Jessica Dofflemyer is an artist, writer, photographer, and mother living on a small Hawaiian island. Her blog, "For the Archives," began as a 40-day experiment to chronicle everyday experiences raising her six-year-old son on her own. What evolved is now a collection of prose, poetry, and photography that seeks to find the profound in the mundane details of daily life. Dofflemyer's blog has archived over 700 postings and has been featured as a Wordpress "Freshly Pressed" selection.
Her photography has been published in the Pacific Writer's Connection anthology, "Ho'olaule'a: Celebrating Ten Years of Pacific Writing," and she continues to post her daily chronicles to the Archives at forthearchives.wordpress.com.
Her photography and art can also be viewed at forthearchives.net.
Jeb and I are at the outdoor shower, where he soaps under the stars. He doesn’t like to bathe alone in the dark and I keep him company while words fall from his mouth as yarn unraveling. It’s an end-of-the-day discourse that peaks at shower time and then falls with a thud on his pillow after putting on his pajamas.
As he rinses and recites, frogs rest and listen in the moss and fern shadows, just out of sight.
Jeb’s at the crescendo. Stories and descriptions of the day’s events come out as run-on sentences. A litany of Lego guy trading on the playground, a scene from a Bruce Lee movie he saw with his dad, and a new knock-knock joke.
“Knock knock”
“Who’s there?”
“A door.”
“A door who?”
“Adore me!”
“I do adore you. That’s a good one…ok, Jeb, get all of the shampoo out of your hair and come on out.”
I herd him toward bed as he finalizes his roll. The last thoughts of his head, draining.
Mary Poppins sang about a spoonful of sugar helping the medicine go down. For me, music is the medicine and the sweetness is that wordless place where vibration rings from a guitar string straight to my heart.
Oh, how I love words. But the mind grows tired sometimes and there is nothing like a little pause on the mental wheels.
With music, just a few sonic notes can resonate through the air and ripple through to raise the hair on the back of your neck. Reverberate through your core. Unlock the front door to your most sacred dwelling with one chord change, leaving words to stammer on the doorstep still riddling the password.
Stop. It’s time to listen. Let the hearing feel. Maybe move. Or just be stilled.
It’s a sonic elixir. A sweet nectar. Music is the way to remind me I’m alive.
Lately, it’s the Archives, here, that seem to get my greatest attention. But this morning I’m reminded…you can’t forget the music. It’s the soundtrack in the background behind all of these wild, running thoughts. Songs that weave together all of these stories. The spoonful of sweetness that brings the flavor to the moment – rich and delicious.
Like an aging granny, I spin tales to Jeb about the ‘old’ days when I was a child.
“Back then, there weren’t even cell phones! In fact, most of the my time growing up, there were only land lines and they had cords attached to the wall! You had to sit by the phone. You couldn’t walk anywhere when you called someone.”
This isn’t quite like the tales of walking to school in snow, uphill (both ways!). But I see the wheels turning in Jeb’s imagination as he listens, not able to picture my world of curling cords and rotary phones.
“You know, there wasn’t even an internet. When I was a kid, if you needed to learn about something, you went to the encyclopedia.”
I remember the leatherish bound encyclopedia set on our living room shelf, representing all letters of the alphabet. Pages edged with a gold-colored coating, promising entry into all things of the known universe that began with the letter ‘A’. ‘A’ was a book, maybe two inches thick. For anything A-related, not listed, that was further research in the stacks down at the local library.
courtesy of Shishberg
Back then, should you have opened up ‘G’ (it may have been combined with ‘H’ or ‘I’), you would not have found an entry under “Google.” These days at our house, it’s a standard phrase. If Jeb asks me questions I can’t precisely answer (“how is dry ice made? what makes lightning?), he simply says “Let’s Google it.” In two clicks we have a plethora of answers.
In all my granny glory, I shake my head, cluck and sigh with amazement: “Oh, the times have changed…”
Instead of pulling down a two-pound bound edition from the shelf, the fingers of answer-seekers are weightlessly flying over keyboards, typing any phrase imaginable to find clues to their queries. Oh, the things that you can find on this new-fangled internet thing!
What are people looking for? And where do their searches take them?
Believe it or not, some of them find me. So intrigued I’ve become, I am introducing a new page here on the Archives called Little Engines that Search (see left sidebar, under About, and click). With WordPress tracking the phrases browsers use, I get a glimpse into the words that trace them here. Fascinating, indeed. So I’ve dedicated a page listing some of my favorite phrases that have brought people to the Archives.
Who would have thought that “highway grass”, “stirrup chairs” and “does anyone sell banana leaves in fresno county” all would have funneled cyber-surfers to this very ethereal locale? Inspired by these phrases, I’ve played around to create my own search term poetry. You never know, maybe this is the next big thing. So profound it could be published. Maybe into a hard-bound book to sit on a shelf…full circle! I can see the title now: “Words Sought in the Ether.” I’d definitely want the pages edged in gold.
WORDS SOUGHT POEM I (BEAUTY)
inspiring word
butterfly cocoon unravel
morning sunlight through my bedroom window
bottle french wine
who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out over the face of the land
rainbow colored honey
rock texture moss
desktop ocean
beautiful toes
barrel of love
wave tossed in the ocean
the honey peace of old poems
robinson jeffers
how do you know? Love
snakes of coastal bend
scary wave wipeout
succulent pocket
osho zen the lovers
chrysoprase stone
moons in our solar system
shroud of turin
desktop water love
a banana leaf miracle
vast
WORDS SOUGHT POEM II (JUST PLAIN QUIRKY)
klmit
hafiz you have been invited to meet a friend
spelling sentences
goat in heat charging
does anyone sell banana leaves in fresno county
highway grass
california safe tent camping
lone ovary
the anatomy of a compost pile
rumplestiltskin edward gorey
solar system for kids
fetus at week 23
how to cut down a banana tree
stirrup chair
red toenails
hornier neck lift
airline rush luggage tag images
charts and graphs on insomnia in children
screen saver crazy
uterus
kermit the frog
For the Archives 