Memoir writing is an act of writing about a specific time of your life. You recall it, you shape it, and you revise it. But what causes someone to write memoir? What is the occasion to write memoir? For me, writing memoir is a way of investigating not only my personal past, but also my present self. Writing memoir is a way of asking, and attempting to answer, questions that seem unanswerable. For me, the catalyst for writing memoir is often something that is happening now in my life.
For example, yesterday I helped a friend do some gardening. His 96-year-old mother had recently passed. Her life had been focused on the arts, not on the garden, and consequently the backyard was like something out of a fable, where it might not be surprising to see a princess asleep under a thicket of vines. This California backyard brims with green, despite the concrete covering most of it. It’s centered by a massive jacaranda tree too elderly to flower but holding on. Vines snake across a fence, growth originating from the neighbor’s thicket of bamboo. In the corner, in a rectangle of grass an orange tree, now bursting with tiny oranges, grows.
As someone who grew up in one cold climate and now live in another cold climate, I’m always astonished by the sight of oranges and lemons growing on trees. It seems like a party decoration. The trees of my childhood in Idaho were mostly apple, some cherry, a pear tree in my grandmother’s backyard, and a peach tree that my stepmother planted. Maybe to an Angeleno, my Idaho fruit trees are exotic, or if not, surely the pines.
Peaches grow here, of course; but they also grew in our backyard, thanks to my stepmother, Rita. That tiny tree bore a lot of fruit. I don’t remember harvesting it or helping Rita with the canning, but I do remember a pantry shelf lined with home canned peaches. I didn’t know how to name the feeling back then, but today I know those peaches gave me a feeling of prosperity and security.
Before my sister and I moved in with our dad and his new wife Rita, we’d lived without home-canned peaches. Life with our mom meant fending for ourselves, avoiding our stepfather. I remember breaking into the neighbor’s shed and stealing a Mason jar of cherries and another of pears. I’m not proud of stealing. But we were hungry, and the tumbleweed field near our trailer court hid two girls slurping the slightly tart juice of the cherries, the sweet give of the pears. By the time of our rescue, our teeth were rotted. By the time we moved from the trailer court to Dad and Rita’s home, my sister’s sleep tore open each night by nightmares that she was still not safe. She never would again.
Yesterday, I stood next to the orange tree. She felt like a friend, more than a friend, like my sister, ensnared in vines. The only clippers I had were ludicrous, with a large heavy handle and a small jaw for cutting. But I wielded them against the bamboo stalks surrounding the tree.
Now let me be clear. I’m not a gardener, either. But I took offense at these vines that tried to take over this tree. The bamboo stood around the tree and sent out the tiny vines, wrapping around and around the branches.
I tore at the vines until my back muscles ached, my forearms itching with tiny cuts. Dirt and pollen showered down on me as I worked, catching hold of vines hanging down and pulling—sometimes gently to coax whole snarls down, and sometimes with all the force of my body.
As I worked, bible verses from my childhood floated through my thoughts, mostly absent, mostly centered just on the vines, and the green stalks of bamboo and the brown ones. Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for the Lord, thy God are with thee.
In California, when the sun dips, it takes the warmth with it. None of it lingers in the air. I’d been cold since I arrived due to unrealistic expectations of the word “California” and what numbers really do mean. But as I used those heavy clippers, snapping at the stalks of bamboo, then dropped them to tear at the severed bamboo and vines, I was sweating, the back of my neck damp. I was sweating fear, too. Wanting to get this tree free, determined to do it, afraid that I might not be able to. And tomorrow’s forecast was for rain.
And there was one monstrously huge wig of vines high above my head, I could barely reach the few tendrils hanging down. I looked up at it. I hate you, I said. Let her go, I said.
But I couldn’t reach it.
If I climbed on an ancient bench—just plyboard held up between two rocks, then maybe I could pull it down. But it didn’t look very safe, and I was afraid to fall.
I hoisted the heavy clippers over my head. I stood on my tippy toes and grabbed a hold of some tendrils with the clippers. I tugged on the tendrils, closing my eyes at the last second while the big dirty mass came showering down on my head. Coated with dirt and pollen and dead vines and lord knows what else, I rejoiced. I got it off the tree, the beautiful orange tree.
My friend, busy with other work, joked that I worked like an indentured servant at those vines. Yes.
I want that tree to have a life. She deserves to grow, to bear oranges, and to live and prosper. The bamboo can have his life, too, on his side of the fence, where he first began to grow.
If you are writing memoir, know that it might come find you when all you intended to do that day was weed. You might get dirty. You might cuss at vines. You might give a tree a better chance to drink the rain. An orange tree, an apple tree, or maybe a peach one.
