Memories from Miles Away

A few semesters ago, I took a personal and exploratory writing course (creative non-fiction). One of the assignments was to use the first several paragraphs of Mary Clearman Blew's essay "The Sow in the River" from her book "All But the Waltz" as a structural template for writing about our own memories of a specific place. Here is the piece I came up with...

Among the skyscrapers to the west of the river in northwest Portland, where 21st Avenue cuts a ribbon of pavement and gathers the colorful thronging crowds into its valley between opposing ridgelines of shops and boutiques, a stately brick walkup apartment building stands. It is on _______, about midway between 21st and 23rd on a quieter stretch. From where I have stopped walking and looked up from my place on the damp sidewalk below, I can see the building, a solid and dignified interruption of the frilly Victorians. I can even see the symmetrical row of maples, providing rain-dappled shade and a filter of privacy over the windows.

I know from my past that if I were to keep walking towards the building and open the door and go up the plush, carpeted stairs and down the corridor to the studio, I would find the space light and airy, the hardwoods shining, and the view into the courtyard green and lovely. But from where I stand the apartment is tucked away and invisible, as distant as my memories of the year I was 23, when I lived in that studio on _______ with my cat and my solitude and the trees outside my window whispering dreams and my fiancé in an apartment two stories below.

My memories seem to me as intangible as the whisperings of those trees. Is it possible, standing here on this damp pavement of a worn sidewalk in this lively district of Portland where the sounds of horns and footsteps and laughter and rain blur into my interior silence, watching the doors of the building open and close as strangers I will never meet spill out onto the sidewalk and wend their way up the street to disappear in the ever-changing flow of the crowd, to believe in any moment but this one? The past fades with their footsteps. I cannot trace a path among them that could be my own. How can I place faith in memory, which shifts and sways and fades and falls, sepia-toned, beautiful but dead as the leaves that are stripped off a maple in autumn?