As April comes to an end and May approaches, it’s a time to reset and renew. Writing can offer that renewal and reset, whether it’s a few words or sentences jotted down each day, or something more ambitious such as a short essay or the beginning of a poem.
Our writing practice is unique to us, and we can make of it what best suits us. I have been amazed at how writers I know use their writing practice to take on ambitious projects, such as revisiting long-dormant painful memories or writing something they have long wanted to write. They begin slowly, one word at a time, much like a beginner practicing yoga. They take small steps or longer stretches, balancing on one leg. Deep breathing is a way to relax, and writers can bring that to their practice by focusing on what inspires confidence and ease, knowing that what they say and write matters. Lighting a candle, playing music, and healing aromatic oils are all part of the practice.
Writing at our own pace can be important. Whether we prefer to write slowly or quickly, the authenticity of our writing practice is what brings satisfaction. It can offer healing for trauma, rest, peace of mind, and creative inspiration. We can do it in a group or practice it alone. The practice belongs to us.
That’s why I love facilitating our Women’s Writing Circle every month. It’s a time for wellness and revival, where we stretch ourselves to do what feels good, and if there’s pain, we stop and put it aside. We listen to each other’s writing, allowing it to evoke a sense of daydreaming and inspiration. Many times I leave the Circle with the energy to go home and just write, to flex my mind and body.
We take a deep breath as April ends and May begins, whether we pull out a worn journal filled with random scribblings or open a blank page on our laptops. Whatever it is, it’s all good. It’s a time to reset and renew.
I don’t claim to be a theologian, but like many others, I am on a journey to find the Divine. I follow my intuition, looking for signs … the red cardinal on the wire … the first burst of lilac in the spring.
Recently, I attended a retreat called “The Mystery of Magdalene,” led by Reverend Pat Cashman, an Episcopal priest. At the beginning of the retreat, she said, “We are all Mary Magdalene. What have you brought with you today that is Magdalene?”
Photos by Susan Weidener
What did she mean?
Outside the second-floor rectory window, the rooftop of a stately home is shrouded in April’s greenery of sweet spring. I remember the June day when we greeted our guests under the portico of that house, newly married, him in a cream-colored tux, me in a rather slinky white wedding gown. I remember our love for one another in a way I haven’t felt since then and never will again. Forty-five years have passed.
Now, I travel alone. People ask me why I am without a man, a partner, or a marriage. Why do you have no one with you? Who are you?
Who is Mary Magdalene?
Although she is a central figure in the New Testament, little is known about her life. The widow, the mother, the sister—the woman possessed by demons? They rewrote her story. They melted her down among the nameless women like a candle of wax. Was she a woman in love with a charismatic preacher? Or was she a wealthy woman who traveled the Galilee alone? Why wasn’t she attached to a man? Or was she a prostitute and sinner whose name tarnishes Irish history, forever haunted by the memories of Magdalene Laundries, those hellholes for “fallen women?”
She kneels at the cross, she is the first to witness the resurrection, and the one who anoints his feet with nard-scented hair. She was a teacher, a leader, a follower, a sinner, a prostitute, and perhaps the one who loved Jesus the most.
Some scholars believe that there was a special love between them and that their conversations were intimate and private, that they kissed on the mouth. Peter was even jealous of her. The rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar turned her into the woman who sings: “I don’t know how to love him.”
The role of women in the life and times of Jesus is complex and confusing. It seems to me that Jesus was a feminist, and it was the men who followed him who failed to relinquish their power and authority to the women he loved. I think of the women witnesses who promoted his ministry, whose lives are never the subject of sermons.
Then there is the woman author belittled because people believed that a woman could not have had conversations that the Twelve didn’t have with the man proclaiming to be the Son of God, let alone write her own gospel. Her leadership and authority are disputed by the men, an ancient message but one that resonates with women today. I think of women whose stories, whether or not they inspire anger or jealousy, dare to write them.
