Week three blog Provocative ideas 

Sketch the beginning of a story, establish your character from the very first line

Connection

Claire

The desire for efficiency made Claire number the boxes.  #1 kitchen utensils.  There was not much, but no sense leaving it behind.  #2, #3, #4 were filled with books and sensibly she put separated paperwork in #5 and #6.  Neatly wrapping in pages of saved newspaper small framed pictures of Paris and Madrid with the children smiling, Claire protectively positioned them in another box.  Half-way through packing up her life in two oversized grey Samsonite suitcases which, in their previous existence, had sailed on conveyor belts at the airport for trips to Prague and London, were now tasked with transporting the inanimate objects that had made up the last 18 years of Claire’s life,  Claire Michaels was folding the clothes meticulously, patiently.   Businesslike, eyes focused on her work, Claire arranged the identical boxes by the door in a satisfactory stack of completion.   Assessing her work, she breathed out and let go of something rolling around in her body. She pushed back the blond wisps sticking to her sweaty face with nervous fingers and unbent her legs.  

Claire had stood up, looking down at her mother’s grave 10 years earlier on a snowy weekday in January, family members stood talking, hushed inside a chapel lit too brightly. She looked at the cardboard tower propped at the door and let go.  Gradually letting go when her mother died was a cold, deep tightening in her shoulders that grounded her.   Letting go of a place where she had had her children, argued, slept and eaten, lifted her away from the floor.  She separated items by sector, mentally genuflecting with reverence to memories, her movement deliberate and purposefully dispossessing time and space. She was rising into the air.


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