Inktober 2019, Day Ten: In which we learn of tears and tapestries…

Inktober Prompt: Pattern
Goldspot Prompt: Suffocate

10 October, 2019

Bridget,

Please don’t cry. I can see the teardrops on your missive. Of course I have not forgotten your father’s antipathy towards psychiatrists, but don’t let his prejudices corrupt your thinking. I know your mother’s therapist couldn’t cure her, but sometimes mental illness resists treatment. And you know your mother’s depression played no part in her death.

You and Dr. Morgan needn’t tell your father that the counsellor is a psychiatrist. Merely tell your father that Dr. Morgan wishes to consult with a colleague for a second opinion.

Sometimes I think I can begins to discern a pattern to your father’s behaviour, but it’s more like a tapestry than a linear flow. Get the help you need, and do not allow your father’s illness to suffocate the beloved friend of

Your faithful,

Hannah

Inktober 2019, Day Eight: A Possible Experiment…

Inktober Prompt: Frail
Goldspot Prompt: Vicious

8 October, 2019
[Yom Kippur]

Dear Bridget,

Your note urging me to relay my idea to you and emphasizing your father’s still-increasing requests for a sand-flower greeted me upon my rising today. Fortunately, my ideas coalesced as I slept, so I can give you a fairly coherent description of my thoughts.

I propose a test of sorts, a proffer of a partial truth to see how your father reacts. Perhaps it would be best if Dr. Morgan were around as witness and, if necessary, protection. My suggestion is that you set out on your walk, and head toward the woods, but go no further than the edge. Find a talisman of some sort: a rock, a leaf — break off a branch like the gardener’s boy in “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” — to bring your father. Return to the house with your token, and “confess” to your papa that you sense a fearful presence among the trees. Watch and listen closely for all the nuances of his reaction. Your father, in his usual state, might tease you a bit, but he would never attempt to persuade you to walk, especially not alone, anywhere you feel nervous or discomfortable.

I would that I could come, as you ask, Bridget. I am less enervated today — the absence of the wind helps — but fatigue continues to tether me at home. As soon as I can, I shall be

Your swiftly repairing,
Hannah

P.S. I meant to add that feeling frail can lead people to be vicious. I hope your papa says nothing to hurt you.

Inktober 2019, Day Seven: An Unforeseen Development…

Inktober Prompt: Enchantment
Goldspot Prompt: Shiver

7 October, 2019

Bridie,

Remember when “enchantment” was a charming word, the stuff of childhood fantasies and the cause of inconvenient, over-long naps? And now the word has a noxious look; it lies there, where I’ve written it, watching, glaring, all its innocence lost.

Perhaps I am seeing it through the haze of your letter, which I opened and read when I woke today. “Subtle differences,” you write, “subtle, but easily discernible to those who know him.”

Bridget, I know you don’t want to see the changes in your father, but even through your letter I can tell the changes are not subtle. Your father has always been a person of vast intelligence, but “wily, deceitful”? These are not attributes of your papa. Dr. Morgan has eliminated all the obvious medical causes, and while she is still waiting for other test results, we should open our minds to other possibilities, even if they provoke a shiver in our souls.

So your father has intuited that you may not be taking your walks in the woods as he has “encouraged” you to do and wants you to bring a “sand flower” (and you’re right; he made that up) from the edge of the lake to hasten his recovery.  Bridie, we both know your father would never manipulate you so and that if he were mad, his insanity would be a gentler sort, one that would give him an excuse to live in his library, in a literary world with his favourite characters. Moreover, if he were ever to retreat so, he would invite you in to whatever realm he was inhabiting and would not insist you walk away from him to become “wode within this wood.”

Birdie, I have an idea forming in my head, but my weariness is sliding the pen out of the hand of

Your loving,
Hannah

(And, truly, more and more it seems your father is enchanted by some power whose epicenter is in thge wood.)

