I’m on the move, looking for beauty. Improvising once again.
So goes the first line of a “captured moment,” written in my journal decades ago while on a year-long journey. Following is the rest of that “moment,” as it now appears in my memoir.
London, August 1990
I’m on the move, looking for beauty. Improvising once again.
The Leicester Garden, a traveler’s hotel recommended in Frommer’s, is too plain, too basic—the carpet’s thin and the bed uncomfortable. So I set off on this scorching day to my new hotel, the Garden Country Hotel on Kensington Gardens Square.
The gravel path through the Kensington Gardens makes wheeling my too-heavy pack difficult. No, not difficult, but rough enough that I am conscious of having to drag it along. My feet are swollen in huaraches, my skirt clings to sweat-sticky legs, and I am lost. Or, if not lost, at the very least, I don’t quite know where I am. And it’s bloody hot.
The trees are tall and grand and spreading and the lawns lush and green on either side of the gravel path. Benches line the way and on one a man leans back, face to the sun, shirt off. His bare chest fairly gleams in the bright light. I’m drawn to stare at his whiteness, that bit of belly above his trousers, the small and roundish pink of his nipples, his hairless chest. I don’t know when I have seen a whiter body.
No bird song disturbs the still air, the birds must be drowsing, too, like the man on the bench. We are all knackered. The verdant aromas of late summer, grass thick and lush and tempting, if I stop here, under this grand oak, in plain sight, in bright daylight, but in the shade…
Planting myself on the grass, skirt under my legs, I remove my shoes. The contrast of my aqua skirt against the deep emerald pleases me. I rub my bare feet in the grass. Is there a better sensation for a girl with Missouri roots? This, I think, is what home feels like.
Pack placed behind me, I lean back, then slide a little further down until I am nearly prone. My eyes can’t help but close against the branch-dappled sun and, stranger in an unfamiliar place, single woman on the grass under a tree in a public park, I fall asleep, deeply and completely.
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This is just one of many moments “captured” in my journal that I later transplanted, revised and included in my memoir. Our lives are filled with moments, large and small, from which we emerge a different person.
In just a few weeks, I’ll launch “Captured Moments,” a new generative writing session via Zoom. In this monthly writing group, we’ll embark on expeditions to discover, uncover, and recover those moments of change in our lives. Participants can use the sessions to produce new material for a work-in-progress, or create fresh, free-standing flash or micro-memoirs or narrative fragments.
The series begins Monday, May 17 at noon (PT). You can find out more and sign up here: https://judyreeveswriter.com/captured-moments/