She was smart. She was slandered. She was Virginia Woolf. She was Adrienne Rich. She was the woman who dared write while the famous male authors said she couldn’t write, so why pretend?
When we eliminate guilt and shame, desire, and anger, we prepare to become “fully human,” according to the Gospel of Mary. This is the writer’s journey, the one that leads to redemption, the one that frees and heals.
To be “fully human” is to be divine. The “realm of God is among you,” she proclaims. This was heresy. This was revolutionary. This was the nameless women who gathered around the sacred Circle, lit the candle, and shut out the distractions of the outside world, putting their trust in each other. This is Magdalene.
The Sonoran Desert and the Santa Catalina Mountains in Tucson, Arizona inspire me to keep creating and hopefully make a difference. I often write about the importance of getting away and stepping out of your comfort zone, especially for writers. My recent trip there allowed me to work on my novel and visit with friends I hadn’t seen in years. We shared perspectives and points of view and caught up on our lives. To be so trusting of one another after years apart was a gift, heightened by the great expanse of the American Southwest.
When I returned to Pennsylvania from Arizona, I learned that my best friend of over fifty years had died. It wasn’t this week or last that she died but in late January. Her distant family member hadn’t let me know of her passing, and for this, I remain deeply saddened. I was denied the opportunity to attend her funeral and was at a loss for how strange life comes to an end. Through technology and the internet, I found the obituary, which knowing she had an incurable disease, I admit I had searched for from time to time with great trepidation.
The obituary was sparse. She was a woman alone. Whoever wrote it knew little to nothing about Paula. Twice divorced, with no children, her parents long dead, there was no one to remember, to speak of her life, which was often difficult but far from lacking noteworthiness, including a journalism award she won for community reporting. There was me, her “sister” who remembered the day she first met the petite girl with big blue eyes who invited her into her house to listen to the Beatles, drink coke, and eat popcorn. She called me Susie and was present at every major milestone in my life. When our Women’s Writing Circle published its anthology, Slants of Light, she got each one of our authors to sign her copy. But Alzheimer’s had stripped her of her memory and her gentle nature. I lacked the courage to make the two-hour drive to New Jersey to visit her in the nursing home in her final years. I couldn’t bear becoming invisible to her and seeing her so distressed, caught between anger and weeping. The last time I visited, when she still knew me, she said hauntingly, “Don’t forget me.”
I am not proud that I never went back after that, yet when I mentioned this to a friend, she validated her own experience of avoiding any final visits with her cousin who also had Alzheimer’s.
With Paula at our Slants of Light book signing
As writers, we seek to make sense of the world around us, not just by drawing upon our own experiences, but by learning from the experiences of others willing to share their stories and moments of pain and suffering. My friends in Arizona and friends here…they help me realize I am not alone in this beautiful and terrible journey. To quote Kate Bowler, whose Lenten study I recently completed, friends and community strengthen us. However, where do we go from here? How do we find the courage to face the most beautiful and terrible things?
I looked out the window this morning. I may have an answer. The luminescent lawn of green nurtured by rain and clouds offers April’s mystery. So do the fragile white and yellow daffodils that grow among the weeds behind tree limbs, fallen during winter storms. As the cycle begins again, it is April that strikes a chord.
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain
– T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland”
The reminder that I will never see my best friend again is poignant and bittersweet. As winter fades into spring, life goes on. It’s easy to be hard on ourselves when things don’t go as planned. That’s why it’s important to be kind to ourselves and focus on progress rather than perfection. Writing can be a powerful tool to cultivate self-compassion. By allowing our uncensored thoughts and feelings to flow onto the page, we can explore and process our grief and loss. This April, I am inspired by the memory of Paula, my beautiful best friend, to keep writing and reflecting on the great love and gratitude we shared during our time together.
As writers, we get out of our comfort zones and find “the next chapter.” Or, at least, that’s what I hoped when I traveled 2,500 miles to Tucson, Arizona, from my home in suburban Philadelphia last week.
