This post is written in response to Linda Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday (SoCS) prompt
Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “your, you’re or yore” Use it in your post as a noun or a verb… or a name! Enjoy!
Days of Yore
We all have our own days of yore. They start when we’re still children.
As soon as we’re old enough to have memories we can recall the days of yore.
Even so, the word yore has a distant sound to it, as if it refers to things which happened long before our own memories began.
The days of yore refer to the memories of others who have died generations before us. So why do they belong to us, too?
Perhaps their recollections are still alive in our collective unconscious. Don’t we all remember and re-imagine the same things?
Isn’t storytelling and all forms of literature a way of recalling and passing on events of the days of yore?
The big bad wolf, the fierce dragon, the handsome prince, the wicked stepmother, the Trojan Horse, the pairs of animals in Noah’s Arc, King Arthur’s Round Table, etc. Someone must have seen and recalled them of yore and passed on the memory, because, don’t we remember them as if we’d seen them ourselves?
The problem is, it’s like Chinese whispers, as the stories are passed down over generations they gradually change; they transform into something else, something later generations can relate to…
They say the legend of the mad woman confined to an attic was told to Charlotte Bronte on a visit to a local country house in her youth. Years later she recreated the legend in Bertha Mason, who became the catalyst in Jane Eyre and most famous secondary character in literary history.
I also shared Miss Bronte’s memories of the days of yore and remembered the story of the screams on the third floor and imagined that a baby was crying in that windowless attic, a baby who returned as a young woman to claim her birthright by her father’s deathbed: Annette Mason in The Eyre Hall Trilogy.
It happened of yore, but I remember it so well, don’t you?
