This content was originally created on a Shutterfly Share Site. Shutterfly discontinued their share sites in March 2023. It was a race to see if I could transfer the material posted there to my laptop for future use here. I had been storing things on Shutterfly Share since 2009.
Eileen M Hector, Daughter, Sister, Mom, Grandma, Aunt, Mother-in-Law, Daughter-in-Law, Volunteer
My Thoughts on Writing
Imagination – Of all of the things in my world I would hope this is the one thing I never lose.
It sets no limits.
My senses of sight, touch, taste, smell and hearing may go…I may lose my mobility but wondering what life would be like without these senses helps me to use my imagination more fully each day. Because I can hear, see, feel, taste and smell all life has to offer I can never truly lose my senses. I think writing is a sensory experience.
I want you to feel something when you read my stories and poetry. I want you to see the intimate pictures I paint with words. I would like for you to be moved by my writings. I would like for you to have a taste of my life.
Please laugh, cry or just sit with me as I share my very personal thoughts with you.
Six of the seven of us last gathered together the year my father died (2004). Pictured from left to right: Shirley, Linda, Timothy, Christopher, Phillip and Eileen. Steven is absent.
Sidestepping
We often hear that we need to take baby steps before we learn to run. For me it was a giant step. I had been writing my thoughts down since I was in third grade. It was a way for me to cope with my feelings growing up in a large family. Writing helped me sort out my life. I could write without confrontation. My four brothers and two sisters could not invade the space that occupied my thoughts when I was writing.
Throughout the years I was a student of many styles of writing. In my third year of high school, I selected Creative Writing as an elective course. The flood gates opened. Most of my writing was personal and it was poetry. Assignment after assignment, day after day I hand wrote my observations of the world around me in my spiral bound notebook. My Creative Writing teacher was very encouraging.
I also joined the school newspaper staff, and crafted articles of interest to our student body. Already a member of the National Honor Society, that year I was inducted into Quill and Scroll, a high school journalism honor society. In 1974 I was one of 850 students in the United States, the District of Columbia, and American schools abroad, that won the National Council of Teachers of English Award for writing.
Though not effortless, it seemed natural for me to write whatever was on my mind. Essays, poetry, investigative reports–were all fair game. The problem was, I still did not believe in myself. My teachers did, but time and again I found it hard to believe in myself.
Life happens and I did not choose to attend college because I felt it would be an undue financial burden on my family. Many years later I picked up my pen again and started journaling. Jump ahead a few more years and my dear husband introduced me to the personal computer. I entered all those handwritten high school poems that had been saved in a manila folder, into the machine, which by today’s standards would be considered a dinosaur. I added more as I found time to write new entries.
Progress forward a few more years to the age of the internet. By 2007 I had two grown sons out on their own and more free time to write. Poetry was still my love. The words tumbled out onto the page. I manipulated them to say what I felt. It was the only way to be heard. I wondered if others would care to hear what I had to say. Finally, with an attitude of what do I have to lose, I submitted a poem for the 2007 Christmas edition of Chicken Soup for the Soul. It was a giant step outside my comfort zone.
Anxiety filled, I sent off my entry and tried not to think too much about it. An introverted writer, I had never shared any of my writing with an audience so large. I still do a virtual happy dance thinking about going to my mailbox and receiving the acceptance letter for that edition. I am still pleasantly surprised that I was a paid for my contribution to the book that year. Getting published in one of the most popular book series helped me believe I was a writer. It gave me the confidence to launch my writing out to a wider readership. It took me more than thirty-five years to believe I was a writer.
Since 2007 I have continued to successfully submit stories and poems to various publications. There have been few rejections. Thirty-five times I have seen my name in print. Some were in newsprint, others are online, some are in soft bound books. In one of those publications is a never before published haiku from my high school days.
This year I decided it’s time for an author website. This year you can find me building new worlds. I am running with it. What have I got to lose?
It never was just about ME! I am one of seven siblings.
“Seven will get you to heaven” is what my mom always said. She’s there now, looking down on us and hoping we will eventually find our way too. She passed through the pearly gates in Nov. 2000. Dad joined her in 2004 and my brother Steven joined them two years later. In 2016 my brother Timothy took that heavenly flight.
Mom always reminded me that I had more than some and less than others. As I examine my life. It really is true. So I write…
My Life
I have this blurred vision of finally making it to be a contestant on the Wheel of Fortune or Jeopardy TV game show and when the show host gets to me and asks me about myself, what exactly would I say?
HHHHMMMMM……….
I can’t think quickly, off the top of my head, what makes me unique or different from the general population because I have tried all of my life so hard to fit in and not be different.
- I guess I could say that I have webbed toes! Would that interest anybody? Actually, I think a very small percentage of the population has this genetic defect! I recently read somewhere that Ashton Kutcher has them! WOW! So I have something in common with a “celebrity”. Syndactyly. In humans it is rare, occurring once in about 2,000 to 2,500 live births.
- I could say that I love to write and have been essentially writing the “Story of MY Life” since I have been 9 years old.
- I could say I share my yard and gardens with a flock of exotics: birds, flowers and fruit. I could say that I love growing things and enjoy an edible seasonal landscape.