This place of magic and mystique speaks to my creative soul, much, I suppose, like New Mexico drew Georgia O’Keeffe. I lived in Tucson for a year in 2008 when I worked as a volunteer in the nonprofit sector and came back many winters, but I hadn’t returned in six years until now.
Last March, I made a pilgrimage to Israel with the Episcopal Church. This winter, I wanted a “less heavy lift” yet a getaway that nurtured me so I could work on my novel.
I figured that coming back to Tucson was circular, like a pilgrimage back to the beginning of a time and place that I remember as happy.
Photo by Susan Weidener
Whether domestic or international, pilgrimages offer an inherent element of spirituality, a soul-nurturing. We discover who we are, not just as writers but as women looking back at the past and where we might go from here.
Serendipitously, my trip coincided with the Tucson Festival of Books. I volunteered at the first festival in 2009, came back years later, and here I was, again, only now an author of four books and two anthologies. The festival brings authors and writers from all over the country together, kindred spirits on the University of Arizona campus.
There’s this thing about being a writer. Being around other writers and sharing ideas, experiences, and creative juices is a coming home, a tribe of kindred spirits.
The idea that writing every day is required if you’re serious about your craft is one of many myths. While some authors mentioned goals of at least 500 new words a day, another said that due to her chronic health condition, she wrote only when she could muster the energy. Yet another works a nine-hour day four months out of the year. The rest of the year is devoted to teaching.
As for me, life often intervenes, steering me from the disciplined intention of working every day. A new writing project like this novel energizes me, as does my writing group back in Pennsylvania, the Women’s Writing Circle. There is one thing all the authors agreed on. A writing partner, a critique group, and editors are essential tools of the trade.
The internet has made the writer’s job infinitely easier. Researching a character…for example, in my novel, a woman has a personality disorder…is as easy as Googling the condition. What does it feel like to be “neurodivergent?” How does a character with a personality disorder express herself?
One writer who had been adopted and learned at the age of sixteen the identity of her birth mother said she wrote her story as fiction, not non-fiction “because I don’t know enough to write it as non-fiction.”
That resonates for me, too. I write what I know, often from my own life experiences. I write fictional characters that resemble people I know or once knew, but the character takes on his or her own life thanks to the alchemy of imagination.
As a fiction writer, I attended sessions on writing with plot and suspense in mind. If you don’t care about your characters, your readers won’t either. Developing dialogue that is “cagey” was an interesting piece of advice from one author…it is not what they say as much as what the reader infers as their meaning or motivation.
End each chapter with something akin to a cliffhanger or a question that makes for pageturners, a hint of something to come, or the revelation of a secret.
Create conflict between your characters. As one writer said: “Make your characters want something and then put obstacles in their way. That’s plot.”
It’s good to be out West, writing. It’s a good feeling to come away inspired to do the hard work simply because other writers validate all your experiences. The “communion” with the first cup of coffee in the morning. The endless drafts. I often wonder where I would have been in my life if it weren’t for writing. What I do know is that writing has been good for me. It’s a pilgrimage to a holy place of creativity, discovery, and learning. And I’m not done yet. More pilgrimages await along the writer’s way.
This weekend, I attended the celebration service for Absalom Jones, the first African American Episcopal priest ordained in Philadelphia in 1802. As the choral group of young girls and boys sang in the high-ceiling cathedral with windows showcasing snow-draped fields, I remarked to my friend, “I can’t believe I was ever that young. They have their whole lives in front of them. Everything awaits with endless possibilities.”
Photo by Susan Weidener
I told my friend. “I wish I were young again. I would love to do it all over…” meaning my life. My friend said, “I would too if I knew then what I know now.” That, of course, would be ideal.
