Of land and time in memoir

October 20, 2016

Hello journaling/memoir ones. I have landed in Niagara on the Lake, sort of unpacked (Cat in boxes, again) and arranged for the house to be repainted, re-carpeted, re-blinded and re-kitchened (are these verbs?) while working on two of the last courses needed to complete my journal facilitator certification.

As my first blog post after “the move” I could ramble on about having vineyards constantly in my view and formerly distant family suddenly here. There are a few empty bottles in the recycling and signs of festive family finagling over Thanksgiving in my refrigerator (yes still). Taste is certainly a valuable sense through which I can recall and tradition adds meat to skeletal stories. But as I reacquaint myself with the province of my birth there is another, quite unexpected, voice that calls to the depths of memory. I hear it as I walk under ancient trees that saw the Battle of 1812, as I break through the October clay that clings to still blooming roses, as I stand in awe of the dark skies that fill with wizardly strings of light and the boom of anger, as I walk the beach with dark sand stuck to my white TOMS, and as I witness a riot of colour strewn like boughs along the escarpment and the way the sunrise makes its’ way across the lake like a rosy silk scarf dropped into a breeze. It has helped me to remember how landscape is a part of every story? Everything happens somewhere and readers want to know about the somewhere and how it imprinted on me. That’s one of the reasons it figures so prominently in works of f