Ethel L. Ingalls
Writing Excerpts
This is a piece I wrote for writing class when I was just beginning to work on my book, Only A Week Away. I thought it might give you an inkling of how distracting it could be. This piece was read in class on July 5, 2001. Ethel
Note: Susannah and James were my great great great grandparents.
Living In Two Worlds
My friend says she lives in two worlds, having recall of her dream world, and I ask, "Isn't that distracting?"
It is for me. I live in two worlds. I guess you could say my other world is a dream world too, but it is a dream I am building day by day.
My second world is nearly 200 years ago and peopled by Susannah and James. When I wash my face in the morning I see Susannah tending the fire. She doesn't wash in the morning. She washes at the end of he day when there is a little warm water.
While I make tuna fish salad for lunch, I see Susannah frying fish she caught that morning, if she was lucky. I get into my car to go to work and I see James and Susannah walking through the woods to the ferry. I reach for my sunglasses. What did Susannah use? A sunbonnet, of course. No, she didn't either. There was very little sun where she lived in the midst of the northern forests and when she took water to James as he cut trees at the edge of his field, she gloried in the warmth of the sun and the patch of sky overhead. She didn't feel so alone when she could see the sun and the sky.
When I put coins in the washer downstairs, I see Susannah scrubbing her clothes on a washboard in an old tub set on a crude table outside her log cabin. It's mid-day. She carried the water from the stream first thing in the morning, six buckets full, to let it warm in the sun. I would be a good laundry day. Some garments already laid across the wooden rack James had made for her.
I stop in at Krogers to pick up milk and bananas and English muffins. I see Susannah's bread rising in her dough box. She'll bake it in her fireplace oven, in time for supper. Before she set her bread, she milked the cow and set the bucket in the stream to cool. Later, she would skim the cream and beat it until it coddled into a soft spread. James loved the fresh buttermilk. Susannah had never seen a banana, never even heard of them. She made apple pudding, letting the dried apples bubble over the coals in the small cast-iron pot her mother gave her for her "settin' up". When the water mixture turned to syrup, she set it aside to cool. It would be really good served with milk, but she was tired of the same old fare.
I turn on the halogen lamp, my remedy for the gloom of my apartment, caused by huge oak trees that encircle the house. I see Susannah lighting candles for the table. The windowless cabin is dark outside the circle of candlelight. She puts another chunk of wood on the fire. It will add light while they eat and burn long into the night and she will stir life from its coals tomorrow morning. This evening she will sit close to the fire and mend James' shirt where a falling tree branch tore it today.
So while I live in Susannah's world, and mine, I wander around in mine, forgetting things, losing things, taking wrong turns off the highway. I find dishpans of sudsy water gone cold and forgotten. I have nothing on my feet and find my socks in the bathroom and my sneakers in the kitchen. I don't remember dropping either of them there. I walk out to work wearing bright pink earrings with my yellow outfit and one day I nearly walked out the door in my slip. I've worn two different socks, picked up a letter to mail and arrived at the mailbox without it, wandered into the bedroom and can't remember what I came for, sat for long periods of time so engrossed in my other world I can not even remember the time of day or day of the week when I return to mine. Where am I? What am I doing here?
Anyone watching me would surely see I am distracted. Susannah would say that I am "addled".