In college, I dated a man who played the piano for a gospel group from a Washington DC church. Since then, I have loved the rhythm and vibrancy of survival expressed through gospel music. We were the only white people traveling with five or six black men to North Carolina and Virginia, where they played at churches. The hallelujahs and amens were an education for the Protestant girl who worshipped in old stone churches with ornate stained glass windows of Jesus holding a lamb. After invigorating services, we enjoyed feasts of barbecued chicken and corn. We stood and talked next to tables laden with bowls of potato salad and plates of apple pie. I see a girl with shoulder-length blond hair, wearing light blue bell bottoms and a colorful dashiki-type blouse. I see him… a man, a gifted musician I loved who turned out to be gay and taught me the heartbreak of first love.
Photo by Susan Weidener
So much is written about age and the passage of time’s imprint on mind and body. I struggle to avoid the advertising and media trap of the depressing. Old ladies staring wistfully out the window…old men in rocking chairs. Slights from people I thought were friends once bothered me, yet now belong to the prism of time that this too shall pass and patience is a virtue.
Photo by Susan Weidener
The snow that blanketed my backyard this week merged in perfect winter harmony with the sunshine and blue sky that followed the storm. My Valentine’s Day passed quietly. The next day, I bought peach-colored roses at the grocery store on sale at 50 percent off. They are just for me, a gift for loving myself.
I am “babysitting” my sons’ dogs for the next two weeks. They say you should feel useful to stay young. Caring for animals is useful. My sons have traveled to the end of the world—Antarctica—a trip they planned for thirteen months, which required a sizeable investment of time and money. They invited me to go, although we all knew I preferred the “health” that comes with a good night’s sleep, not the grind of 27 hours to get to Argentina…and whales, yes, I’ve seen those before.
I am leaving for Arizona after they return. This Is Me Now… a woman accepting the ideal getaway…leisurely and familiar yet magical. The sunsets and desert become muses for a work-in-progress novel.
As the young people at the Absalom service, called “Hope is Here”, sang gospel hymns of praise, I thought of a cozy house, a dinner of my choosing … and three dogs … mine and my sons’ … awaiting. This is the loneliness and beauty now.
Photo by Susan Weidener
Winter is a time for comfort. As the great painter Andrew Wyeth once said: “I prefer winter and fall when you feel the bone structure of the landscape. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn’t show.”
There is a quietness now that comes with understanding the complexities of life. Absalom Jones fought against all odds the injustice of slavery to become a spiritual beacon of light. I see the complexities of my life, too. From that first gospel concert with the boyfriend from DC to the one on a winter’s day decades later, it’s all unfolding to the rhythm of comfort and time.
Earlier this month, I wrote on Facebook that I had started work on my new novel. It’s a bit of a departure for me as it tackles the topic of obsession and has a true-crime aura, albeit fiction. I received a lot of congratulations and interest, and so I’m writing again every day.
Photograph by Susan Weidener
Yesterday, when I mentioned this project to a friend, she was intrigued. “Oh, I love it,” she said. She asked me to give her more details. It’s about a woman stalking a man, harassing him, I said. What motivates her to try and ruin this man and have so little faith in herself that her entire identity is wrapped up in a relationship gone wrong, especially when she is an accomplished and educated woman?
She went on to tell me that when she was in her twenties, she had dated a man for three years. When he broke up with her, she began stalking him. When she looks back on that time in her life, she realizes that it was not just her anger at being rejected but her attempt to reestablish the relationship. It was wrong, she said.
Maybe the past is why she told me she enjoys watching “crazy women” on YouTube. “I’ll send you links to some of the videos,” she offered. When I got home, the links, half a dozen were there. In one of them, a woman screams and pounds on her ex-boyfriend’s door, begging him to talk to her. Begging over and over. When he refuses and tells her to go away, she tries to smash his window glass with a patio chair. He’s afraid of calling the police because he thinks they will side with her. After she punched him in the face, he knocked her to the ground. Meanwhile, he records it all on his cellphone.
Dark obsession is something Stephen King had written about years ago in his novel Misery. And we all remember the movie Fatal Attraction with Glenn Close and Michael Douglas. But I have to wonder: Did things get worse after the MeToo Movement?
