Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)
Write it and link it to Denise’s blog.
Read other Sixes and comment.
[ This week’s Six is a continuation of (one of the sub-plots) in my WIP, ‘Home and Heart’. It’s the story of a daughter’s search for her birth mother. The daughter is Sister Catherine (of St. Dominique’s covent in Crisfield MD) and the mother, a woman who once saw the Beatles live in Cleveland and spent her adult life hiding from what well-meaning and un-caring people told her was a mistake. Both mother and daughter are bound by shackles for which each woman holds the key to free the other.](As a lead-in, this past July there was a Six ‘duet’. I wrote this Six. Pat Brockett followed with this Six.)
Use the following prompt word:
Annual
“Please, come in and…”
“Make myself at home?” Sister Catherine stood in the doorway of ‘Nature’s Gift’, a little shop tucked between an insurance broker and a taxidermist in the center of which only locals would call ‘the main drag’ of Dunsmuir, California.
The friendly animation in the other woman’s face stuttered, like an old car rolling down a hill, desperate to reach a speed sufficient to turn over the stalled engine; Catherine felt a bitter pleasure burn inside, like her first drink of hard liquor, accepted on an adolescent dare.
“I’m Catherine, your daughter and the last time we were together was on the doorsteps of the Miami Children’s Home in Ohio,” the slightly-sour bloom behind her heart failed to resolve itself; she began to suspect that, despite the appropriateness of such an aperitif, she lacked the emotional palette to become a connoisseur of the suffering of others.
The walls of the shop were decorated with thin sections of tree trunks, displaying annual rings like one-sided mandalas, each as alike and unique as fingerprints; offsetting these umber discs were photographs of actual trees that cloaked the flanks of Mount Shasta, the raison d’être for the taxidermist and the real estate office and, most assuredly, this little shop.
The owner and proprietor of ‘Nature’s Gifts’, self-taught naturopath and amateur medicine woman stood before the woman in a designer suit and simple crucifix and, with the alchemy of acceptance and surrender, somehow grew younger and younger, finally, reaching out with both hands said, “please, forgive me’ in a voice as quiet as a prayer.
About clarkscottroger
Moving six. Great video. Love Jeff Beck.
I love all the nun stories, love to spend time with them.
I have no satisfactory words. Excellent 6. Made more so by my emotional connection to the characters/on going story that is Home and Heart.
What a moment, wow.
I so love Jeff and am so jealous of Tal :)
I was relinquished at birth (in a society that ostracized unwed mothers and their offspring so I absolutely understand why and was never angry about it) and located my birth mother several years ago. Ours was a joyous reunion and the beginning of a wonderful new chapter in our lives, but I know there are as many variations as their are people involved in that situation. What a very moving six. I’m looking forward to the whole book! (You totally have my heart today.)
Thank you, Deborah.
This writing thing is so… something* The story of Sister Catherine’s search for her birth mother is a subplot to the WIP, ‘Home and Heart’, which is, in turn, a Sister Margaret Ryan story. Somehow in the magic of characters come to life, they begin to tell their story. So it was with Sister Catherine who, in the first Sister Margarent book, was something of a ‘bad guy’, the stern, authoritarian nun at the convent where Sister Margaret doing her novitiate. But, I suppose like people in the real world, Sr Catherine had more of a life than I originally thought.
* yes, I am into writing