memoir

Helena offers some poetic “impressions” from her daily journaling practice, plus a requested and imagined end to the two-part monkey story from March and May.

In her 44th post, Helena Clare Pittman tells the second part of her March story of adolescent rebellion.

A memoir isn’t about recording everything that’s ever happened to us. It’s about building a narrative around a soul theme.

When I was fourteen and life had taken its hormonal turn, pushing me out of the childhood home that I thought was permanent, I bought a monkey...

I am still painting flowers in glasses. Different destinies. Different kinds of artists, people. Maybe stars. But it was a privilege to see, in a kind of secret act, that lovely little painting...

Soft-edged and dreamy, on a deeper brown neutral ground, so that the beauty of orange, with its green tones and reds, its yellows and lavender grays, is revealed. The image captivated me...

My older sister, Jolene, was the ringleader in our sister group. It was a group of only us two...We were an organism. Where did she stop and I begin? I can't find a fixed edge...

My dad whistled. Cheer was part of his nature. He whistled around the house and in the car, and sometimes he sang.

Facets of clear amber stone that flash. There is a dimension between the flashes. Julie called it the interstices. That’s where the story, with all its trauma and love that Julie bequeathed me, lives.

We step onto firm ground when Marilyn gets to the thing that is waiting, underneath everything she says, the thing she can't forget. Right there, in the middle of the air, we're standing on something solid.