Story is Sacred- A Six-Part Series

Part One: "Your Story is Your Offering"

Welcome to Pocketful of Prose, a community for sharing stories. This pocket kicks off the first in a six-part series on the power of story. I invite you to check out the song that inspired the title of this post. It is Aisha Badru’s song “Rooted.”  If you are local, I will be expanding on this series in the memoir creative writing class I teach at the Corbin Arts Center. The class begins in October, and you can register here. Writers of all ages and stages are welcome.

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Special thanks to my daughter Anna for her editing and photography skills which made this pocket pop.

Thomas King, the author of The Truth about Stories, A Native Narrative, writes “The truth about stories is that’s all we are.”

The stories we tell are important.

The stories we tell matter.

They shape us, and they shape our world.

Without further ado, I offer you today’s pocket.

The green tomatoes in my garden will never turn red, and just like that, I know that fall is here. Every September, my heart breaks a little at the garden dreams that won’t be realized. Anne Byrne, who writes Between the Layers, taught me a few tricks this week about what I could do with my green tomatoes. I have tried paper bagging my green tomatoes in the past, and it has never worked for me. After reading Anne’s article, it seems my mistake was not putting the green tomatoes in a bag next to an already ripe tomato or banana. Anne’s friend simply sticks her tomatoes in a drawer next to these already ripe fruits, and then voilà, the magic happens. See the green tomatoes turn red.

I like the idea of mature fruit helping immature fruit grow. However, I am not sure that putting a rotting banana in a kitchen drawer would work like magic for me. I have a tendency to put things in drawers and forget about them. I once bought six packets of Kool-Aid to make playdough with Mateo. We had a blast making lime green playdough, and I put the remaining five packets in a drawer thinking we would surely do it again, but nope. Those packets stayed there until the packaging wore down, and they burst. Red, orange and blue sugar was everywhere.  This was not great, but it wasn’t as bad as the time I once forgot about an entire bag of potatoes.  I guess I put them in the cupboard above the microwave to save for a rainy day, but it never rained. I only remembered them when fruit flies infested the kitchen. I think my step towards maturity is not in saving my green tomatoes, but rather in letting them go, in realizing that I don’t have the capacity to do all the things.

Another sign that fall is here is the pumpkin party I discover at the Trader Joe’s. There is pumpkin granola, pumpkin ice cream, and pumpkin yogurt (I don’t recommend it.) Pumpkins of every size and color are lined up outside the store, and inside the store, they are giving away pumpkin filled cookies coated in pumpkin ganache, much better than the yogurt. However, they cost $5 for a box that looks like it only has six cookies in it, so I let that go too. On my way out of the store, though, I break with social norms and return for another free sample. I save it for Seabass as I am now ten minutes late picking him up because I was so distracted by the plethora of pumpkin.

I regret my decision not to buy the cookies. Letting go is hard. So, when I see pumpkin cookies on sale at another upscale grocery store, I grab them. The box promises me that the cookies are made with pure pumpkin. The ingredients tell another story. According to the label, these cookies contain less than 2% of dried pumpkin. The rest of the cookie is enriched flour, sugar, vegetable oil shortening and a few ingredients I can’t pronounce, things like thiamine mononitrate and riboflavin, that are clearly edible, and perhaps even good for me, but still seem to exist in a non-food realm.

It turns out pumpkin cookies are filled with a lot of non-pumpkiny things.

This thought of something being something else returns to me during my morning meditation. I am performing a sun salutation when I remember Thich Naht Hanh’s words. “There is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper.”  Clouds bring rain, rain nourishes trees and trees provide paper. “There is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper.”

I suppose there is a cloud in the pumpkin cookie too, but between all the different forms of Vitamin B, I can’t find seem to find it.  I think that’s why I like gardening so much. When I eat things straight from the vine, I feel closer to the clouds.

Something can be everything. A sheet of paper can be a cloud.

Something can also be nothing. The pumpkin cookies don’t actually have pumpkin in them.

Adrienne Maree Brown, author of Pleasure Activism, says that it is really important to say who we are. Every day we get to say who we are, and “every day we get to clear everything out, that’s not that.”

I try and imagine reading the label on my own box of ingredients. What would it tell me about who I am?  

I am a writer. I am a mother. I am a teacher. I am still these things even though I haven’t published a book, even though my kids are teenagers, and sometimes tell me they don’t need me, and even though I don’t have a classroom of students this year and my role has shifted to full-time instructional coach. At my core, I write, I mother, I teach, and I work from this place regardless of my shifting circumstances.

I don’t want to be a dehydrated version of myself.

Sometimes we have to say who we are, so the things that we aren’t don’t take up all the space.

Sometimes we have to remind ourselves who we have become so that when old stories revisit us, stories that stir up trauma and hurt, we can remember we have learned new ways to navigate through those stories, new paths of healing that lead to wholeness.

I am Mary Hutto Fruchter. I am a writer. I am a mother. I am a teacher. My story is my offering. Tell me who you are today.

“The truth about stories is that’s all we are.”

Here is a sneak peak at the “Story is Sacred” series. I am excited to share more with you in the upcoming weeks.