To reminisce is to “indulge in enjoyable recollection of past events.”

Reminisce as a noun, as a writing exercise, is to write down what I see, feel, think, say, taste. It happens in the present to inspire reminisces later and I find it often captures emotions and atmospheres pretty idealistically. This isn’t a writing exercise anymore though; it’s just a poem.

Reminisces 

There’s some sort of swallow singing in the leaves as rays of sun push through gaps in clusters of the foliage and barely find her sitting on the porch. Behind trees and bushes and a fence that’s falling over she can see her neighbor pruning tomato plants and between breaths of the swallow and coos of a dove she can’t find, someone is mowing the lawn. For a moment she wishes she knew more about birds, but — even though there’s a computer sitting on the table next to her — she doesn’t care enough to study them and she realizes she’s happy knowing nothing. She would rather sit in between rays of sunshine and listen to songs from little people she doesn’t know than to be sad when the swallow flies away. She doesn’t know what she’s thinking; she never wanted to know anything about birds.

She wants to be able to write and be better at drawing and get all of her work done for once. She wants to type sentences that make people think about themselves in the world, but she has trouble writing poetic verse when her anxious critic won’t shut up long enough for her to turn something rubbish into gold. Her fingers are shaky from all the coffee and she wonders what it would feel like to write something beautiful — overwhelmingly poetically stunning. To capture this moment from the porch in her backyard in a way that makes people want to be alive right here, as well, forever.

Her dog comes up with his frisbee. She picks it up from a spot that isn’t completely slimy with saliva and tosses it further into the yard. He’s happy. You can tell because his tail wags: even when he’s walking it somehow manages to swing back and forth, but it throws off his lope turning it into some sort of adorable swagger. And his butt moves side to side while his chest tries to go forward so he ends up looking perfectly happy, but overwhelmingly content. She wonders if she has something like that — a sort of tail wagging to let everyone around her know she’s happy. It might be easier to socialize that way. She probably does though; he wags his tail when he’s nervous too.

Hemingway wrote entire novels made up of reminisces; maybe I’ll do that too.
Stay gold,
Sabrina