The People Who Cultivated My Imagination

Sometimes I forget that my imagination didn’t form itself.

I didn’t come from a family of writers, so at times it’s easy to look at authors who do and think about what an upper hand they had on me. But now I’m beginning to wonder if it’s less about what kind of people we were born to and rather how those people taught us. 

As I walked with my son today along the forest edge of our yard, I asked him questions about what we saw. What do these pine needles feel like, what colour are these flowers, and so on. As we passed by a group of mushrooms, I asked him if he thought maybe grasshoppers used them as beds. 

As the words left my mouth, a memory came rushing in like a wind at my back—of my younger self, maybe five or older, walking with my grandmother through the forest. We passed by a stump with chips of a pinecone on them, and she slowed me down in front of it and pointed at it with her frail hand. “You see that there, Lara?” she asked. “That’s where some squirrels had a good meal together.”

With that memory, another one pooled into my mind: My mother walking me through the forest paths in autumn, where our horse trails were completely covered in gold and orange. We had a bag to collect leaves to press in the big books at home—the same books where we had pressed tiny violets from the previous summer. She taught me to notice the beauty around me. She never read or wrote poetry, but she taught me to see the poetry of nature as she dug her hands into the earth to array flowers in just the right way.

Continue reading at Story Warren.