However, all in all, I think I live a very ordinary life and I like it that way…
Growing Up In Between
I don’t know what makes my mind wander back to this place in time as it occasionally does. Why I even think about the place I grew up after all of these years, sometimes puzzles me. I can picture every detail of that house. The living room that we always referred to as the “front room” with its wood floors, the kitchen with its modified picnic table and the dining room with the canvas painted storage cabinet that my oldest brother painted with a winter scene when he was in high school. We did our homework in this room. It is there that I learned and will never forget, that 6 x 7 equals 42 and 7 x 6 equals 42.
Lots of wood floors downstairs. I remember helping mom polish them by sliding around on old flannel baby blankets to give them a final shine. Art Deco linoleum upstairs and white vinyl mosaic look tiles on the floor in the kitchen. We had a gas stove and an eye level oven. We had a lazy Susan in the corner cabinet and an enameled sink under the north window.
I let my mind pause there. I can picture the stairs going up to our bedrooms, stacked with folded clean laundry, opposite the front door with its diamond shaped windows. I see the shadow boxes painted brown that my father built to hold my moms knick- knacks and the closet with my older sisters clothes in the hall, at the top of the stairs. I stomped up those stairs more than a time or two when I was sent to my room.
I can hear my older brothers jumping on their beds and anticipate my mother calling after them that they need to stop now because “your father will be home soon”. Is it winter, autumn, is it spring or summer? It must be winter because if it were any other time of year we would be outside playing unless it was raining then we would be in the basement playing. It must be when they were younger too because after they had grown up some my father built them a bedroom to share in the basement. After all, there were seven of us in that house, plus my parents, in only three bedrooms.
I look out that front picture window across the empty field and there is snow everywhere and a harsh north wind blowing it into drifts. The elm trees are barren of leaves and the gravel road is a slushy rut where the cars have traveled in and out to Geneva Road. I pull on my coat, scarf, gloves and boots and grab my carefully covered school books to make my morning trek to the bus stop on Papworth. Out the back door I go.
It is summer now. I hear the crunching of the gravel in our drive in the early morning and it is the milkman arriving to drop our order of milk on the back porch. He also chops chunks of ice off a big block, used to cool his deliveries, as a treat for us. The ice melts quickly in the stifling heat. I need to plug in that fan that I have been warned not to touch.
Our pool is in front of the garage this year. Dad has built a “perch” for us to jump from. All of us older kids are in there making a whirlpool, forcing all of the water to follow us as we circle around the twenty four feet diameter of pool wall. We create a current of sorts in the four feet deep water. Stop and let the water sway us along.
One of my younger brothers is out playing on the swing set. He climbs it with ease as he chins himself up. He hangs upside down.
The youngest brother is at the end of the back sidewalk playing with little trucks and cars in the dirt where the grass won’t grow because we always turn the corner there and have trampled it repeatedly.
The purple and white irises are blooming along the edge of the house on the south side around the window wells that let light into the basement. The peonies, out by the drive towards our street, have pale pink blooms that are so heavy they droop. The cherry tree along the southwest fence row is not quite big enough to climb. The field next door has wild strawberries and a few raspberries almost ready to pick.
Across the street to the west they are setting up a circus. Rumbling trucks arrive with colorful tents and arcade games and the Big Top with animals. Bleachers and banners, what excitement! We comb the grounds after it has packed up and moved on for any worthy remnants. All we find is some loose change, a few dollars of lost currency, consolation prizes not worth keeping and trampled grass. And we anticipate its arrival again next year.
It’s raining now and the diapers that were hung on the line have gotten wet. The poles used to hold the clothes lines up have fallen and everything is in the mud. Mom will have to do them all over again in the wringer washer that occupies space in the basement and pray for a sunny day for drying.
The wooden stairs that lead down to the basement are painted gray. The floors are green and the walls are a butter yellow. There are four small windows, two on the north side and two on the south side. The freezer, the washing machine and cement tubs are in the northeast corner next to the sump pump. The furnace sits on the east wall beyond and behind the stairs. Was there also a well tank down there? My memory fails me now but I see some piece of equipment in the southwest corner of the basement with gauges on it. I’m thinking it could have been our well tank as I don’t recall one in the yard.
Off the kitchen entry is the back porch. The back porch collects boots in the winter and wet towels in the summer. Down the back sidewalk there is a water spigot with a cup tied to it in the summertime, for drinks of water, so we don’t have to run in and out of the house to ease our thirst.
Because we rarely close the garage door, the sparrows are building nests inside the garage, in the rafters. The old Rambler station wagon refuses to go in reverse.
I am sitting on the front steps right after the yard has been mowed. The smell of fresh green grass fills the air. A warm summer breeze cools the evening. We watch for the aurora borealis, the Northern Lights, as the darkness creeps in. And there it is, to the west in the northern skies. A wave of color, like heat lightening with no rain. There are stars above us as we search for Sputnik.
I’m not sure why these recollections of my youth appear out of nowhere, but I write them down hoping maybe someone will be interested in what my life was like growing up in-between. In-between four brothers, two older and two younger and two sisters, one older and one younger. That is my place. This is only part of my story.
From the Muzzey Family Archives
Eileen M Hector 