The Past in Present Sense

Memories are like seashells on the beach. As you walk along ambling in a lazy gait, the past surges at your feet as the foamy waves break and leave beautiful treasures or broken fragments across the sands of your mind. Occasionally, you lean over and pick up a prospective find, blow off the sand, brush your fingers across the surface, anticipating that perfect piece you can tuck into your bright blue plastic pail; a treasure to adorn the shelf in your home next to the snapshot of a loved one. They are few and far between, scattered as they are among those fragile remnants, those shards of something that you cannot recognize. Those pieces you examine, turning them over in your hand, and wonder what that used to be; what image in my brain did this snap off from? You discard the unrecognizable remnant as nothing, insignificant and unworthy of gracing your shelf.

Yet, when you reach a point in your life when you feel memories are all that you own, when time has passed so quickly that you find yourself unprepared, we must reach down and cherish anything we find, even those painful broken pieces we think to chuck back into the waters. Even those make us who we are today. Even those make us the writer's we strive to be, bringing up memories in the words and stories we create in ways that may astound us.

The earliest memory I have, that has crept into my writing life, is one of those rare treasures. My parent's home in South Georgia, a small single wide trailer with an added back sunroom, was not much to speak of, but in that sunroom my dad had a turntable next to the tweedy brown couch and across from the fireplace. In the cabinet below the fireplace, his records stood waiting sentinel and for eager fingers to slide the black vinyls from their sleeves and set them on the player. Click, spin, and the sound of music filled the air. But what I can remember most about those old records is the choices I made in what I played. My dad had a whole bevy of flavors, yet two stood out to me: the "Meet the Beatles" album and the song "Ferry across the Mersey" by Gerry and the Pacemakers.

I adored Paul McCartney at seven years old. Whenever I was sad, whenever life around me filled with confusion, parents arguing, or inexplicable lonely moments, his Liverpool brogue soothed my soul. The sound of those British voices created in me a yearning for England, almost as if I heard the winds from the moors, the voices of all those old English writers calling me. In my childhood imaginings, the stories I created in my room, or trouncing through the pine trees, I was in England with a clear accent flavoring my southern drawl. From then, until now, the feeling has never died and when I began to write English historical fiction, I felt like I have come full circle to that little girl listening to those Brits in the dimly lit sunroom.

I have had the pleasure of visiting England three times in my adulthood and if anyone knows what it is like to know when you are home, then you will know what my heart felt when I stepped out of the train at Victoria Station onto the ground. A sense of belonging as if the ghosts of the past greeted me along the ramp. And then, standing in front of 'The Old Curiosity Shop,' thinking of Dickens, or walking along the banks of the Avon River in the shadow of Shakespeare, words inundated my mind. The little girl smiled. Yet, as always, with those beautiful sparkling shells, the cast-offs remain. I always had to cut off the record player and I always had to return to the States. Thus, I am a writer who dreams of the day when she can go home.

Beatrix Potter said that a writer must know where they belong, and she knew it when she moved into her home in the country. There she was inspired as never before. I have hope. I see a day when my writing develops into what it is meant to be in a place of inspiration, the day when that little girl can hear those voices all around her, when she can fill her bucket to the brim with shiny seashells singing, "So, ferry 'cross the Mersey, 'cause this land's the place I love, and here I'll stay, here I'll stay…here I'll stay."