This fall, explore the theme of transformation to help you get your personal and family memories on paper. Use the following prompts about transformations to reflect on the times you’ve had personal changes or observed them in the world around you. Also use these prompts to think about relatives and ancestors and what changes they experienced.
Personal Turning Points
Describe when you realized you had outgrown a long-held belief or realized that it was time to give up on a dream. Did it come about in a moment of sudden clarity or was it something that happened over time? How did you feel about it at the time? How has your perspective changed? Are you happy now with the choices you made back then?
Fall brings a change of perspective. Use this to spark your creative writing.
What about your ancestors? Do family traditions or research reveal turning points in their lives? What were the stakes at the time? How did that turning point affect the rest of the family? Future generations?
Nature & Seasonal Changes
Here in Michigan, we enjoy a dramatic color transformation in fall. Septembers are mild and mostly sunny. As October arrives, trees dress in their showiest golds, reds, and oranges, like they’re vying for the award of most transformed.
Brilliantly colored trees line a quiet lake front near Clare, Michigan.
Without fail, it reminds of the autumns of the past.
Over the last couple of years, my favorite maple (technically it’s my neighbor’s tree) has started to decline. It doesn’t leaf out fully or turn brilliant magenta.
This brings home the natural order of things and leaves me nostalgic for after-school sidewalk chalking with the kids, playing with the dog, and reading a book on a carpet of orange underneath the blue sky.
What personal journeys does fall’s changing palette bring to your mind? Changes in a stage of life? Taking on new challenges? Hunkering down for the cold? Relief from the heat?
What about the places you’ve lived? Have they changed or are they immune to the passing of years?
What about your family’s gestalt? Is it the same as it was growing up, or are there younger patriarchs and matriarchs? Are cousins close?
If any of your ancestors’ vocations were impacted by the seasons, research a little to determine how they would have prepared and coped.
Friendship Metamorphosis
Friends often come and go out of our lives, but sometimes they’re as stalwart as family. Write about a friendship that has stayed the same or has significantly changed over the years.
What keeps you close, or what has drawn you apart? Have you each grown stronger? Have you grown in the same ways?
Social and Technology Shifts
The longer you’ve lived, the more changes you’ve experienced. But sadly, that’s something that most of us fail to document.
Seldom do we know how our forebear adjusted to changes.
When I look at a timeline of my maternal grandmother’s first twenty years, I see thing huge societal changes, including women gaining the right to vote. Mentally, I try to juxtapose those against her life on a poor tobacco farm in Virginia. I wonder if she found it exciting or disorienting and what her elders were telling her about it.
Sadly, I can’t know. But I watched my mother change from a very traditional “housewife” to the manager of an all-girl band called “Liberation.” She and my dad believed women could do whatever they dreamed of.
If I think back on my college days, I realize I couldn’t have envisioned today’s world of the Internet and social media as I marched down to the computer lab to create spreadsheets of white on green.
How have your outlooks shifted with the times? Are they social or technological changes? Do you find yourself resistant or do you find yourself a more open to things that would have shocked you in your twenties? Write that down! It’s something your descendants will find interesting.
Your Turn:
What Transformations and changes would you recommend family historians and memoirists write about? What do you wish you knew about your family members?
