One of the things I remember most vividly about my mother happened on every vacation trip our family took. We typically went camping for two weeks near the end of summer, with perhaps one night a week spent at a motel, as we journeyed to various national parks. Dad always drove and Mom sat in the front passenger seat with a pad of paper and a pencil. As we made stops along the route to whatever national park we were going to visit, she would jot down a note or two on the paper. She did this every day of our vacation.
When we started our vacation trips, we’d stop frequently to see the sights along the way to our ultimate destination. On the way home, however, it was more of a direct drive from wherever we were to home, so there were long hours spent in the car. We three kids played the usual car games as we drove – I spy with my little eye, my father owns a grocery store and he sells (blank), or counting how many different state license plates we saw on our travels across the miles. After awhile, mom would get out her notepad and remind us of what we saw or did on our first day of vacation. Then she’d offer the first line of a poem, and we three kids would chime in with rhyming lines relating to that day’s events. We continued this poem-writing process covering every day of our vacation. It kept us all occupied in a joint effort, we learned a lot about rhyming and tempo, it was a good review of our whole trip, it made the time and miles fly by, and we had a lot of fun doing it. The final version of each poem was descriptive, accurately depicted our adventures, and always included a bit of humor. By the time we arrived home, the entire family, together, had written a two page long poem about every day of our entire vacation experience. Sometime after we were home, Mom would type up the final version of the poem for us all to see.
I think those poems were the basis of my enjoyment of writing poetry to this day. We studied poetry in school, of course, but I think this joint effort with the whole family writing the family vacation poem together made a lasting impression on me and fueled my love of poetry.
Left To Write 