Camp Nanowrimo Day 2

Day 2
Since last year, I have been sending my Super 8 home movies to be digitalised and saved onto a usb key. Three were returned today. These were filmed in 1975, 1986 and 1988, and since they are over thirty years old, they may be classed as historical documents. We were in Glasgow, Wolverhampton and India (a seven-week trip) during the filming.
While watching, I am struck by the number of family members who have died from three generations of family. My husband was the fifth of ten children. He filmed his parents picking chilly peppers in their fields. Dressed in white cotton, they sit low between the green bushes taking each ripe red chilly and placing it in a basket. Nearby their family play around the water gushing from the pipe at the electric well. It is a July evening in Punjab and the heat of the day has dissipated. The sun is setting, and the shadows are long. Wearing a lilac sari, which I have hitched up, I paddle my feet in the stream that takes the water to the fields. As well as the parents, eight of the second generation, six brothers and two sisters have passed on. Revisiting the past is not always a happy experience.

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April 2nd 2021

It’s Camp Nanowrimo, and I am doing it my way since I’ve already missed a day. Yesterday, we had a long beneficial zoom session with Bearsden Writers on ‘Page to Stage’ by Neet Neilson. All about the creation of a five-minute stage play. We agreed that the writing process was quite similar to other areas of writing. The method of taking your written work onto the stage seemed to include a lot of other people with the potential of fighting for your words and ideas. That was scary.
I should be editing the words I wrote in November, but I might be more productive if I try to fit those into my work in progress. I don’t think I can write a memoir (too many tangled tales in my past), so it will have to be a work of fiction with some stories from my life included, which is how my novel ‘Finding Takri’ came into being. It works that way for me.
What did I do since November? I have been busy but not writing, not submitting, although I have been keeping in touch with my writing community. I have been reading, doing jigsaws, knitting and baking flapjacks.

Our only visitors were our neighbours’ hens, who would tap on the patio doors for food. Unfortunately, our local fox got a hold of them on a dark March night when the wind had blown their coop door shut before they could get in. Two children next door were distraught, but so were we adults. Only one of six hens survived, Rosie, who hid in a tight space near a shed. Oh well, the fox and her babies had a feast! My neighbour bought four more hens to keep Rosie company, but they are not allowed out of the coop yet.