Day 2

With the exception of formula writing and hack work, every exercise in writing is an experiment in what can be said. Writers know this. One begins somewhere, with ideas or with language, and tries to find a shape or sound or substance. And then one moves it forward until it starts to breathe and move on its own. Recognizing that point changes the experiment a little. When the writing comes alive, as all good writing does, the writer's job is to keep up, to follow it out. This process holds true even when the writer begins with an uncluttered mind in the dark of a new morning and waits for something to come, as the late poet William Stafford is known to have done for most of his adult life.

My experiment will begin here. At the end of July this year, 2010, family gathered to celebrate my mother's 90th birthday. More than fifty of us gathered at my older brother's home in Leesburg, Virginia, where my mother lives in an apartment he built into his house. Some of the family attending I know well, three of my four brothers and their wives, nieces and nephews and their children, my mother's older twin sisters, three cousins. Some extended family, spouses and children of cousins and relatives of relatives, I had never met before. But we had all come for my mother, none of us exactly surprised at how far her touch had reached.

We pretty much stayed indoors since it was 108 degrees outside, the kind of day that makes you sweat instantly. The three 90 year old sisters, the Nordstrom girls, held center stage. They were dressed as if they were heading out to a wedding in lovely, colorful dresses. The rest of us, all younger and considerably less concerned about dress than the heat, tried to look as nice as shorts and sandals permit.

Everyone but my brother, my sister-in-law, and my mother had journeyed in from somewhere. My 92 year old aunts rode the train, their preferred mode of travel, from St. Paul. As far as I know their primary concession to age was allowing my cousin and her husband to ride on the coach with them. Most of the rest of us drove from all over -- Maine, New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Massachusetts. We were, of course, more than happy to do it. We wanted to show up and be part of her life again while she still remembers us and can tell her stories -- before those are lost to her progressing Alzheimer's. My mother's journey, now at 90, is the hardest of all.