Inktober Day Two: A sense of foreboding steals in…

Inktober Prompt: Mindless
Goldspot Prompt: Chill

Inktober Day Two

2 October, 2019

Well, Bridie,

As happens so often, our letters must have crossed in the post. I was pleased to see it; I was expecting your recipe for pumpkin soup — goodness knows I’ve asked for it often enough!

Your missive started out well enough; I am pleased that your dear papa is improving. But, Bridget, as I read on, I confess a chill brushed through my soul and left a pattern of ice crystals there. I can hardly say why. There seemed to be a creeping, mindless aura to your words that has settled over my own brain like a living mist and has quite put me out of countenance.

Write back at once to either reassure or confide in

Your anxious friend,
Hannah

P.S. And please don’t forget the soup recipe!

Inktober Day One: And so it begins…

Inktober Prompt: Ring
Goldspot Prompt: Mystery

Inktober Day One

Dear Bridget,

Autumn is good and finally here. For weeks, the flowers & trees have seemed still & quiet  — waiting. But now they begin to ring out with glory and colour. It started with the drifting, spinning leaves of the locust, floating down like slow-motion largesse, looking like the tinkling of a wind-chime in a lazy breeze.

But now the reds & oranges ring out on the trees and bell out that ‘Fall has come!’ in deeper tones than even the aspen can manage. There is a mystery to the liminal seasons, a mystery of which I never tire.

You are laughing, I’m sure, at my florid prose, but I am even more sure you will forgive and indulge

Your tedious friend,

Hannah

Letter Therapy

In a recent post, I wrote about developing aphasia and labouring to re-build my vocabulary. I am an editor and an independent scholar; both my work and my vocation depend on my ability to deploy words with attention to nuance and connotation. This post is a note of gratitude to Jaynie Royal, the person who helped me to revive my inner thesaurus.

Before I “met” Jaynie in LinkedIn’s Literary Endeavor discussion group (which Jaynie established), I had been playing “brain training” games and looking up words, writing down their definitions in tiny journals (I’ve long given up on the games, but I still keep the vocabulary journals).  I read read read with a kind of desperation that alloyed almost out of existence any pleasure I might have taken in the activity. I also consumed articles and comments in on-line groups, and I did find some support and validation there, but no solutions. 

And then, a little more than three years into my struggle, I started to get to know Jaynie, thanks to the magic of the Internet.* We became friends, and then, when she invited me to join her publishing house, colleagues. To keep our work and our personal relationships (slightly) separated, we started consigning our communications about editing and publishing to e-mails and using letters — the kind written by hand, on paper, with a fountain pen — to share news and thoughts about family, the weather, politics, recently read books, and recipes. (Well, it’s mostly Jaynie sharing recipes because she is a superb cook.)

Beyond the exchange of chat and epiphanies, Jaynie and I discovered just how much we share an enjoyment of playing with language, of indulging in what we think of as elegant prose and others might call florid ramblings. Since this is my blog, let’s go with elegant prose. (Jaynie’s style absolutely sparkles.)

Here was someone who laid out the riches of her vocabulary for me to delight in and who was willing to revel in the gems of verbiage I was able to unearth from the buried treasures of my verbal trove. Corresponding with Jaynie over these last four-plus years has helped me unlock rooms in my head that I forgotten were there. Letter therapy — unintentional, accidental therapy — has been what has brought me back some sense of who I am and what I used to be able to do.

I doubt that I’ll ever completely recover from the effects of the Prednisone (I am on the far side of middle age and I’m not sure of how much plasticity my ossifying brain is still capable), nor is there any compensatory silver lining nor new philosophical outlook that will make me a better person because of my aphasia. I will always resent the loss; I will always be frustrated when the right word refuses to trip off my tongue or slide down my nib. But I am relieved to have learned that I can get better. And I am tremendously grateful to my friend Jaynie for giving me the means to do so.

      

(I think I’m going to need a bigger box — or another one.)


*Jaynie and I have met in real life too. You know those movies where people find themselves living inside their favourite novels? Meeting Jaynie was like that, only I felt as if I had walked inside one of her letters.