I think I have said before that my brain seems to categorize words by sound and rhythm. If I am searching for a particular word, I will almost always think of two or three other words—not right in meaning, but right in syllable and rhythm—as I feel toward the correct one. I can hear in my head the outlines of the word I want, sometimes well before I can see its details.
Today before I sat down to write, I had two verses running together in my head, and it took me some time to realize what they were because all I had was the rhythm and shape of them (no words):
It was many and many a year ago,
in a kingdom by the sea
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;…
I was a child and she was a child
In the kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
I and my Annabel Lee—
……
'Twas all so pretty a sail, it seemed
As if it could not be;
And some folk thought 'twas a dream they'd dreamed
Of sailing that beautiful sea
But I will name you the fisherman three,
Wynken, Blyken, and Nod…
Why both those poems? Why together? (Google tells me, helpfully, that they "were written by different authors and have very different tones." Gee, thanks.) Only my subconscious knows for sure, but that doesn't stop my conscious self having a go at it…
We've been traveling to Oregon together since the children were small, when it was a sort of fairyland to us. We could contentedly go back every year. It's not quite like revisiting one's childhood home—it's just foreign enough to be interesting, but familiar enough to be comfortable—and the more often we go the more we love it. We don't do quite the same trip every time, but we revisit our favorite activities and places, even as our family composition changes.
It carries very distinct feelings, this layering of time and space, full of nostalgia and almost dreamlike in experience. I sometimes feel like I'm a double-self, experiencing the past and present simultaneously. Hard to capture in words, but those lines from the poems aren't a bad start, those galloping rhythms that feel like the race of time—from "many and many a year ago" when "I was a child" and so were my now-adult children—to now when the names and faces are different, but the experiences are somehow the same. Which one is reality and which the echo?
Those are the questions my brain is dredging up for me (accompanied by poetry soundtrack) as I look at these pictures and sort through the layers of memory that go with them.
So, humor me while I post about our trip, for the blog books that will simultaneously record these new memories and reinforce old ones. Skip on by if it's too much. I don't know what these books will mean to the kids, once they are all grown. But they are beyond price to me!
