The sounds of my mother’s typewriter

As a child, I often woke to the sound of my mother typing. I’d hear a spatter of sound, a pause, a tentative tap or two, some silence, then more taps. With the staccato music of the typewriter coming through the wall as the first light brightened my window, it was as if my mother were composing the day itself.

Some mornings, she was typing her term papers. Having left college after her sophomore year to put my father through the rest of his education, she gradually finished her bachelor’s one class at a time at the college where my father had his first job as a professor. When I was a teenager, she drove a couple of days a week to a university an hour away where she earned a master’s in English literature. By the time she began working on her doctorate, I was out of the house and trying to follow in her footsteps, typing my own term papers on a manual typewriter until the day of the personal computer arrived.

On other mornings, my mother was writing in response not to a teacher’s assignment but to something inside herself. I remember her telling me that she’d had a teacher who encouraged her to write first thing in the morning, while the house was still quiet—to show up every day at the typewriter whether she thought she had something to say or not. Do that, her teacher told her, and you’ll find that you have quite a bit to say. And so a stack of pages in her middle desk drawer grew higher and higher, filled with her observations of the world around her and the stories that her engagement with the world inspired.