Writers explore topics that interest them. Being a lifelong feminist, I always felt that the egregious behavior of men who could sexually assault and abuse women without repercussion needed to be rectified. But when angry women feel victimized and suspect they can weaponize law enforcement and the judicial system to their advantage with false allegations of abuse and assault, then how much progress have we made?
What motivates a person to seek revenge? What sparks their obsession? Why do some people not accept the consequences of their decision to enter into a relationship that is unhealthy but then stay with it?
I think so much of what we’re living now is a study of anger, polarization, and the feeling that others are to blame for whatever is lacking in our own lives. How do we deal with this? Who is to blame? How does it end?
I became the target of obsession when I first became engaged to my husband, something I wrote about in my memoir Again in a Heartbeat. His mother, in a fury, came after me with a knife and stabbed me through the hand. Was it her fear of a loss of control … of losing her son to another woman? If she had been on medication, would she have been a different person?
Craziness and anger are rampant these days. Have people lost all ground, all belief in themselves? Do they feel their lives are over and destruction is the answer? Writing is a journey. This novel offers an exploration of the human heart. And so I write.
Christmas is a joyous time because it coincides here in the Northeast with colder and cloudier days that force indoor time and introspection. It’s a teaching time, learning to value what we have, as well as appreciating that all of us have so much in common. That, after all, is the human condition and the true meaning of this season.
I love the holiday glitz and glamour, but where would I be without the Women’s Writing Circle? Throughout the year, as we have for the past fourteen years (yes, can you believe it, we first met in 2009?), we come together to celebrate in an amazing variety of ways, offering poignant memories and imaginative writing through poems, memoirs, and fiction.
It’s a time when I especially appreciate friends since I have a small family… there are only six of us… my sons, me, and our three dogs. I miss my parents and mostly my husband, but friends buffer grief and offer good cheer. Each of my friends is a world unto herself. We are unique with differing backgrounds, experiences, and even perspectives but all the more to make our bonds richer.
Each month I end my messages to our Women’s Writing Circle with the quote from Margaret Atwood: A word after a word after a word is Power. Words frame our artistic maturity in a way that provides invaluable insight into the collective consciousness of the feminine. The Circle is a sacred container that allows that trust and journey to flourish.
It’s not just writing but baked goods, favorite books, and gifts from the heart that make for a warm and supportive atmosphere.
We cultivate the craft of writing by studying the work of other writers and sharing resources available locally and online.
Here’s a retrospective of some of those happy times in 2023 with our Women’s Writing Circle, who offered me so much joy and creativity. A special thank you to the Chester Springs Library in Historic Yellow Springs for hosting us in their community room with views of sky and field. I hope to see you again in the new year, as well as welcome new members who desire … and dare… to dip a toe into the wonder that is writing.
Happy Holidays! May we continue to find in connection a wonderful new year.
As I look at this past year, I think of the exceptional moments. There was the writing workshop I led at the Great Marsh Institute, a retreat that offers the artist and writer solitary trails and nature walks. Together, we gathered and wrote of our moments of being, of exploring the self and the world around us. My pilgrimage to Israel during Lent meant being rebaptized in the Jordan River, where John the Baptist baptized Jesus. The birthday celebration in Portugal with my sons included standing at the southernmost tip of Europe and gazing across the Atlantic accompanied by two men who looked like their father.
The Galilee. Photo by Susan Weidener
I realize, too, however, that what Virginia Woolf once said is true. Exceptional moments are not typical and can also be despair and sadness.
Amid the holidays, memories return when I think of the people no longer with me. Their pain and suffering helped me find a relationship with myself.
There was Aunt Edna who suffered from schizophrenia. Her tragic illness held our family captive with despair and unending responsibility; she never left the house except for the weekly grocery shopping trip, and when she came to visit my parents, her clothes smelled of mothballs. If anything, I wanted to live each day, be adventurous, and explore the world while I still could.
Aunt Edna, second from left.
