Katie Eberhart: Common Life

“The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose
incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them,
throughout, as far as was possible…”

– William
Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads”

For twenty-eight years, we lived
in the same house a few miles from Palmer. The house was built in 1935 for a Matanuska
Colonist family and had been the residence of several families before us. While
we lived there, gradually we became acquainted with the house’s past and with
changes that people had made—some thoughtful and well-planned, others
ill-conceived and strange. We also left our own ideas and preferences behind,
in colors and windows, walls and appliances, trees and shrubbery.

What triggers ideas for writing?
As Wordsworth aptly mentioned “incidents and situations from common life”
provide focus yet routine can make noticing difficult. Once, in a writing
workshop, the instructor asked us to describe our morning using only scents.
The words for smells eluded me, especially since I hadn’t been paying
attention.

I wish now I had thought more
often of words for aromas and smells. If I had written the smells, I might now
have more nuanced memories of experiences, like picking tomatoes when the sour
scent of foliage coated my hands and later the soapy wash-water turned green.
If I had written scents and smells when we lived in our Alaska house, I might
now have a more refined vocabulary for the heavy sweet aroma of the old lilac
at the corner of the house that, one summer, attracted a flock of Tiger
Swallowtail butterflies. The visual connection is stronger though and, now, seeing
a Tiger Swallowtail brings to mind lilac blooms.

Being reminded of a smell can
trigger memories but that writing workshop exercise could have had a second
part, and even a third: after describing the smells, continue writing toward
the place where the ephemeral and the gut-feeling meet. Follow each digressive
or distractive memory or thought. Smells (whether real or remembered) might be
strongly visceral like the late-autumn, pungent rotting of highbush cranberries;
or lighter and harder to describe, like dry-cold mountain air.

One winter night, I convinced my husband Chuck to drive with me into
the Talkeetna Mountains toward Hatcher Pass because I thought that, from the 16-mile
pullout, I could  photograph the aurora. When
I got out of the car lugging my camera and tripod, the snowy peaks were awash
with moonlight, the aurora was inconsequential, and in a few minutes the subzero
breeze chased me back into the idling (and warm) car. Driving home, we stopped
where the constellation Orion hung above the canyon wall. Getting out of the
car and standing beside the empty road, we inhaled an iciness that crackles
nose hairs and smells like nothing words describe. Beside us, the flow of the Little
Susitna gurgled beneath the moonlit ice.

This fragment omits part of the
scene and thus story. Before getting back into the car at 16-mile, I turned my
camera toward the Matanuska Valley which was framed by a vee of mountains. I
clicked photos of a scattering of house lights and the flamboyant orange
streetlights that extend for three miles along the Glenn Highway across the Hay
Flats.

My only encounter with a moose had
been on that stretch when the highway was still a two-lane road, unlit and
built-up like a causeway, where suddenly a moose appeared in the fog at the
edge of my low beams, standing still and licking the pavement. What I remember
is the seemingly slow-motion arc of the car sliding, the interminable time
between cranking the steering wheel and learning whether the auto would plunge
over the edge or spin into a new skid. Again and again the car switched directions,
as if zigzagging along a narrow icy highway was normal, until finally the
engine died and the car stopped, as if that was normal, too.

Both moose and highway ended up
anchoring a section of my poem Illumination:

Before the freeway was built
across

the hay flats, it was a
two-lane road

with high causeway shoulders

and inky black winter nights.

Before the steep-sided
highway was scraped

to a moderate height with
code-compliant

edges, my fog-dimmed
headlights

gave little warning of a
motionless moose,

a glancing impact and long
icy skid.

Now string-of-pearl street
lamps slice

the dark hay-flats night and
moose stand

in orange light pools

like frozen dreams—that
startled, plunge

into the glowing stream.

Notes:

Illumination is in Unbound:
Alaska Poems, published by Uttered Chaos Press (2013).

Our 1930s era house became a character in a number of my
essays and poems, including Cabin Fever, an
essay that appeared in Cirque Journal (Winter Solstice 2010, Vol. 2 No. 1).

Katie
Eberhart’s chapbook ‘Unbound: Alaska Poems’ was published in 2013 by Uttered
Chaos Press. Her poems have appeared in Cirque Journal, Sand – Berlin’s English
Literary Journal, Elohi Gadugi Journal, Crab Creek Review, and other places.
Katie has an MFA in Creative Writing. She currently lives in Central Oregon
where she blogs about nature and literature at
http://solsticelight.wordpress.com/