Easter weekend is no longer a thing for me. While I was coming along as a grader, my grandmother was a driving force in celebrating Easter weekend and noting the resurrection. In studying the history of her community of Polish immigrants in Minnesota, I found her desire to don special clothing, attend Mass, and take posed photographs of everyone to note the day has its roots there. They lived an impoverished but good life in the late 19th Century. They also shared a vibrant cultural life surrounding the church. Parts of that cultural heritage found its way through grandmother to me, even if it didn’t stick.

I’ve been working on the part of my autobiography that describes the time our child started school while we lived in Indiana from 1988 until 1993. I kept written journals and re-reading them has been life changing. During the 30+ years since then, I have forgotten a lot of my own history. The current writing includes broader historical perspective I couldn’t get while living a life in real time. The end result is an appreciation for things I did do to help our child be the best they could be.

A main concern was how to spend more time with family. In February 1991, I put a pencil to it and found I was spending no more than 60-90 minutes per weekday plus time on weekends with our child. That seemed not enough. There are dozens of snippets of journal entries about our lives together. The challenge is how to weave those into a meaningful narrative, yet maintain the idea they are only a part of our lives together. This is perhaps the most interesting writing challenge thus far in the autobiography.

I didn’t make much progress on the book this weekend, although there was no shortage of things about which to think and remember. Some days, that’s what a writer needs.