My Aunt Marian wrote the other week, and a sentence captivated me.
Marian’s mood was full of optimism. And so I was relieved. Marian and Mum were close, so that mattered.
This one sentence I read twice, because it painted an elaborate picture in my head.
“Going to sit under the night sky for a few moments now before bed. Stars are out and it’s dry.”
My mind was flown from a computer under my fingers in San Francisco to a patio in Dingle, Co. Kerry in Ireland. I pictured a dusky sky and a balmy summer’s evening warmth, though it was spring. And this image of Marian and Mum sitting together. The two of them chatting sweet nothings over sips of wine and the end of the day.
Marian has a beautiful smile. Just like Mum’s. There’s something in what happens to their eyes, those two sisters, when a smile switches on. A gentle but energetic lift in their cheeks. From a calm, introspective gaze to a glisten of joy at the world. A big smile provoked by something small.
Mum and Aunt Marian both loved reading and I remembered how they’d trade fiction books over the years.
I re-read the sentence…
“Going to sit under the night sky for a few moments now before bed. Stars are out and it’s dry.”
What is it with words that will cast a whole scene in our heads? As we read, pencil lines sketched in our heads can quickly fill with color and texture into a full-blown painting.
Marian continued, sharing a gem of a secret about Grandad…
“Daddy always wrote his shopping list on cigarette packets”.
And now the sentence whisks me off to the small kitchen in Donegal that gave onto a tiered wild garden.
And I could smell the clash of cigarette smoke mixed with the earthen boggy air of Donegal’s damp latitude, as both wafted in the open kitchen door. And, the black small stools at a table that would ‘pouff’ with a squidgeon of air when you sat on one, even when you were five…
“Smoking was a part of his little treat. The match box often home to stray bees! Open at your peril.”
A memory painted by a memory, a matchbox somewhere in it in a kitchen in Donegal. Half open with a bee pollinating a match stick and the crisp smell of peat and the Bay.
“I remember that fondly. Obviously it is a double sensory memory, sight and smell.”
From the window behind me the San Francisco air stirs the energy of ocean salt with gritty streets and gently breathing conifers.
But a bundle of words had taken me to a whole other place, a balmy Dingle evening and a memory of Mum and a matchbox in a musky kitchen with a bee in it.