I think of Andy, my older brother and my only sibling, whose strength, stamina, and charisma were stripped away by cancer. He loved his dry martini and the game of golf. He was one of the most handsome men I have ever known. Driven by ambition and the pursuit of wealth, he rarely slowed down. I want to slow down, stop, and pay attention to this beautiful place where I live and appreciate the modest life.
I think of my mother, as the abuse and terrible conditions in assisted living and nursing homes have been much in the news. She fell one night in her sad little room, alone, discovered in the morning to have suffered a stroke. I remain determined to stay in my home for as long as possible.
Photo by Susan Weidener
Recently, I attended an Advent mini-retreat based on the reflections of Kate Bowler, a Canadian author and professor of divinity, and a survivor of colon cancer living with chronic pain. We spoke of what is known as “toxic positivity,” which is the idea that one must be grateful for the life they do have, no matter what, and always put on a brave face. Yet, you can not deny the complexity of life or the reality of death, and negative feelings are not a failure but a normal part of the human condition—nor is gratitude always a solution to pain.
Bowler’s podcasts featured Richard Rohr, the Franciscan priest living in New Mexico, and his reflections on “the good life.” If you are unable, or unwilling, to appreciate the beauty of a single flower or a dog who waits patiently for your return and loves you unconditionally, Rohr said, then you forget what makes for a good life. His philosophy is almost childlike in its simplicity: “If we can let go” of the many impossible and soul-draining expectations, pay attention, and be happy in the moment, then our suffering and pain are released. Remember, too, he said, that a word of kindness, where you “recognize” another person, offers them and you meaning … I am seen … and makes for a good moment, a good day. After all, you may never see them again. Everything has dimension, even when it’s not about you.
Photo by Susan Weidener.
My Scripture during the mini-retreat was this: John 3:30: “Jesus must increase, but I must decrease.”
Virginia Woolf knew that a catalyst for great art was suffering and uncertainty. Travel, family, and friends remain gifts to be cherished, but the entire range of human emotions and experiences can be exceptional, too. Joy and despair… I’ll write about all those moments. In the end, even my imagination would not have conjured what might and did happen and is still to come. How exceptional is that?
It’s December. There’s a mystery to the season. As Mary Oliver writes in her poem, “Mysteries, Yes”: “Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood.”
Photo by Susan Weidener
My kitchen window faces south and by mid-afternoon, the room is infused with gold light. A fading maroon chrysanthemum potted in gray alabaster on the outdoor deck and trees stark against a vividly blue sky is an inspiring tableau. I’m unsure what I will write, but somehow it always returns to him. Last night I had another dream. The dreams are often so similar that I wonder if when I wake in the morning he hasn’t come back, not to haunt me but to let me know that, sorry, death is not a place you can follow me. He remains shrouded in the shadows or a darkened room in the dreams. The dreams make me feel as if in some way he is angry with me, or he doesn’t want me to think that he ever loved me, or that he is a stranger to me now.
I suppose a Jungian therapist would interpret this as that in some way my subconscious is to blame. After all, there was a time when I wanted to flee out beyond the moonlight and never return to the disease, to this house, to the miasma of death and decaying dreams.
The next morning he’s gone and I’m alone. Something awaits, something just for me. As Mary Oliver writes: … “People come from delight or the scars of damage, to the comfort of a poem.”
The writing, the opening of the laptop on the kitchen table, letting the words take shape even though I’m not sure where they’re taking me, therein lies mystery and comfort. Last week, I met two long-time writing friends when we read this Oliver poem together. One friend I hadn’t seen in almost seven years. Imagine that! Yet, writing forged a bond—if just for one afternoon—that brought us together in the “comfort of a poem”, the memoir moment of a life transition that takes shapes from something as simple as a writing prompt, the belief that there is no shame in anything we write that is true, and that nonjudgemental freedom lifts our spirits.
The memory returns to another house, a childhood bedroom where I read poetry and wrote stories. A brown secretary desk with brass knobs from my grandmother’s house in Germantown with nooks and crannies for pens, little spiral notebooks, and a tiny vase with silk flowers graced my room and offered its own magic and the blank page invited wonderment and possibility. I wrote love stories at that desk. He came to her then in a dream, two souls forever entwined out of the serendipity of mystery.
