I finished Old Friend From Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir by Natalie Goldberg. Since it is a library book which needs to be returned soon, I took notes but have only done a few of the exercises.
However, last year I read The Right to Write by Julia Cameron. I am typing up an exercise that I did for that book. I was to choose one of the places where I had lived and write in first person, present tense and put myself back into the time I lived there. I chose Big Bear Lake, California where I spent several months each summer at a complex of family-owned cabins for over a decade. I put myself in my early elementary years.
From the mountainside the lake is my compass. As long as I don’t cross the stream below, I know I can climb back up, and the blue beacon will guide me home. I am free to roam, to explore, to imagine events playing out on the massive granite slabs and in the crannies. A small plane passing overhead is the enemy. Quick! Crawl into the cave-like void to hide. Or gather flat stones to hold pretend meals. Oh, oh. I sat in a gooey glob of pine pitch. Hope the Borax gets it out. I probably should head back to the log and rock cabin. Don’t want to miss the walk to Boulder Bay store for ice cream.
Tonight we play Pit with my aunt and 3 cousins in the big two-story cabin. Those worn bull and bear cards are hard to trade. Everybody knows the faded colors of the undesirables. I don’t like losing. Mom says I need to be a good sport and not cry.
We carefully make our way down the hill in the narrow beam of our flashlights. Best not to leave the porch light on; attracts too many bugs, especially those fat June bugs. Besides, Granddad and Grandmother may go to bed early and don’t want the glare shining into the Home Cottage where they live across from our one-room log cabin.
Mom builds a small fire so we can hang our pajamas on the mesh screen. Even the warm PJs don’t quite keep out the coldness of the sheets. I doze off as the flickering fire casts shadows.
When I wake, I look out the knothole and see sunshine and the hand pump on the flat meadow. It is more work to get to the top bunk, but my twin below only wakes to a rock wall. The chill of a Big Bear morning is dispelled by the cheery flames in the massive stone fireplace. I keep centered at the hearth as I dress; stepping a few feet away causes shivers.
After breakfast, my two sisters and I fill buckets at the pump and trudge up the rock steps positioned into the soil for the steep climb. Mom heats on the stove a teakettle of water so we can wash and rinse dishes in the 2 giant aluminum tubs. Some water will remain in a bucket on a table for dipping a drink, and in a bucket set on the cement slab outside to use in the chipped white enamel basin for hand washing.
With no plumbing, our hygiene at our summer home is rather primitive. Sitz and sponge baths in the same tubs we use to wash dishes; tooth brushing leaning over the ledge where buckthorn hides the spit-out toothpaste; a walk half-way to the flat to the outhouse. A chamber pot in the cabin is used for nighttime peeing if needed; the thunderous echo wakes everybody.
As I open the bottom drawer of the dresser to retrieve my coloring book and paper dolls, I spy the little metal steam roller. I had much fun smoothing out my farm next to the porch so I could plant my moss crop. The long rock on the trail to Mummy’s Cave not far from Aunt Betty’s cabin has plentiful dried-up moss. Scrape some off, “plant”, water, and the brown turns to bright green. I don’t do that anymore though. That’s for little kids. I’m in elementary school now. I cut out paper doll clothes, color my Grace Kelly book, read, and help with the jigsaw puzzle on the card table on the shaded porch, looking out towards the distant lake.
I and my sisters sit on the big rock in front of our cabin and the Home Cottage every Friday watching for Daddy’s Pontiac turning onto the dirt road along the edge of the mobile home park, rounding the bend, and then down the lane next to the pump. Sunday he’ll take our stack of library books back to Whittier.
Sometimes we sit on that same rock looking for the Helm’s Bakery truck driving up and down the trailer park lanes. Grabbing a nickel from Mom, we race down the road to buy a jelly doughnut. Occasionally an ice truck shows up at the Park, and my grandfather takes our big metal tubs in his car to buy a block for his icebox and a block for ours. Granddad’s Studebaker is our Big Bear transportation since my dad has our car in Whittier to drive to work. We climb into the Studebaker to go to the Safeway grocery store and early in our stay to the dime store to stock up on our coloring book and paper doll set for this summer.
The myriad stars in the clear mountain air awe. Once I used some binoculars to stare at the moon. A creepy feeling that something might be staring back sent me inside. We have no TV here, just a radio. My dad flips on the radio on the weekends; otherwise we ignore it. Some evenings we sit with my grandparents in their cabin looking at the drive-in motion picture on the screen in front of us on the main road. We can’t hear anything so my grandfather listens to the Dodgers baseball game on the radio. I remember a film where the scientist becomes a fly and fears for his life as he sees the world from an insect’s perspective. We interrupted the baseball play-by-play with gasps as the flyswatter came close to the scientist-now-a-fly.
Granddad often sits on our porch catching up on family news while we work on the puzzle. He’s a good story teller, especially of when he helped fight forest fires. He’s a great horseshoe thrower. He patiently waits while we retrieve our shoe that tumbled in the pine needles far from the stake.
We don’t look at the clock much. We eat our biggest meal midday, a bowl of soup most suppers. We eat when we are hungry, not at any set time, though we make sure to finish the evening meal with plenty of time to make an outhouse stop and brush teeth before it gets dark. Nobody wants to use the cob-webby outhouse when you can’t see what’s in there.
I like the whisper of the wind in the Ponderosa pines, the sun warming my skin as I sit on the rocks behind the cabin reading. On the weekends the surrounding cabins are occupied and busy, but during the week it is quiet except for the wind, the chatter of squirrels and chipmunks, the squawk of a jay.
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