Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.”
Today, please welcome writer
BARBARA BOYLE
Morning…
I am on a treadmill.
No, really. I am in a hotel gym.
Far from the home I left behind in Italy, no longer at home here in San Francisco, in that awkward place between home and not home. I am running, pounding on and on, going nowhere, breathless.
It is a rainy morning, deep in January, with thoughts of faraway Italy tucked away in my heart. It snowed there today, said the neighbors, and I can picture the steady, pristine silence. Faded scenes of my childhood in San Francisco occupy other corners of my heart, comforting and innocent.
On I run.
Out the window, I watch a family trying to take selfies while holding umbrellas in the wind and rain. A cable car comes click click clicking past them, ringing the bell as it crosses the intersection. I admire their determination. A helpful passerby takes the camera from the young family with their umbrellas and takes the photo for them, the old school way. It is a great shot. The little girl is laughing and so are her parents.
The San Francisco I know from my childhood, my city by the bay, is famously grey and foggy and beautiful. But this wet, rainy town with a whipping wind throws me. I am happy that the tourists don’t seem to mind. Downtown is coming back, they say, though homeless still wander 6th street, bent over in fentanyl-fueled gyrations, talking animatedly to the air.
It has a ways to go.
My little town in Italy, Roddino, has no homeless people. No one sleeps on the cobblestone streets. No one goes hungry. Osteria da Gemma routinely serves a hot meal to neighbors who may be in need of one, for whatever reason. Gemma says there is always enough to go around.
I hit the down arrow on the treadmill, slow to a walk and begin to recover. Scribbled notes and pieces of paper are waiting for me in my room, strewn across the unmade bed. It is time to focus on them.
Midday…
Back in room 328, I am propped on the bed, half-packed suitcases piled to one side, computer on my lap. I need to create something, some sketches, a timeline, or perhaps a back story. It is hard to write in the limbo of my room. Colorless. Temporary.
But writing is like that. I cannot always put life aside and focus purely on the craft, or escape to an ideal setting without interruption, the need to prepare dinner, or look after someone besides the characters in my head.
My first book was a memoir, and it was a thrill to write, to see it accepted, published, and sent out into the world. I took my time with it. Writing it felt almost too easy. But in the end, all I had to do was tell what happened. I did not focus on arcs, plots, character development, and all those technical aspects of a novel that I will need in the story before me now.
Now it is daunting. I keep looking at my notebooks, the yellow sticky notes, the messy phrases on scraps of paper and on the backs of envelopes, and hope, trust, that it will all come together at some point. I hope, trust that those scraps of paper are pieces of a puzzle yet to reveal itself.
Probably not today, however.
What I do have is a character I love; the woman who was born in my house in Italy, and died there ninety-eight years later, having never married. Emma was her name.I am fascinated by her. Who was she? What did she experience in her long life? Did she ever fall in love? Where did her enormous strength and will to survive through two wars come from?
I feel her spirit in the walls and halls of my three-hundred-year-old home and want to imagine the story of her life. If I were there, I could simply put a log on the fire, lie on the couch, and study the stones in our thirty-foot walls, their echoes and whispers revealing tales they have heard for over three hundred years. I know the setting well, because it is where I live. I know how noisy the birds are at dawn in April, where the sun sets in winter and in summer, and how the autumn mists curl over the valleys below.
Before I left, I was able to write the first chapter, or at least a draft of it. How and when this will become a novel keeps me up at night. Sometimes, as I toss and turn, an entire scene comes to me, almost like a memory, or a piece of film, and I know what my heroine will do and how. In the morning, sometimes, it becomes a paragraph or more. Those are good days. But the road ahead is long.
Finally, sitting quietly in my stark beige room, some thoughts and half-finished phrases come to me. I scrawl them by hand, in blue or red ink:
“Emma adores the power of the tractor she drives and tunes the engine like a skilled mechanic.”
“early one morning in May, she comes into the barn and witnesses the bloody and beautiful birth of a baby goat.”
“an American paratrooper lands in the gully below the house, and her cousin protects him from the enemy; after she tends to his wounds, they fall in love, he goes back to the front, leaving her carrying his child.’
My back begins to ache. I find myself hoping that the rain will let up so I can take a walk outside, away from the scattered scraps and notebooks.
Paragraphs are for another day, I suppose.
Later in the day…
I stride past the hotel bar, football games blaring, glasses clinking, and venture outside to breathe in the cool air.
The rain has become more of a heavy mist, and the sun is just beginning to set as I head up the hill towards Grace Cathedral. The lights from the Nob Hill hotels twinkle reassuringly in the dusk.
Entering the cathedral, I am welcomed by the warmth, the majesty, the hushed beauty. There is a positivity to its architecture and the soaring grandeur of its stained-glass windows. It is an icon in the city that has always stood for equality and unity and love. Amidst the candles and plants in the vestibule, I find origami birds with handwritten messages of hope and kindness. “No more racism.” “No more poverty.” “Peace.”
My heart is in Italy, but my life today is here.
I can only imagine what lies ahead for me, for my book, and for our world in these next few months. I do not know how far along I will be with my story of Emma, or where she will take me. But I do know that while I am here, I need to keep my eyes open, making notes of my journey, all that is around me, and hope to make some sense of it all.
To keep going. To keep writing. To keep running.
~
THOSE SAME 3 NEW QUESTIONS…
1. What one word best describes your writing life?
- Purpose.
2. Is there a book you’ve read over and over again?
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The book I have been keeping by my bed and reading and rereading this past year is Guidance from the Universe by Jill Amy Sager. Aside from that, I love reading and rereading Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, and anything by Jane Austen. Old school. (English Lit major!)
3. What is your strangest obsession or habit?
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My strangest habit might be always counting stairs anytime I go up and down. A therapist would have a field day with that one.
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