“How two hands touch and the bonds will never be broken.”
Photo by Susan Weidener
I know he will come again in the darkness and I will feel rejected, even abandoned, yet I also know I will wake to a morning light to remember that once he loved me. It wasn’t a dream. It was real. It was my life. His and mine. And for that, Mary Oliver was right: “Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood.”
One of the things I most love about a writing group is the inspiration to keep writing. Whether it’s inspiration or incentive, the idea that you’re about to meet with a group of writers is energizing. Sometimes, I can go days without writing or wanting to write. When I know that my writing group date is getting closer, I’ll make sure I have something to offer. This might be in response to a writing prompt, or just the desire to contribute to the creative mood of a group. Each of us can offer something as a way of thanking the other for coming to the group.
In the Women’s Writing Circle, I offered a prompt for November that inspired me to write a memory I had long forgotten. In this way, I found something new to remember about love and loss. A bittersweet memory evokes feelings and writing crystallizes those feelings. As I wrote last week, vulnerability in writing is great courage and great writing. The prompt was this: Someone once wrote: “I left him in the middle of a melody…” Write of a time when a song brings back a memory.
As this is autumn in Pennsylvania, the song “Autumn Leaves” came to mind for several reasons. So, I wrote this.
At an upright, cherry piano set against the wall with framed photographs of her parents in wedding regalia, she first started learning to play melodies and hoped to get better with time. There was “Ebb Tide” and “The Shadow of Your Smile” from the movie TheSandpipers, tunes easily mastered because they didn’t require different tempos from two different hands, something she could never manage, whether through lack of coordination or simply little to no musical talent. The song, though, that she loved and could play perfectly well was “Autumn Leaves”, a haunting melody that often inspired her to sit down at the piano due to her love of fall and the red and gold maple trees outside her parents’ living room window.
Even years later, when she was a senior in high school and knew she would soon be off to college, she played that song, letting her thoughts flow to the melancholy beauty of love and loss, those summer kisses and sun-burnt hands the lover used to hold. After college, when she landed her first reporting job, she met him and played it for him. When they married, he took her to John Wanamaker on Market Street in Philadelphia to buy her own upright, cherry wood piano. In those days, they sold pianos on the fifth floor of that gigantic department store, something that now seems as outdated as her past and the autumn days of her youth.
They had sixteen autumns together, but on the seventeenth, he died in October leaving her alone with their two young sons. In her grief and loneliness, she played “Autumn Leaves”, remembering that night when they had bought the piano, him wearing a camel-colored overcoat with a matching scarf, jeans, and brown boots. He had a mustache and it tickled when they kissed, but she liked it anyway, really there was nothing about him she didn’t like because as corny as it sounded, he had brought her dreams to life…having a wonderful man by her side on autumn days when leaves fell like crepe paper snow to the sidewalks and they walked their blond cocker spaniel, another gift from him.
The piano languished until her younger son said he wanted to learn, but he soon found practicing scales tiresome, or maybe it was the curly-permed teacher with acne who failed to inspire, although her son had more likely inherited her lack of musical talent and knew it was useless to keep at something when you’re so mediocre at it.
For her, who was there to play for? Herself? So, one day, when autumn leaves fell outside her own living room window, a truck pulled into the driveway. She stroked the keys one last time. Two men carefully rolled the piano out the front door to the truck and its new home, which was apparently a church fellowship hall. Strangely enough, or maybe not so, she never played the piano again after that. Now when she hears “Autumn Leaves”, it is a sweet reminder of those glorious years with him, the autumn days of old when she was so young and filled with love.
Since you went away the days grow long And soon I’ll hear old winter’s song But I miss you most of all my darling When autumn leaves start to fall
Photo by Susan Weidener
How about you? Does meeting with other writers encourage you to keep at your craft?
Along the Writer's Way 