At this past April’s Writing It Real in Port Townsend Writer’s Conference, participant Janet Love read the following vignettes to the group. She had the idea of developing a piece about exploring her life since moving she from northern California to Eugene, Oregon by being sure to mention one of her three children in each part of a three-part essay. The result is a triptych, an essay in the making done in three parts, each of which explores the same theme. “I always like groupings of three, like the Trinity,” Jane wrote to me.

Years ago, I heard the poet David Whyte say to an audience that the term “three days and three nights” is code for “a long time” and I think that writing in threes helps us use writing to cover time distance in our lives and the lives of others.

As you read Jane’s draft, think about how specific locations of home in Eugene and thinking about each of her children helped her evoke the way she is settling into the notion of who she is right now.

Back in Eugene: Three Vignettes
By Jane Holly Love

I. My Pool
It’s July, and under a cloudless blue sky I am floating on my back in my pool. Unremarkable, you say, it’s summer and it’s hot and she’s floating in her pool. Remarkable, I say, because this is my debut, my first shy, solitary slipping into the pool at my Oregon home, a home I’ve occupied just one year after 25 years in California.

It’s not an ordinary pool but a deep, odd-shaped pool edged in white Spanish tile and cupped on one side by a high wall of flagstone. I even have a cascading waterfall, a fresh tumble of water over the lip of a small stone tub in one corner. It’s an opulent pool, and its showiness almost embarrasses me.

Last summer, when I was newly ensconced here, it was not swimmable. The previous owner had let it go and a pair of wild ducks were enjoying its brackish water, their eggs hidden nearby in the peonies. After they left, I had to have the pool drained and scrubbed, get a new pump, and put in daily chemicals. Eugene, Oregon, does not have many pool servicemen so it fell to me to read the daily news about my pool on a small dipstick. Filled with fresh water, the pool was icy–broken heater.

And last summer, even though I chose to return to Oregon, and some of my dearest and oldest friends live right in my neighborhood, and even though I live on Baker Boulevard, the same street where I lived happily as a single mother in the seventies–even with all these bounties and familiarities–I cursed my pool. My friends, seeing my wrath, said things like, “It’s a luxury, like a horse. Or a boat. It needs things.”

“Well, I’m going to backfill it,” I said last summer. “Or maybe bomb it. I wish the ducks would come back. They can have it.” My friends were patient, having looked forward to pool parties, naked dips in my custom pool, maybe a little geezercise.

 Today, my cat my only witness, I luxuriate, thinking ruefully how even ten years ago, I would have loved owning this pool. But there you have it–we never feel like we think we are going to feel. I never imagined how crabby I would be in my beautiful new home. Today, my contrary self is melting slowly like an ice cube losing all its sharp edges in a tall drink. Today, I make a few stealthy laps, feeling like a water spaniel or even a muskrat, my hair fanning out in the water. Today, I lie back under a blue sky in blue water. To the south lies my reference point, Spencer’s Butte, which I scaled monthly while pregnant with Derek. Closer is my home with its skylights, the bedrooms where all my grown kids slept during the holidays, warming it. I’ve painted all the rooms. My kitchen is red and one wall in my bedroom is a bluish green Martha Stewart shade called “watery.” I’ve planted tomatoes and peppers and squash in a raised bed not too far from where I float in this clear, cool water. Roses, fuchsia and mallow, pruned and fertilized last summer, are blooming crazily.

I close my eyes and far off, a train whistles. Eugene. I’m at the top of a steep hill, a hill where in 1975, a man pedaled his bicycle up to my much smaller home bearing a bottle of cold duck. His exertions caused the bottle to explode as soon as he arrived at my door. Those days are gone. I’m now the cold duck, and my fizz is well-contained. But this pool is beyond a pool. It reminds me of my favorite swimming hole on the Navarro River in Philo, California, where hawks drift overhead and redwood trees arch upward. I’m going to name my pool. I’m tempted to call it The Grotto, but that’s too Hugh Heffnerish. I’m flooded with a feeling of well-being and belonging. I’m going to call my pool Wellspring.

II. What Is Gone
There is a small cottage on my street– number 2785 Baker Boulevard. I live at 2826 Baker Boulevard now. But I walk down Baker Boulevard often and I look at the small cottage. Boulevard is actually a misnomer. The street is only two blocks long, wooded, and not with the bustling breadth boulevard suggests. It’s a quiet dead end street, actually, my favorite kind of street. I’m not afraid of the stigma of dead ends.

This cottage is one of my abandonments–a husk I outgrew and left. I lived here with my young son Zac when he had yellow, soft Easter chick hair. He turned five here and walked out the front door for his first day of kindergarten at Edison Elementary School just down the hill. We were Zac and Jane Powers then, before we went from Powers to Love.

We lived in its tiny confines for four years, me using the broad front room as bedroom, living room, and dining room. Zac had the one bedroom. The kitchen was a walk-through and did not have room for a table. The bathroom was windowless with a tin shower stall and no tub. We painted the bathroom wall a deep indigo. Zac’s watercolor paintings looked so good on that blue wall. His Save the Whales painting with a black grinning whale spouting was a good one.

Rent was $75 a month.

