My dear friend
Things happen and I think to myself I must write and tell you about this, but then something else happens—either immediately or some short time after—and the thing I wanted to tell you is replaced by something of no consequence. And later, even if I remember what it was I was going to tell you (and very often I don’t), its relevance is lost or faded.
How much of life disappears. (I’m not sure whether to end that with an exclamation or question mark.) In all the thinking and writing about memory and forgetting that I’ve done over the years, there’s one thing I’ve never been able to pin down:
What happens to memories when you aren’t thinking about them?
These past few days, for example, I’ve been in Clare, the place where I spent my earliest years. Tiny things trigger enormous feelings. I see the sweep of a street as it curves down the hill and I remember my father pushing my brother’s pram, letting go then grabbing hold before it can fly down the hill and my mother saying, ‘stop it, stop’ and I’m terrified; a concrete bridge across a creek and I remember walking home from kindy, my mother singing ‘mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy’ and I think this might be my first memory of happiness, or of being conscious of the sensations that added up to happiness; the tops of trees blowing back and forth in the hot north wind and being told to come inside and I’m not scared but around me is fear.
I keep thinking, ‘I’d forgotten’ that or this. But they aren’t things that I’ve forgotten because they’re all still there. The images and the sensations. They’ve just been pushed to the back of my mind or the depths of my soul. Do these ‘memories’ hang there benignly waiting until they’re stirred? Or do they mix with other memories (whether related or not)? What happens to them if they’re never called on again?
From time to time this worries me. A lot. I wonder what is lost.
A few years ago when I was trying to decide whether or not I was going to keep trying to be a writer and, if yes, what I could possibly write about, I spent a week writing down everything I could remember. I set myself a target of 5,000 words per day and wrote for six days, simply letting one thought follow the next and writing each one down as it showed itself to me. Some of the things I wrote went for a page or two, some were done in a paragraph or two and others were tiny fragments. As I wrote, the researcher and the librarian in me started sorting things. I had one folder for ‘eras and stages’ another for ‘sensations and emotions’. ‘Sensations and emotions’ has a file called ‘sounds’ and it’s a long list of things like, ‘Dad banging the schnitzels with a tenderiser’ and ‘Our science teacher taught us how to understand the speed of sound by making us stand at one end of the oval, then he went down to the other and banged a metal bin against a goal post so we could see the difference in time between when we saw the bin hit the goal post and heard the sound’.
You have to approach an exercise like this cautiously of course. Memories can take you places that you don’t want to go, and there are memories best left buried unless you’re sharing them with someone who can be trusted with the fallout. But I was in a good place at the time—physically, emotionally, mentally—and I ended up with a good collection of things. I also had sore neck muscles from sitting at my desk for six days and typing so fast.
I know you’re always fascinated by accommodation(s), the differences between hotels, the quirks of cabins, the quainteries of cottages, so I’ve gathered together some random things to tell you about the house where I’m staying:
It’s just outside town, and the yard is filled with rabbits. Wild rabbits, not pet rabbits. Did you know rabbits don’t eat strawberries? Because I dropped a strawberry yesterday, so I put it under a bush because I thought it was better to be compost than landfill and it was still there this morning.
Over the fence is a horse stable. The horses get put into their stables each night, but the lights get left on in the stables until quite late. I don’t know how late, they’re still on when I go to bed, but they’re off when I get up in the night to look out of the window to see the rabbits are doing. Did you know horses have the lights left on for them? Maybe it’s so they don’t go to sleep too early because then they’d be up too early.
There are kookaburras in the trees all around me. They wake me up in the mornings, but I go back to sleep.
The kettle has different settings, depending on what you’re boiling the water for: green tea (70 degrees), white tea (80), oolong (90), coffee (95), black tea (100). Oolong tea has it’s own setting! Can you believe? As you know, in the evenings, I like a cup of chamomile tea. I’ve been doing it at 80 degrees. I hope that’s right.
It’s raining now and I’ve finished my cup of tea and that seems to be all the right ingredients for heading to bed. I made you a playlist of songs I thought of while I was writing to you. I know I write rarely, but I think of you often and until next time, I sen you all my love,
Tracy xx
I loved your letter today. Last night my grand daughter took our old teddies off the dressing table and said I know these are as old as grandpa I will cuddle them gentle. This made me smile and then I started to wonder where was my memory of where I use to keep our teddies before we had our current dressing table. I could not find that memory. So when I read your letter it resonated with me
Much love, enjoy Clare
I love your letters Tracy, always a thrill when they pop up in my inbox. This one, with all its richness, particularly. Oh and they leave the lights on in the stables to either get the mares cycling earlier so they can breed, or if they are show horses to keep their coats short and shiny as horses get their glossy summer coats depending on the length of daylight…the random facts you pick up along the way hey. Thanks for your letter,
It brightened my inbox this morning. MM