Lockdown, day three hundred thirty-something...

It's another day in my apartment, watching light turn raindrops into jewels on the windowpanes. The one event was my weekly conversation with Margie, and today was a shock.

Margie has returned to her memoir and is once again writing daily, and I hear a tipple of happy excitement in her voice. 

I met Margie in a Women’s Writing Group in 2008 when she was a mere 81 and I was a pipsqueak of 62. We worked with writing prompts, but those developed, both for her and for me, into memoir. We wrote our stories, read bits to each other, and put them aside. Around 2017 we stopped meeting. This blip marked that closure, and the extra is a lovely shot of Margie and me, photographed by Tommee Carlisle with my camera. (I'm even wearing the same shirt I was wearing for that self-portrait on Sunday.)

Here’s what Margie says (I took notes as she was talking): 

“I find that my perspective has changed so much since 2008 that what I wrote then needs rewriting. I have a broader vision; my ex-husband has died, and I think of us differently now. I see that when I met him I was compliant but unconscious. I was an innocent bystander of my own life. 

“I dropped out of university after two years to marry Alex. I went back to finish that degree when my third child was a baby, and I began to grow in confidence. It wasn’t that I had a vision of where I wanted to go. I just sort of rolled into it, and Alex didn’t like who I was becoming. 

“What I’m now calling the first draft of the memoir is like a springboard for what I want to say because what I wrote ten years ago is only partially truthful. I see more clearly now. When Alex found another woman and left us, I gathered the kids and told them, ‘Daddy isn’t going to sleep here any more. He won’t be around during the week.’ I left myself out of that story entirely. I was still doing that same thing ten years ago when I wrote the first draft, but now I feel I can talk about what a blessing it was that Alex left and I had a chance to find out who I was and what I wanted. I didn’t see it at the time, but his leaving was a gift. I want to leave a record of that for my children to read, because they may find it useful to know. Each sentence I write is like a revelation to me. As some other writer said, ‘I write to find out what I think.’” 

Laughing, she adds, “It doesn’t take long for something to be new to me now.” She’s putting her writing time on the calendar. She starts at about 2 or 3 in the afternoon and keeps going into the night. It's working for her. I wonder if I can follow her down that trail. What an inspiration she is.