I stare long and hard, glad the cottage is not razed or gentrified, except now the garage is a second bedroom. The cottage does not return my stare or give me a hint of recognition even though I loved it and painted one living room wall chocolate brown. I don’t really expect to see my younger self come out the door, wearing a long skirt, heading to campus where I worked and studied for a Master’s. I don’t even expect to hear Aretha Franklin singing, or to smell the sharp yeasty odor of baking bread. My lover Sam and I baked bread there.

The yard is no-fuss now, a lot of ivy. I had a blanket of nasturtiums, a rose bush, and a small garden with tomatoes and zucchini to tend in the summer.

Lately I’ve been redoing, by decades, all my photo albums, using proper art portfolios with black archival paper, making notes besides each picture with a silver pen. In the 1970s album I’ve pasted a snapshot of Zac standing in this yard in front of this cottage–he must have been six. He was wearing a gray wool sweater with a hood and he was smiling at me, our black cat Licorice draped over one arm. To his left in the photo stands a small pine, our Christmas tree that year, its root ball almost bigger than the tree itself and wrapped in burlap. I guess we were about to plant it.

Over the years, after I married Sam and we moved to bigger houses and then out of state entirely, I would return for visits. Always I cruised down Baker Boulevard to check on our tree. Last visit, it must have been 100 feet tall.

Now I am back on Baker Boulevard–for good this time. But our tree is gone. All that remains is a round stump, smooth as a table on top, and when I go closer, I can count the growth rings. It’s how I know for certain how old I am now.

III. Toadstool
When I returned from Thanksgiving back East, I had a message from my daughter, who had been house sitting. “Check out the toadstool by the front gate, Mom. I’m pretty impressed with it.” I went out to look for the toadstool, and found it growing under some juniper. The head was about 12 inches in diameter, bright red with white spots. The last time I ‘d seen something like that, I was reading British author Enid Blyton’s The Big Noddy Book to one of my kids. Noddy is a little wooden man who lives in Toyland among pixies, dolls, and Noah’s Ark animals. He and these fanciful comrades can be seen congregating under just such a toadstool, to read, to have a tea party. But here it is, growing in my front yard, this same gaudy fungus.

I’ve cycled through two summers and two autumns in my “new” home, and I continue to make discoveries: I’ll be pulling ivy and digging and under the rich, black soil I unearth stepping stones, a fluid-filled blue plastic teething ring, two rusted flywheels. I know a little about some of the previous owners. One was a stockbroker with a Corvette Stingray he parked where my old Volvo now sits. He is responsible for my extraordinary pool. Rumor has it that the backyard, during his tenure, was sigh…manicured. Child development innovator Rudolf Dreikurs spent a summer here. The professor of women’s studies from whom I bought the place gave birth to a daughter, Maya, here, hence, I’m guessing, the teething ring.

But the inhabitant I thank the most is the English botanist. He planted twelve mature lilacs that perfume the air every spring, yellow, pink, scarlet and silver roses, blueberries, a peach tree. And maybe, just maybe, he was a fan of Enid Blyton and encouraged the spores that produced my toadstool. Never mind that I have identified it as Fly Agaric, a poisonous mushroom so-called because boiled in milk, it immobilizes flies. If ingested, it produces delusions, raving, and profuse sweating. All these unwelcome symptoms are familiar to a woman of my age. Still, the brilliant symmetry of the mushroom pleases me. Here in green Eugene, where we get mist and downpours while Atlanta prays for rain and San Diego fights wildfires that leap from house to house carried by Santa Ana winds, there is a magic fecundity. And as Caitlin puts it, I’m pretty impressed with it.

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Playing games as Jane did when she decided she would mention each of her children, one per section of her writing about living again in Eugene, is helpful for writing. Your left brain becomes occupied with the task you’ve set it and eases off its criticism of your right brain’s desire to describe in details and associate from one to another detail .

To try this kind of play yourself and see what results, think about three people you can select to mention, one per section of a three-part essay: relatives, teachers, friends, neighbors, grocery clerks, partners. Or select pets or pieces of jewelry you’ve worn or articles of clothing, or trees, or fruits, restaurants or coffee houses, theaters or bake shops. Any category will do if you feel a rush of interest in where each of the three might pop into the sections you write.

To introduce a platform for emotional subtext,  identify the most important thing that has happened to you this year. Have you moved? Started a new job, lost an old job? Become a grandparent? Lost a loved one? With that topic in mind as well as the three people, places or things in mind, start writing by describing a place in your house or surroundings and include memories as well as present time details. Allow one of the three people, places or things to come into each of the sections, briefly.

Jane writes, “I am not afraid of the stigma of dead ends.” She remembers, “We were Zac and Jane Powers then, before we went from Powers to Love,” and she muses, “…it produces delusions, raving, and profuse sweating. All these unwelcome symptoms are familiar to a woman of my age.” Commentary like that will rise up from your specifics and memories. Your words will lead you to make assessments as you describe who and how you have been, who and how you are now. You may come away from this writing “settled in” to who you are and to what excitements, though they may be subtle, lie ahead.

And you m ay notice that the triptych you write is multilayered. Jane’s can be seen as “past, present, future” or “people, places, things” or “kinds of relationships” (mom, lover, single)  or “houses she has lived in” (present location in Eugene, cottage she used rent in Eugene, California home). It isn’t that the three are necessarily given equal time or equal descriptions, but each of the three, whichever way you look at it, inform the evocation of a lived life and a new time in that life.

Experiment with a playful strategy like the one Jane developed and see where the words take you.