Greetings Everyone!
Today’s post is written in the new modern memoir style. Read it slowly, and immerse yourself in the experience.
Notice that the new modern memoir style doesn’t minimize or gloss over feelings but uses our senses to bring us fully present in the experience. The overall emphasis is on the outcome - what wisdom came as a result of the experience…
Wisdom From The Wine Shop
Colored leaves crunch under my feet on this playful windy autumn day. I walk up the well-worn wooden steps, through the creaking door of a well-established neighborhood wine shop. Rows of different height bottles act as canvasses for the variety of graphically designed labels, telling me the wines have traveled from all over the world. I smell the poignant stink of blue cheese as I reach for a cracker from a napkin-draped bowl. Picking up a wired basket I hear a voice as I walk toward the sign for Italian wine,
Hello and welcome. Happy you’re here. Browse about. My name’s Tom. Wink or wave if you need help, he chuckles.
His brown suede cowboy boots with sharply pointed, leather tipped toes, climb the rungs of a metal ladder, the noise echoing past me. Three bottles of red wine hugged on his left side, and two securely dangling in his right hand. I watch fixated, as he displays them intently, turning the labels out for all to see.
Dusting the bottles with a black felt cloth he leans back from the ladder and admires his work. Looking toward me, his one-person audience, he removes his black-framed glasses and exclaims, These are my personal favorite! In Italy when I was a kid, in my grandfather’s vineyard, the whole family would crush the grapes with our bare feet. We’d walk round and round the large wooden oak barrel for what seemed like hours just laughing and chatting, as carefree as the wind.
As I listened to him, I could picture the juice of the natural elements of the life-filled grapes oozing forth, surrendering the liquid joy of a life-on-the-vine. Soon their protective skins would be separated out in the elegant life journey of the grapes from vine, to bottle, to table.
On that day in the shop, feet glued to the ground, in that piercing stand-still moment I knew, I understood. I got the role emotional pain had played in my life, squeezing me like juicing grapes under my feet, bursting me forward through an enriched life fully lived.
The shapely dark glass bottle wears a label of metallic gold on black, framing vibrant red letters spelling - LIFE. I smile as I think how much the life of a grape is like mine. I raise my glass and toast life. The crystal long-stemmed glass is held high above my heart, as ruby-red light glistens through, kissing my lips. A rich embracing warmth radiates in my tummy, as I sip, reflecting on my journey.
Like a corkscrew doing it’s job, my purple metallic pen to blank paper now uncorks the pain of a past that fermented my future, an award-winning fine wine. The heartache, longing, and grief for what I don’t even know, is so powerful it would stunt my growth if I let it. The vivid pain of emotion calls me forward, out of and through, the stifling grip of the past. Tear-stained journal pages dry as I sit and write, finally free from frozen pain.
Anya Sophia Mann
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Wow. Every cell in my body feels these words. Standing ovation 🥂