Check out an excerpt of my essay No Ordinary Places published with Fathom Magazine in June 2020:
Several months ago—on a night when I couldn’t fall asleep, a night my wandering thoughts would not be still—my mind began to retrace its steps through every room in my childhood home.
Doorway by doorway, hallway by hallway, and room by room, I entered those once-real places that have since become only fixtures of my girlhood memories.
During those late hours of the night, my thoughts stilled and the memories resurfaced with joy. But every image my mind conjured up felt a little too hazy. As soon as I remembered the nostalgia and delight of those ancient spaces, I began to recognize how many of the small pieces that made them I had already started to forget.
Did we keep a chair at that built-in desk in the sunroom? And which corner of the living room housed the ficus tree? Which one held the lamp? What year was it when we covered up the periwinkle paint in my bedroom with a soft green?
My parents sold that home only a handful of years ago and I was astonished at how my memories of it had already begun to dissolve.
Fifteen years of bedtimes, birthday parties, family dinners, and lazy Saturday afternoons shrank into the cracks of my rememberings, crowded out by new rooms and doorways and spaces…. Keep reading!
