Writing my memoir, I let myself go—both ways—into my head. I surrendered to the force. Without me, my mind brushed on the next dab of paint, as if by instinct knowing how to make it all fit by association. Many days, I worked in a fever, a frenzy, as if the bombing started the next morning at dawn. Memories and thoughts awakened me at night. In the darkness, I shuffled around in the bed clothes, hitting my knuckles as I tried to wrest index card and pencil from the bedside table in the dark, waking up my tired husband—and then was blurry and short with the kids in the morning. But there was the petite, incomparable thrill of note cards spilled around my bed at dawn: little jewels I gathered in the morning, a harvest from the blackness of night.
Originally posted on Monday, November 5th, 2012
Sara Mansfield Taber 