The first is what I'll be working on today. "Find a picture of a landscape and try to tell a story about what seems obvious but also what you can't see in the picture, like events or memories that happened in this landscape."
And of course, in my creative funk, I couldn't pick a landscape. So I had my brother in-law pick one for me. I have never seen this before and have no idea where it's from or where it actually is.
To passersby this is a little house on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean in Newfoundland. The house is orderly, and well kept, and there isn't much of a lawn that needs to be mowed, but the view from their "backyard" is what makes people stop. The house is situated on a plot of land that has been nick-named "Picture Ridge" where locals and tourists stop to admire the view of the cliffs and the Ocean.
The little house on the cliff sneaks into many of the picturesque landscapes taken from "Picture Ridge" and is commonly called the "Ridge House".
As lovely as the house and scenery is, the location is not what makes this place beautiful.
"Ridge House" is known as Home to the Murphy family. Margaret and William Murphy bought this house as a starter home shortly after they married in 1949. William Murphy, 20 at the time, was a fisherman. If you ask him now, he'd tell you he's always been a fisherman and will be a fisherman till the day he dies, but now he does it recreationally. His wife, Margaret, was 18 and a seamstress. If you asked her now if she was still a seamstress she'd shake her head and smile politely.
"No." She'd say. "I'm just a mother, and grandmother, who happens to be able to repair my kids' favourite clothes."
Margaret and William had intended this house to be a starter house and never expected to raise four boys; Robert, Charles, Arthur and Peter, in their little house but the cost of four young boys stretched their pockets thin. The house was small and loud with 6 bodies bumbling around in 3 bedrooms, and fighting to share 1 bath.
As they grew up they watched their boys race down the stairs on towels pretending they were on magic carpets, or watched them scamper across the ridge in the fall when the grass was yellow and crunching under foot.
When they first got the house William had screwed a paddle from his first boat on the wall in the kitchen. No one knows why. Margaret never asked, and William never said. It hangs on the wall vertically and Margaret used it to measure the height of her boys every Christmas. She would line them up; which was a task, with the promise of cocoa and a gingerbread man if they stayed still long enough for her to strike a line with her pen at the crown of their head on the shaft of the paddle. Peter always spent the day before Christmas walking on the tip of his toes trying to stretch his legs and make them longer so that he might get taller than his brothers.
During the winter when it was really cold, the Murphy's would gather in their parent's room and listen to Margaret as she read their favourite books aloud. Robert had an old copy of The Lord of the Rings that he favoured, while Charles and Arthur preferred the Redwall stories, and Peter liked Peter Pan. Although they all liked different stories, and they had heard them before, the only time that the Murphy house was ever calm was when Margaret was reading to her boys. They would pull the mattresses in from the other rooms and gather in a makeshift pillow fort, while Margaret would snuggle into their father's lap; who'd fall asleep before the first chapter was finished, but his hands would stay snaked around her waist holding her close. The boys would set up their pillows and blankets and watch Margaret with rapt attention. Margaret would make voices and accents for each character, and run around the room imitating battle scenes, or flying around the room as if she were covered in pixie dust. When Margaret was reading the boys were watching. It was the only time the boys ever really watched their parents.
Eventually Margaret and William started watching their boys lives from the windows of their little house. The four walls were too small and they boys couldn't stand to be in them very long.
Margaret and William continued to watch as their boys learned to skate on the frozen water beyond the ridge and started to join the neighbours in friendly hockey games. They watched as they started to blush when they were asked about some of the neighbourhood girls.
As the boys grew up they became less mesmerized by Margaret. They found her stories childish, and annoying. In the winter when it was cold they would seek refuge from the cold in the solitude of various rooms of the house and busy themselves with work or school. The family would fight, and brothers would form alliances to trade rooms and avoid one another. They fought with each other, they fought with their parents, they fought with themselves. Margaret and William watched helplessly as their kids drew lines on the floor and dared each other to cross it.
One day while William was at work Arthur and Robert got into a horrible fight. Peter barricaded himself in his room, and Margaret and Charles tried to ease the tension, but the brothers were so loud they couldn't hear them. After the fight with Robert, that ended in a broken nose and a sprained wrist, Arthur moved out. Robert went off to University in Toronto that fall.
And then the boys grew up.
They went off to school across the country, found partners and jobs, and only called their parents for their birthdays, but were often too preoccupied with their own lives to get the dates right; they were usually only off by 1 or 2 days, and Margaret always said she didn't mind, but they always visited for Christmas.
The "Ridge House" got very big and very quiet when they boys went away. The ocean stayed blue, and the rocks of the ridge never changed, but when the grass turned from bright green, to yellow and brown, then slept under a blanket of snow, the beauty on the ridge would change. When they boys would come home for a visit at Christmas, they would bring their wives, partners and children to the little house, and it would turn back into their home.
William and Margaret, now aged and lined would line up their family with the promise of cocoa and gingerbread to take a family photo, and when tempers got too high, Margaret would reach for the nearest book, sit in her husbands' arms and read for her family.
The family they had started with had seemed so big, 6 people in 3 bedrooms, but now there were wives and grandchildren; 13 people squeezed into that little house, and even in this small house the spaces between the brothers was too much. Things that had been said in anger or frustration kept them apart, and even the size of the house could not get them close enough again. But when Margaret pulled Peter Pan off the shelf and started to read, the eyes of her children watched her mesmerized once more.
They watched her not just for her tales, but admired her for her patience, her generosity, and watched as their father's arms squeezed her gently as he slept- loving her through his dreams. They looked around the room at siblings they had fought with and nodded silent apologies. They let go of their grudges and resentments surrounded by the bigger family they had created, and that Margaret had brought together.
“Never say goodbye because goodbye means going away and going away means forgetting.”
-Brandolyn
Wow, I just lost myself in that. I started this 2 hours ago! It's long, but I hope you like it.
Awesome! Such a good story. I hope it sparked some creative juice! I loved it.
ReplyDeleteThanks bro! I feel like there's a short story in there, I just have to tear it apart and piece it back together.
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