Write Thru Crisis – Places Replenish
Write Thru Crisis – Places Replenish. Reading stories aloud was a big deal when our grandchildren were growing up. At bedtime, always, with my voice at deliberately droning level to encourage sleep. But my favorite tale-reading moments happened under the storytelling tree.
Our front yard featured a particularly family-friendly place. A yellow Adirondack chair fitted into a notch at a fence corner between two trees. I would sit in that chair with a grandchild at my side and another at my feet, and I would read.
There were actually two trees, but the way they grew made me think of them as one. At ground level, they were far enough apart to accommodate a seat and small table. Further up, at about towhead height, they began to grow toward each other.
One day my grandson, ever inquisitive and curious, asked me about that. “What’s the story with the trees, Grandma.” He was staring at the place where the trees came almost together over my head, and he’d asked for a story. I gave him a story.
“These trees were born very close to each other under the ground, and they fell in love. When they grew above the ground and saw each other’s beauty, they fell in love even more. So much so that they couldn’t stand being apart and grew toward each other instead. Until they were side-by-side, with their branches entwined, reaching for the sky.”
I’m not sure my grandson believed my story, or my granddaughter either. But they appreciated a good yarn, and allowed me to think they accepted what I said. On the other hand, I believed every word with all my heart. Especially the mood of it, the undertone and maybe the reassurance, of romance.
Stories have power. They lift and transport us out of real-life time and space into another universe, separate and apart. John Gardner called that universe “the dream of the story.” I believe in this lifting and transporting, but I also believe in places like our storytelling tree.
Places have power too. Wherever we may be, we can picture ourselves somewhere else, like that notch in the fence at the corner of our front yard. We can take ourselves there, into the feel of it. The green branches overhead, the smell of grass and a child’s hair, the sound of bird chirps on the soft air of late spring. The taste of contentment on the tongue.
At bedtime in those days, I sat in another chair. Bright red, with a comfortable back cushion to ease me after delightfully exhausting hours of youthful energy everywhere. This chair stood between the dormers of the children’s upstairs loft bedroom, where the angles of the ceiling leaned toward one another, much like the trees in the fence corner outside.
These days, when I most need to be re-spirited, I take myself to Christmas Eve in that red chair. There’s a stack of books at my side, to be read in the same order each year. My singsong has droned two excited children almost to sleep. I reach the last book on the pile and begin. “Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house….”
I hope you will tell your re-spiriting stories as well. I imagine you lifted out of all that the Now may demand of you, and into a place you know intimately in every detail. Your heart is opened there. Your hopes are revived there. Your soul is replenished there, as it most richly deserves to be.
Alice Orr – http://www.aliceorrbooks.com.
Speaking of Christmas, A Vacancy at the Inn is Book 3 of Alice’s Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Series, and it is a holiday story. Find A Vacancy at the Inn HERE. Find all of Alice’s books HERE.
What Readers Say: “Alice Orr is the queen of ramped-up stakes and page-turning suspense.” “Warning. Don’t read before bed. You won’t want to sleep.” “The tension in this novel is through the roof.” “Budding romance sizzles in the background until it ignites with passion.” “I never want an Alice Orr book to end.”
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