A Writing Group Prompts Autumn Memories

One of the things I most love about a writing group is the inspiration to keep writing. Whether it’s inspiration or incentive, the idea that you’re about to meet with a group of writers is energizing. Sometimes, I can go days without writing or wanting to write. When I know that my writing group date is getting closer, I’ll make sure I have something to offer. This might be in response to a writing prompt, or just the desire to contribute to the creative mood of a group. Each of us can offer something as a way of thanking the other for coming to the group.

In the Women’s Writing Circle, I offered a prompt for November that inspired me to write a memory I had long forgotten. In this way, I found something new to remember about love and loss. A bittersweet memory evokes feelings and writing crystallizes those feelings. As I wrote last week, vulnerability in writing is great courage and great writing. The prompt was this: Someone once wrote: “I left him in the middle of a melody…” Write of a time when a song brings back a memory.

As this is autumn in Pennsylvania, the song “Autumn Leaves” came to mind for several reasons. So, I wrote this.

At an upright, cherry piano set against the wall with framed photographs of her parents in wedding regalia, she first started learning to play melodies and hoped to get better with time. There was “Ebb Tide” and “The Shadow of Your Smile” from the movie The Sandpipers, tunes easily mastered because they didn’t require different tempos from two different hands, something she could never manage, whether through lack of coordination or simply little to no musical talent. The song, though, that she loved and could play perfectly well was “Autumn Leaves”, a haunting melody that often inspired her to sit down at the piano due to her love of fall and the red and gold maple trees outside her parents’ living room window.

Even years later, when she was a senior in high school and knew she would soon be off to college, she played that song, letting her thoughts flow to the melancholy beauty of love and loss, those summer kisses and sun-burnt hands the lover used to hold. After college, when she landed her first reporting job, she met him and played it for him. When they married, he took her to John Wanamaker on Market Street in Philadelphia to buy her own upright, cherry wood piano. In those days, they sold pianos on the fifth floor of that gigantic department store, something that now seems as outdated as her past and the autumn days of her youth.

They had sixteen autumns together, but on the seventeenth, he died in October leaving her alone with their two young sons. In her grief and loneliness, she played “Autumn Leaves”, remembering that night when they had bought the piano, him wearing a camel-colored overcoat with a matching scarf, jeans, and brown boots. He had a mustache and it tickled when they kissed, but she liked it anyway, really there was nothing about him she didn’t like because as corny as it sounded, he had brought her dreams to life…having a wonderful man by her side on autumn days when leaves fell like crepe paper snow to the sidewalks and they walked their blond cocker spaniel, another gift from him.

The piano languished until her younger son said he wanted to learn, but he soon found practicing scales tiresome, or maybe it was the curly-permed teacher with acne who failed to inspire, although her son had more likely inherited her lack of musical talent and knew it was useless to keep at something when you’re so mediocre at it.

For her, who was there to play for? Herself? So, one day, when autumn leaves fell outside her own living room window, a truck pulled into the driveway. She stroked the keys one last time. Two men carefully rolled the piano out the front door to the truck and its new home, which was apparently a church fellowship hall. Strangely enough, or maybe not so, she never played the piano again after that. Now when she hears “Autumn Leaves”, it is a sweet reminder of those glorious years with him, the autumn days of old when she was so young and filled with love.

Since you went away the days grow long
And soon I’ll hear old winter’s song
But I miss you most of all my darling
When autumn leaves start to fall

How about you? Does meeting with other writers encourage you to keep at your craft?