Recently I visited our assisted living facility to conduct a writing project as part of our arts programming in the community. Armed with a questionnaire and a sort of “Mad Libs” format we received from the North Dakota Council on the Arts, we came into their common room that day asking the residents to help us make their memories into a poem.

Now, I’ve been making memories into poems most of my life, but I know that sort of expression is not something that comes easy to everyone. I’ve been around long enough to know that telling a room full of midwestern women to share their very important stories is going to be met with a smattering of humble responses to the effect of, “Well, I don’t know. It wasn’t that interesting.” It’s a sentiment I’ve heard before and one I have strongly disagreed with since I first started begging for childhood stories from my family members around the kitchen table and coffee counter.

Our favorite thing was to hear how our dad crashed his Trail 90 in the coulee with his brother, or how my mom once drove all the way home from town on Halloween with the back hatch of her car flung all the way open and she didn’t notice. And she was dressed as a witch. We like the one about the Charolais bulls getting dumped out of the back of the pickup-box trailer in the yard and any story about dad’s pony Bugger bucking him off and eating his hat and on and on, tell them again. 

I don’t know if every kid is like this, but I’ve noticed it in my children as well. They linger around the adult section of the party a big longer when the stories are flowing, hanging on to every glimpse into a world they’ll never get to visit. I know I felt like that, and I still do. Hearing childhood stories from our neighbors and our family made me feel like the loose threads that tie generations together was pulling tighter.  

Lately our youngest daughter Rosie has been requesting stories from my husband and I at bedtime. She is very specific with her requests—they must be something that happened to us as a kid, and they can’t be shorter than ten minutes (not that she’s timing us or anything). Reaching back for childhood stories on command is challenging. These stories don’t just sit on the top of your mind waiting to be shared at a moment’s notice, rather, they’re there for your recollection if the conversation turns the right corner, or the coffee is flowing right, or someone else’s story reminds you of yours. 

And that’s what we aimed to do with the writing exercise we brought to the residents that day. We came to chat and to be the ears that wanted to listen with an activity that asks you to list things like an everyday item from your home, family traditions and habits, things you were told as a child, the family mementos and where they were kept. These simple questions make you imagine yourself there again, in your childhood home, or the home in which you raised your own children. And it makes you remember little pieces of the life attached to your mom’s good dishes or the stairway in the house you once met your father coming down for work, you just getting home from being out all night, and the words not spoken between the two of you. 

Where are you from? What do you remember? What was it like?  

I want to know. I want to know to know you. I want to know to know myself.

I helped guide the residents through the exercise and then I did it myself. 

Where I’m From

I’m from guitars and a living room cable box
from a deep freezer and Schwann’s ice cream. 

I am from a double wide trailer with cedar siding and green shutters
brown living room carpet and a patterned linoleum kitchen floor
 a big leather couch and flea market coffee tables and a back deck.

Kitchen table homework, mom’s lamplight and the screen door letting the cool air in.

I am from the wild oak and ash trees 
that have grown along the banks of the creek for a hundred years
And mom’s potted geraniums 
and dad’s vegetable garden with too many weeds 
and the cedar trees he transplanted and made us water with buckets

I am from pancakes on Christmas Eve and a good ear for music

from Gene and Beth
the Veeders and Linseths
the Blacks and the Blains.

I’m from front yard basketball games
 long drives to town, the tape deck in the minivan
People magazine, coffee with neighbors and stories from the old days. 

I am from “Up and at ‘em Adam Ant,” 
and “You’re a good kid” 
and “Be-Bop-a Lula, She’s my Baby” 

I’m from skipping school on shipping day 
and Minnesota 4^th of Julys

I’m from Watford City and Norway and Sweden 
and Dad’s shrinking hamburgers and mom’s surfer square bars. 

From my little sister and her pony Jerry who would try to roll her right off his back 
and her ringlets 
and the tear that was always streaking her face. 

Old black and white photos of our grandpas on horseback 
sit on the antique buffet where she keeps her good dishes 
and Indian beads and arrowheads in old jars on the back shelf
guitar picks and pocket change in little bowls on his night stand 
the same way I keep mine