Post #6 – Women’s Memoirs, Writing and Healing
THE PLACES WE’VE LIVED
By Pamela Jane Bell
My brother and I sitting on the front porch of our house in Stamford, Connecticut, 1950
I am haunted by houses in my past. I dream of these houses, especially the white frame house in Connecticut where my family moved when I was two. Here I first awoke to the world of stories – “The Lone Ranger” and “I Remember Mama” on our small black and white TV, “Titanic” (the 1953 version) at the movies, and the book of nursery rhymes my parents read to me, filled with pictures of children in old-fashioned clothes skipping through orchards and meadows.
Through the old country rhymes, I came to believe that the land of the imagination was a rural one. Its images were pastoral and its mood wistful for I sensed that the world of cottage gardens and country lanes was fading. Standing at my bedroom window gazing down into our big shady back yard, I imagined I could glimpse this long-ago land through a fold in time. I saw a boy in knickers and white stockings scrambling over our backyard fence, and a girl in lace pantaloons running through the shadows. Or was it just a trick of the mind, the sunlight flitting through the leaves?
Every night I said my prayers when my mother tucked me into bed.
“God bless Mommy, Daddy, Brother Philip, relatives, friends and Pamie,” I recited dutifully. The prayer had a pleasant, comforting cadence. I’d been saying it every night since I could remember.
And I had absolutely no idea what it meant.
Then one night I had a revelation.
“…relatives, friends, and Pamie – that’s me!”
The name, Pamie, and the awareness of myself as a person, separate from others, collided like a thunderbolt. I was someone; I had a name. I existed. At that moment, I entered the world of story as a character in my own life.
We moved away when I was five, but I carried with me the image of the house I loved and the backyard where stories whispered in the trees and shadows held the secrets of the past.
Other times in my dreams I return to the brick bungalow in Dearborn, Michigan, where we lived in when I was a teenager. There my mother had a nervous breakdown and vanished for three weeks into the psychiatric ward of Henry Ford Hospital. Afterwards, my parents went through a long and painful divorce. In my dreams, I pause in the living room to leaf through the books in my father’s cherry bookcase – Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence, the stories of Katherine Mansfield. Then, like a ghostly spirit, I float up the stairs to the alcove in my room overlooking the maple tree to explore the mystery of why I was so unhappy here. I think what a fine place it would be to write, to remember and to dream. If only I could talk to my teenage self, just for a moment. I’d take her by the shoulders and whisper, “Wake up! This is just a moment in time. Go deep and find the beauty in it. Then bring back a story.”
The Stamford house as it is today, 2011
Recently, I got the idea of contacting current owners of the houses in my past. I began with the house in Stamford, Connecticut. I addressed a postcard with a photograph of the cover of my new children’s book to “Residents” followed by the address, which I still remembered. I told them that I had lived in their house as a little girl, and how much it had meant to me. A few weeks later, I received a warm email from the couple who live there now. We wrote back and forth about our memories of the house, the family they’d raised there, and the renovations they had done over the years. We even exchanged old and new photos of the house and compared them.
A few weeks later, I addressed another postcard to the people living in the brick bungalow in Michigan. This time I received a note back with a photo of their grandchildren standing in front of the house, decorated for Halloween. This seemed fitting since the title of my book on the postcard I’d sent was A Vampire is Coming to Dinner! To my surprise, they remembered my parents from when they bought the house, forty-five years before. And they remembered me. “I felt bad for you,” the woman wrote. “You looked as if you were going through a hard time.”
Somehow knowing there were real living people occupying the ghostly, dreamlike places of my past, people who wrote back and in one case even remembered me, was deeply healing and restorative.
I was someone; I had a name. I existed.
It was also comforting to know that the places I’ve lived weren’t empty or abandoned but filled with families with their own memories and stories. The houses of my past were loved.
Writing and Healing Prompt
Close your eyes for a moment and allow an image of a past place to come to mind – a childhood home, a beloved room, or a special corner of the backyard.
1. How did you feel when you were there? What would you tell your younger self now, if you could go back in time? What would you say to the people who live there now?
2. Write for ten minutes about this place. Describe it in detail. How does it look, smell, sound? Explore the memories, feelings or questions it evokes in you. Then follow the thread that leads to a story or a revelation.
As a speaker at a writer’s conference once said, “Go slowly, go quietly, look deep.”
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You can follow Pamela Jane Bell at:
http://www.pamelajane.com
A VAMPIRE IS COMING TO DINNER!
10 RULES TO FOLLOW
“A ghoulishly good time.”
Publishers Weekly
Monday Morning Memoir Blog:
http://pamelamemoir.livejournal.com
Children’s Book News:
http://blog.pamelajane.com/
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