Keeping with the random theme, I decided to share a piece of what I worked on today. I had originally written this in a present-tense voice. Today I rewrote it using past-tense. Somehow the past tense voice feels more immediate than the present. What’s that all about?
I loved watching from my viewpoint on the chrome high chair that sat beside the stove. I’d flip out the two steps and hug my knees as I watched Mom mix up the foaming yeast and sugar in the biscuit coloured bowl with its milky white interior. She’d pound and knead the dough, mix up pastry for pies, roll balls of dough into buns and loaves and pat out cookies.
She’d take the big wooden mallet with the long green handle and use the crosshatched side to press little checkerboard patterns into the oatmeal cookies, finishing each one with a final coating of sugar before settling it on the baking sheet that had been rubbed with the wax paper from the butter.
But the best part sometimes came at the end, when my mom took all those leftover dough scraps and made me my very own pie. This was when it definitely paid to be too young for school.
I never knew until much later that it was probably just a tin lid from a big tub of peanut butter or maybe a lid leftover from a pail of Rogers Golden Syrup. It had been baked to a dark clay colour; all pretences of brass having been fired off a long time ago. There was no shine and flash for that mini-pie baking dish.
Mom kept it in the bottom drawer of the stove, and when she pulled it out, I knew it was going to be the best kind of baking day.
Her strong fingers made it all look so easy as she took all those bits of dough and pressed them into a round slightly larger than my special dish. Next, she’d roll two of the side edges up, like tiny sausages. She’d curve them toward each other and soon there would be a perfect rolled edge of dough just inside the edges of that lid. In the middle she blobbed jam; homemade strawberry or garnet-jeweled raspberry, and then she baked this mini-pie just for me and only me.
And even if Rhonda and Diane came home in time to have shared some, it didn’t matter. They got to go to school. This was mine.
Agree with Michele…AND I struggle with tense, so what do I know? I think the past tense works, Colleen. It’s far easier to write in past tense, I think, too. I just love your story, and YOU writing it. Keep at it. 🙂
I was absolutely convinced that all the memoirs I’ve loved have been in present tense…I went back and looked. They are all in past tense, so what do I know? Nada, that’s what. It’s so comforting to know we’re all muddling around in this together. Thank you for your encouraging words 🙂 Onward!
Beautiful – past tense works for me and someone told me it’s easier on the reader.
I’m glad it’s easier on the reader because as it turns out it’s easier on me too. What on earth had me convinced that it all had to be written present tense? Not sure what that was about…I’m still wandering out in the desert on this thing but at least I know this one thing. Now I just need to figure out where it’s all going.