Last winter, I signed up for Laurie Wagner’s self-paced class, A Wild Writing Practice, 21 Days of Pen to Page”. Each Day, Laurie reads a poem, usually by a contemporary poet, and provides some “jump-off lines” to get us started. Then, we set a time for fifteen minutes and write, keeping the pen to page without stopping. It’s like Peter Elbow’s freewriting. When I engage in this practice, I never quite know where I will end up.

Today, is Day 13 of the practice. The poem is “Twelve, Twelve, Twelve” by Aimee Nezhukumatathi. The jump-off is to use numbers and/or the alphabet to organize the details of the story. Today, I began thinking about the old song, “When I Was Seventeen” and the next line in the lyric, “It was a very good year”–except for me, my teen years were not all that great. I didn’t have the language or the knowledge to understand that I am my nature an introvert, and I just thought I was an odd-ball and a misfit. So, today I wrote about “when I was seven” and used the letters, not as an acrostic, but as an organizing principle. Here is the result:

When I Was Seven

• A–When I as seven, we moved from the “Old House,” a simple “shot gun” farm house with white clapboard siding and a front porch with green chairs and a faded yellow and white glider, where we lived with Grandmother and Granddaddy while the new house on the hill was being built.
• B–We moved in the spring after Grandmother died of leukemia and a cerebral hemmorhage. I didn’t know what that was then, but I knew she went to the hospital one day and did not come home. I remember the huge purple-black bruises on the underside of her arms.
• C–When I was seven, we had a whole new place to explore. There was the fort in the woods across the driveway next to the road to Peak where my sister and I could hide from our brother and the cow path across the GP land betwen our new house and the Old House.
• D–Before we moved to the new house, Mama and Grandmother would carry us from our bedroom to the kitchen to dress for school because the floor was so cold in winter. The Old House had no insulation in the floor or underpinning to keep out the cold.
• E–We learned to pop open crepe myrtle buds from Grandmother. She picked the buds from the crepe myrtle tree that grew in the corner at the back porch. We squeezed the buds until the pink petals opened between our fingers.
• F–That back porch corner was a good place to play, especially after a rain storm. There was a puddle of clear water that ran down the corner of the roof where the porch intersected with the rest of the house. The puddle was filled with tiny brown and tan pebbles that sifted through our small fingers.
• G–It wasn’t long after we moved before Granddaddy sold the Old House and moved in with us. Strangers moved into the Old House, and it lost its magic; it was no longer my home with its wood and linoleum floors, dim lights, kitchen and pantry filled with the wonders of home-canned vegetables, staple goods, and the pies and cakes Grandmother and Mama baked.
• H–And yet, it is the Old House that reminds me of childhood, of exploring the outdoors with Grandmother who introduced me to the little critters of the world–lizards and glass snakes, bugs and beetles, and salamanders in the spring box; to fishing in the creek at Peak where the rumble of cars over the wooden bridge above us sounded like thunder.