You know how to write this story. You begin with the details – the bracelets, the pale ocher leaf, the hand perhaps making an offering. You stop writing. You forget that you know how to write this story. You believe you have to make up a fabulous plot. You convince yourself that you don’t know how to write this story.So. You circle back to the beginning. You begin with the details: S/he/I wore five bracelets. S/he/I had made three of them.
You keep writing…
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Please send us what emerges – and tell us what you have learned.
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Here is Lynette Sheppard writing about last week’s blue tarp prompt:
The realtor looked up at the gray sky and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Bolinas is the only town I know of where blue tarps are a decorative element.” He sighed. “But I do love it.”
And I did too. Quirky, counterculture, downright cantankerous to outsiders. That was Bolinas. That still is Bolinas.
Back in the early 1970’s, an oil spill brought scores of hippie volunteers to the tiny North Coast community across the bay from San Francisco. After the cleanup and rescue of petroleum soaked birds wound down, the helpers looked around and liked what they saw. Kelp strewn beaches and a eucalyptus studded mesa butted up against Point Reyes National Seashore. They moved in, took over the water board, and issued a moratorium on water/sewer connections that has kept the town from growing to this day.
Artists, writers, organic farmers, burnouts, and folks that kept the Summer of Love alive called Bolinas home. We had one thing in common – natural beauty and solitude were our sustenance. Each time that Marin County dared put up a sign at the lagoon turnoff – Bolinas 2 miles – we townspeople tore it down.
Most of us were on the hermit side of reclusive. Nodding or grunting passed for conversation with shopkeepers and neighbors. We were loners. We were not lonely.
We wore down parkas for strolling the beaches during the foggy summers. We worshipped the sun in autumn. We avoided driving “over the hill” to the busyness of San Rafael, Mill Valley, Sausalito. I could see the lights of San Francisco across the Bay from the upstairs windows. it might as well have been Mars glimpsed through the lens of a telescope.
We left “Bobo” when the kids reached junior high school age. We re-entered what most called ‘civilization’ with its traffic, movie theaters, and Whole Foods. Save for a single glance in the rear view mirror, I never looked back.
I now live in an even more remote locale. But I still carry a little Bolinas in my heart and in my soul.
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