Was it a beautiful day?

In your neighborhood?

Write about any neighborhood you remember or want to: now, then, in between.

Write and see what happens. They may switch around. Your childhood neighborhood might show up in your dreams and spill into yet another neighborhood. 

Enjoy running into old neighbors and expect many surprises. Personally, when we did this yesterday in my monthly Memoir/Creative NonFiction Group, I was delighted to run into my old love, Joe D, whose last name is so dang literary I long to share it, but alas... even my first love with the pompadour and Buddy Holly glasses deserves his privacy. Especially since the writing and running into him yielded some yummy memories and that felt really good to write about; not because I long for him, not because I wish I still lived in my childhood neighborhood in Los Angeles with the lemon trees and Olympic Blvd, with its 12 lanes of traffic. Not even because some of my happiest memories live there and daily beckon me back to the ocean. 

It felt good simply because in the mysterious ways that writing together works its magic, I was full as I could be to unexpectedly remember and write about that pale, aspiring actor, with  his green cardigan and white pick up truck, his face in the jasmine bushes in my front yard, breathing deeply, not a care in the world for that summer moment, despite the gridlock he'd just battled all the way from Carson.

Rise Up: Your Neighborhood