This entire story is only possible in the past.

What we choose is a sharp mountain range. To look at it is to face cold wind. Even the blue dog at your side stops scattering songbirds to bow his head. The mountains are blue and white. The river is white / ice.

When the art gallery asked for a blueprint of your past you told them the basement was blue and white laid next to each other, cheek to cheek, like ocean to land. Not blended.

You remember sprinting into the North Sea as a child. It was frigid but you had to do it so you could enshrine it in myth, a baptism of ice. Blue-and-white, the way your grandfather’s parents used to count wooden shoes at night to make sure all their children were home. It’s the only image you have of your Pake’s childhood: thirty wooden shoes, two small ones almost touching, the boy already in bed, the start of your story.

A scientist shows you his sketches of trees. He says that it is impossible to reduce a tree to graphite and paper. Regrettably, although he wants to explain the future, he can only describe the past and so here are the sketches.

An alder, he says, has cork-like roots and tumbles pearls of air into its water intake and so survives being swamped. A spruce lets its branches hang so the snow slides off. All trees talk slow: their messages travel one-third of an inch per second. In the time you have read this, the maple’s roots haven’t yet heard about the beetle.

In the past, your want and your trust are two children painted in delft blue on a piece of tile in your grandmother’s kitchen. Your Beppe knits socks, a pair a day, as the snow falls outside and the blue jays pillage her bird seed. Her yarn slips into knots the way you laid your hand against a tortoise shell last summer, touching two hundred years into the future, long after your Pake’s wooden shoes turn to dust.

A poet hands you a soft morning sky and it starts to unravel. What you hold at the end are two balls of yarn. You take them to town. A woman frames them in deep blue wood.

Slow growing trees live longest, the scientist insists, as long as they have parent trees. One hundred years or more, and they mature. In all that time they shed their skin just like we do. You know that; you have picked up the pieces all your life. Your pockets bulge with the past. •

“Courage” by Maaike VanderMeer. Cyanotype and Japanese watercolour. Sold.

This morning it was warm enough and light enough to sit outside and write. There are plum blossoms on the trees and tulips blooming and everything just a little giddy, a little tipsy. Just being outside is enough of a writing prompt, but if you want something more guided, I dropped an idea in the chat for you to play with.

This piece evolved over many edits into what it is here. One thing I’m still asking is — did I drive the “you” too far? There’s a point where the reader stops existing in the story and starts feeling over-explained too, and I’m not sure I played that balance exactly right.

If you’re intrigued by my blend of magical realism and memoir, stick around. There’s more coming, and as I put together the “how” of it, I’ll share that too.

Here’s a quote from Dorianne Laux for your week: “This is why poetry: to carve a moment out of the chaos, to live the moments we are most alive into what we are built to be, sense-making and nonsense-making machines, all our powers working together: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, fully being in this world we’ve been given as a gift, making it ours through art, and then giving it away.”