Listening

Eudora Welty, Grande Dame of American letters, loved gardens. Recently, I revisited my memories of Ms. Welty (1909-2001), penned on the occasion of her 90th birthday. What follows is what I learned about listening as I imagined walking with her in my garden at Breakfast Creek a quarter of a century ago.  

The morning air was inviting on the porch at Breakfast Creek where I was trying to give equal attention to what I was reading about Ms. Welty’s life,  to a black kitten that had climbed into my lap, and to the coffee I’d been looking forward to for the past hour.  It was a balancing act that the writer—an accomplished gardener—would have found humorous and would have enjoyed acting out for friends.

I’d planned to go into my garden early that day but found that I wanted to learn more of what had shaped Ms. Welty’s beginnings as a writer.  In her 1983 book, One Writer’s Beginnings, she writes of listening.  Of hearing words as she writes.  Of common things and what they come to mean over time.  Of her fondness for New York City.  And of her own special pulse on life in Jackson, Mississippi where she lived for over three quarters of a century.  As I read that morning, I listened to her descriptions and heard her words resonate in my own life.  I heard them describe the common place scenes that made up the layers of my world at Breakfast Creek.

When I finally began my morning routines, Ms. Welty walked along with me. In the front yard, I heard her voice ask for the story behind the shriveled remains of a pumpkin aging at the edge of the meadow. For months, I told her, the pumpkin had remained firm in the cool autumn air.  When snow frosted the pumpkin, I photographed it on a brilliantly sunny January day.  With each successive cycle of freeze and thaw, its skin wrinkled, sagged, and finally grew brittle before splitting open at the seams.

Little by little, the old pumpkin had melted like brie, and birds harvested the rich seeds that remained in its cracked shell.  It remains to this day a memory that I captured on film until one day a voice within me whispered  “Listened to its story. Then write it down.”

Walking with Ms. Welty along a split rail fence that morning, I cut stalks of wild asparagus and enough lilacs to fill a silver mint julep cup my mother had recently given me.  Both being lovers of gardens, Ms. Welty and I walked in silence on tender grass interwoven with delicate bouquets of spring violets. New beginnings could be seen and heard all around us.  I had only to listen before being moved by the beauty that was unfolding all around me. 

Near the end of our walk, Ms. Welty recalled the time her mother Chestina gave up her own ticket to the theater so that Eudora could attend the performance with her father, Christian Webb Welty.  While the drama would always fill Ms. Welty’s being with excitement and wonder, the knowledge of her mother’s sacrifice arrested her until she could hardly bear her pleasure for her guilt.  As a writer, she admitted, “I have never managed to handle guilt.  In the act and the course of writing stories, these are two of the springs, one bright, one dark, that feed the stream.”

Our walk finally brought us to the driveway where wild columbine had pushed up through gravel.  I wondered what that spring would bring?  What unexpected tragedy somewhere in the world might turn the morning’s bright spring into one dark and evil?

Today, I find myself wondering again how we can hope to understand the two springs that feed the stream Ms. Welty described?  Reading her words in One Writer’s Beginnings again, I hear her voice and remembered.  Understanding, she wrote, comes not from laying blame or passing judgement.  In life, as in writing, she believed that understanding comes only after we learn to listen.  Only then can we trust our own voice and write the stories.

Excerpt from Eudora Welty’s chapter “Listening” in One Writer’s Beginnings:

My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books.  When I write and the sound of it comes back in my ears, then I act to make my changes.  I have always trusted that voice.