Cynthia Lord - Other Writings

Writing Friends

Other Writings:

Last year, I won a free SCBWI membership with this prose poem. The topic was "County Fair," and I wrote about going to the harness races with my father.

I love the horses, sleek as water: Raven's Magic, Liberty, Over the Clouds, April Morning. Lined up, they are chocolate, chestnut, and my favorite, gray as smoke.

"Long odds on that one," Dad says, but I don't care. I imagine her ribs between my thighs, my fingers tangled tight in her mane. "April Morning," I tell Dad. "She's the one."

Pages ruffle and a cigar smells bitter, dirt-brown as the track. Jockeys in a rainbow of satins, hold whips I hope they never use—not even to win.

"Get ready," Dad says. "Here they go!"

The truck starts steady, gaining. Horses' necks stretch proud, legs pumping, hooves pounding like drumbeats, faster, faster.

The gates open and I climb on my seat, peeking over hats and heads. Don't blink. Here comes Liberty pulling ahead! Raven's Magic is coming up fast. But where--?

A flash of gray. Not smoke curling-slow, she is gushing steam, a runaway train. It's April Morning coming on strong, thundering down the track.

Winning by a nose!

She tosses her head on her victory jog, snorts as she passes me as if saying, "We knew. Why didn't they?" Scattered cheers, sighs, as heads turn to watch new horses warming up.

But I close my eyes and dream of April Morning under me, running, running.

Every Monday, my friend Jo Knowles posts a “Monday Morning Warm-Up” on her blog. Here’s a few things I’ve written to her marvelous prompts. Try them yourself!

Jo’s Monday Morning Warm-up: Choose an object you’ve kept for more than five years and make a list of all the memories—the stories—you link to it.

On my desk, I have a cup of pens and highlighters, and down at the bottom is something useless, but something I will never throw away.

When I was a child, I loved our town library. It had a huge bay window stretched nearly floor-to-ceiling, and a spiral staircase, the only one I’d ever seen.

Around and around, down those twisting stairs, was the children’s section in the cellar. In summer, it was cool underground and quiet, and I was almost always alone down there. But not really alone, because Laura Ingalls Wilder was on the wall and Anne Shirley was near the fireplace and Nancy Drew had a long shelf of her own.

I went to PEI with Anne, shivered during the long winter with Laura, and Nancy? Well, she kept a suitcase in the trunk of her car because she never knew when she might have to suddenly stay overnight somewhere! I thought that was the most wonderful thing I could imagine—a life so unpredictable and full that you’d need a change of clothes and a toothbrush at the drop of a hat.

There was fear at the library, too, and it came wearing marble-sized pearls and a polyester dress, and her name was Mrs. Plummer, the librarian. She scared me so much I could barely look at her when I slid my stack of books across her desk to be stamped.

But I watched her hands. I didn’t envy many things in my childhood, but Mrs. Plummer had something I coveted greatly. She had a date stamp.

Two thumps on the inkpad, a slip of the index card up to show the first empty box, then the double twack--once on the little envelope, once on the card. Twack-twack, book after book.

“Two weeks,” she’d say in growly alto. I don’t know what happened to people who were late with Mrs. Plummer’s library books, but I didn’t ever want to find out.

I would snatch up the books with a fast “thank you,” be out that door, lickety-split, and ride home with my books in my white wicker bike basket.

Except one day.

Most librarians have a shelf or a display for the new books—Mrs. Plummer had a shrine. It was behind her desk, and you had to ask to see a new book. I never even glanced at them, because I never could've asked.

This one day, though, after my “thank you,” she said, “CYNTHIA JEAN.” Where I grew up, if you got both names like that, you were in trouble so deep you’d need a ladder to climb out. So, my heart was in knots as I turned around.

She pulled a book from her shrine, double twacked, and passed it across the desk to me. “This just came in,” she said. “I think you’ll like it.”

I wish I could tell you what that book was or even if I liked it. But I don’t remember. I have never forgotten the moment she placed that book in my hands, though.

And when I became a student teacher, one of the first things I bought myself was a date stamp. It sits on my desk with the pens and highlighters, completely impractical (the latest date on it is 1990), except that when I see it, I am walking down that winding staircase again to find Laura and Anne and Nancy, and it reminds me of the awesome power of the books we create.

Jo’s Monday Morning Warm-up: Choose a "mysterious" family member and make a list of all the things you know about him or her, all the "gossip" you've heard, any visuals you remember, any peculiar words or phrases you remember the person saying, what the person's voice sounded like, everything, every detail you can remember. See where it takes you. Have fun!

She had feet so small she wore children's shoes her whole life.

And brown hair so long it touched the backs of her knees, though she only allowed one photograph of it hanging down. In the rest, it's tight-braided, roped around her head, safe from the sharp tug of the mill looms or from tangling in curious baby fingers.

Nine years old, she crossed the Atlantic on a steamer with a suitcase, a set of porcelain Staffordshire dogs, and two souvenir plates from Blackpool.

Hated the nickname "Lizzie," but it trailed after her always, like her shadow, her hair.

I have books she won in school. Great Expectations: "Spelling prize, 1910." and Tales from King Arthur: "First prize essay."

So smart, one night the principal of the high school sat at their kitchen table and begged her father to let her go to high school.

But "Girls don't need an education," her father said, and she and her sisters worked to put her brother through high school, instead.

Years later, that class invited her to their reunion. "I don't have the right to go," she said, folding back the invitation. "I didn't earn it."

Tiny, she stood tall against mill bosses and against my grandfather's tuberculosis that left her a widow with a daughter to raise.

"Pull the shades," she told my mother so no one could look in and see which men slipped silently through the woods and in the back door for union meetings.

"Trouble," a "rabble-rouser," blacklisted when the strike failed, she did the only thing she could do then. She cared for other people's children until she died.

Born too late to know her, I give her back the only thing I can: the name of queens, of ocean liners, the name she was only truly allowed on her headstone.

I call her Elizabeth.

Jo’s Monday Morning Warm-up: Describe in careful detail a scene from a childhood vacation. Use the list method (if that works well for you) and see what happens!

There's a bridge in Vermont that floats, my mother said. It sits on the lake, not an eyelash curl of wood and beams arching over, but a path laid long on the water.

Like Jesus and those South American lizards that skitter, fast as a skipped stone across the waves, the bridge builders knew faith doesn't sink.

In the backseat, my sister and I played games, winning and losing through twisty miles of pine woods, past fences and cow pastures, red barns and white porches, on our way to Canada, until we arrived at the sign:

Floating Bridge is Closed for Repair.

Years later, the lesson came back in my kitchen when a kind-eyed woman with a clipboard said, "I'm not qualified to make a diagnosis, but I'll tell you what I see."

Sometimes, the bridge is closed.