Can fiction presage the future?

Can fiction presage the future?

A cool blustery spring has come to Washington.

The cherry blossoms are here, along with a startling array of color—red and pink tulips, yolky daffodils, and bright purple heather.

In a week, we are moving from the house we’ve lived in for 22 years, from the neighborhood we’ve lived in for over 30, to an apartment downtown. We’re in the process of a massive sorting, purging, and downsizing that has been too overwhelming to write about: the photographs of dead loved ones; crinkled black and white elementary school class pictures, writing assignments from seventh grade; a 1978 postcard that leaves me winded, the children in their stages—as newborns, and babies, and teenagers, and college students, and the astonishing young women they have become.

If nothing else, this process demonstrates the relentlessness of time.

During the mid - aughts, I wrote an (unpublished) novel whose protagonist, Willa Abbott, a widow, takes a look back as she approaches her 80th birthday. She recalls selling her house in Boston in anticipation of her move to a cottage along a river in the fictional town of Bellington, Maine.

To prepare for her move to Bellington, Willa had sorted through the detritus of her family’s past. On the green shelves in her basement she found dusty mason jars, their gaskets hardened and crumbling. Cracked red corners of construction paper were the remains of her daughter’s elementary school art projects. Glued collages had disintegrated. Piled in corners of old boxes were uncooked elbow noodles, spray painted gold, fallen from the orange juice cans they once transformed into pencil holders.

Willa felt remarkably buoyant after an estate sale disposed of her wedding gifts—crystal goblets, cut glass decanters, sterling well and tree platters, bone china, and her Wedgewood sugar and creamer. Her daughter wasn’t interested in any of it, and now Willa needn’t be either. The library agreed to take the collection of long playing records. Willa declined to hold onto her aunt’s embroidered table cloths.  Even her husband’s carving knives and a silver dinner service were sold. 

I’ve thought about this passage frequently during these past few months; the buoyancy that Willa feels after she lightens her posessions, and her lack of sentimentality in disposing of objects from her past. Was it predictive?

I don’t know. I’m in a storm of emotion, and sleepless for the amount of logistics and brute labor that need to happen before the moving van arrives. But I am intrigued by the idea that fiction can precede life, as opposed to the reverse. I wonder what you think.

I wish you and yours a happy, peaceful spring and beyond.

Love, Martha