Connection, Reflection, & Growth

Exclusive Writing Lab on the eight step essay with an example from the field

Last week, I posted this prompt but haven’t seen any action in the comments. Perhaps you’re thinking, “I’m way too busy to make this happen,” or “I just don’t care enough to try,” or “I don’t get it??”

Fine. Fine. I’ll give it a shot with the caveat being that I’m in Chicago with my daughter this weekend.

After embraces and kisses at the airport and a long Uber ride home filled non-stop chatter, I’m now sitting here with her on her sofa. We’ve just finished a crazy good meal of lamb tikka masala, nan, and steamed broccoli with lime and avocado yummy-ness, and she needs to sew something for a school project. That leaves me in the moment and at loose ends. Let’s see where the eight steps take me (and you).

Go back to last week for the steps again, or if you remember, follow along

1) Out the window, dusk falls, and a stormy day slips into dim grey. The branches of newly leaved maples wave in a stiff wind, and there is the flash of headlights on the Boulevard with a steady stream of cars going and coming.

2) I’m on the mustard yellow (straight out of the 70s) “garage sale” sofa my daughter bought with her roommates and hauled into this townhouse during her sophomore year at college. It groans with each adjustment I make, sounding almost human—a kind of exhausted moan—which makes me laugh out loud.

She says, “It’s comfortable though, isn’t it?”

“It is,” I say.

She’s kneeling in the dining room across from where I sit, my 21-year-old, framed by pillars on her right and left, and shakes out squares for her quilting project due for finals next week.

Behind me, on the wall, one of her weaved tapestries that she created with weft and warp and when done, cut up, sewed together, imprinted with inked birds in flight, and then presented as a wall hanging to her teacher and critique group. To my right, a table lamp draped with a silk scarf we bought together at a vintage store in Paris when she was sixteen and decided she would work with fibers. On the wooden radiator cover, leggy house plants in terra cotta pots. Before me, her desk with a cricket loom and a handloom and yet another wall hanging she’s made.

3) I’ve not been with her since winter break and the moment I saw her at the airport, running toward me and yelling, “MOM,” I thought, “She’s changed. Again. Filled in. Filled out. She is willowy and womanly and more grown up.”

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