I don’t care who you are and what you’ve done (or haven’t done) but chances are there are a couple of places on this semi-green Earth that you know very well. Intimately, some might say.
Go ahead and think about some of your favorite movies or books. I’m willing to bet that more than one entry on your list belies a certain infatuation with a certain place on behalf of the artist. Think New York in Sex and the City.
One of my favorite books of all time (that I continuously rant about) is The Blue Castle, by L.M. Montgomery. It’s set in a tiny Austen-esque Canadian provincial town where the locals are small-minded, nosey snobs. But this tale is no ode to bucking the country life for the city: Valancy goes from living in a tiny town to a cabin in the Ontario woods, and the story is peppered with descriptions of wildflowers and sloping trees, snow banks and mist.
Not my usual cup of tea.
But it works. And beautifully too (just check out the Amazon reviews). You get a sense that LM Montgomery has a special fondness for the wilds of northern Ontario, out of all places, and she coveys that admiration brilliantly.
Yesterday, I sat down to write a poignant break up scene. It was late, and what I really wanted to do was go to bed, but I’d just spent two hours watching Law and Order so if I didn’t get a couple of pages down I would have felt pretty shitty about my output.
I set about planning the scene. All I knew about it was that a couple was going to break up, so I started thinking (and yawning) – where do two people who are barely speaking to each other anymore, who can hardly stand each other’s company, go to break up?
The first thought that swept into my mind was: restaurant!
One person (the hopeful one) invites the other (the one who’s about to put the kibosh on the relationship) to go out for a meal, and then BAM! It’s over. The imaginary demon of laziness perched over my left shoulder had spoken. Restaurant. Hadn’t I gotten dumped - and done the dumping - over dumplings before?
But then I heard it - or felt it, rather, because it wasn’t the angelic voice of a muse eating grapes and imparting nuggets of wisdom from a chaise longue in the far corner of the room - it was more like an annoying woodpecker drilling the side of my scull.
“You can so do better than that,” It said, annoyingly.
“Why should I? A restaurant is fine. Haven’t you ever been dumped at a restaurant? Shut up.” I countered.
But it wouldn’t (shut up) so I made a list. A very lame one, with such uninspired entries as “amusement park”, “Connecticut”, “college campus”, and “mall” (I’m not kidding). But somewhere between “college campus” and “mall”, magic happened.
For no discernable reason at all, the word “Maine” popped into my head. Specifically Ogunquit, Maine, and artsy beach town I drove to with my then-boyfriend in between graduating from University and starting my first real job because the opening at the company was immediate and wouldn’t wait until I got back from the summer in Europe, as had been the plan.
And though Ogunquit was no Turin, Italy, it was artsy and quaint, and it had a beach (glacial though the mid-June waters were), and it was a much better background against which to end a long-standing and valued relationship than some random restaurant.
I stayed up well into the night finishing that chapter, something I’m not sure I could have endured had I stuck with my original, lazy choice.
So there you have it – make really lame lists. You might be surprised at what comes up.
