laura k bray

 "If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you."  -Natalie Goldberg This is my year of memoir. Not only getting serious about writing it, but also reading it. When I look over my reading journal, it tells me that so far, I've read ten books from the genre.  I tend to read memoir over breakfast. My husband drives my daughter to school and it is one of the only times during these pandemic days that I am home alone. I set a place at my large, wooden farm table; a cup of tea (almost always English Breakfast with milk and sugar) and cinnamon toast (almost always with homemade bread and creamy, salty Irish butter). I keep a stack of memoirs on the far corner of the table, they are easy to reach for in the morning. I know, if I have to go searching for the book, I won't read it. As I have become more and more interested in writing memoir, my book choices widen. I find myself looking for different writing styles and book structures. Some I have hate...

  I park and get out of the car, passing my daughter as I move from the driver's seat into the back seat. My daughter slides behind the wheel of the car as I settle into the backseat. My husband, in the passenger seat, steels himself to begin my daughter’s first driving lesson. As we lurch around the empty parking lot, I fall into disbelief. Wasn’t it only yesterday that we nervously brought her home from the hospital? I sat in the backseat that day too, my hand resting on her tiny body, worrying for her safety. Was she breathing? Was the car seat in the locked correctly into position? As my daughter begins her lesson, I sit in the back of the car thinking of the many times I drove with her as an infant, car seat facing backwards, listening to her cry and not being able to comfort her. My attention torn between her dismay and the knowledge that I needed to stay focused on driving in order to get us to our destination safely. I am abruptly pulled back to the present as she brings ...

  Today’s story is about my maternal grandfather’s army jacket from World War II. It used to hang in my grandparent’s basement, in a cedar-lined closet. I remember opening that closet door sometimes, where all the winter coats were stored and taking deep gulping breaths of the smell of cedar, old wool, and cigar smoke. The smell of my grandfather. At some point in time, he gave me the army jacket. I don’t know how that happened-how it was given to me. I do remember having it in my closet when I was teenager and remembering a vague story of grandfather telling me he was wearing the jacket the day he saw Mussolini hanging in a piazza in Milan . He would have only been in his late teens as he went to war when he was quite young. I have no idea if I really heard that story. I imagine something was said as I don’t remember hearing the details of the death in school. Gruesome historical context aside, my grandfather’s army jacket brings back strong high school memories for me. In m...