Wrinkles in Time

When I was ten years old, I believed that I could figure out the answer to any question if I just gave it enough thought.

I said as much to my mother one evening when she came in to say goodnight.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Try something!”

She was quiet for a moment. Then she asked me, “Where does the wind come from?”

During my childhood years when we lived in London, she kept me supplied with a steady stream of thought-provoking books – The Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit and A Wrinkle in Time – books to get inside my head and spark my imagination

But no matter how long I thought about it, I couldn’t find in my own mind any understanding for where the wind came from.

Many years later, I had the opportunity to meet Madeleine L’Engle – who wrote A Wrinkle in Time – at her farmhouse in Connecticut when we interviewed her for a documentary we were making on the intersection of creativity and spirituality. Fascinated with the writing process myself, I hung on every word she said.

The stories she read and re-read, she once said in another interview, were usually stories which (in the words of J Alfred Prufrock), ‘dared to disturb the universe‘ – those which asked questions rather than gave answers.

Last summer, I sat by my mother’s bedside, watching her slip in and out of her own wrinkles in time, heartbroken that I was losing her, but grateful for her gift of encouraging me to think and to write.

And fifty years later, I am still wondering where the wind comes from….

Author: kristin fellows

I am a documentary film consultant, writer & photographer. And once upon a time, I lived in Asheville, North Carolina. I am really, hopefully very nearly finished with my first book, "Lions, Peacocks & Lemon Trees" – a travel memoir that follows a collection of old letters half way around the world, from the Blue Ridge Mountains to Ethiopia to Portugal and Italy. Other adventures have taken me to Iceland to hike volcanoes and photograph puffins; to Barcelona, Mexico, and Croatia. I went to Athens for a big fat Greek wedding, to Helsinki to get beaten with frozen birch branches in the city’s oldest public sauna, to Portugal to track down the backdrop of an old photograph, and to Italy to travel in the footsteps of my late grandmother. My travel articles have been featured in Pink Pangea, a travel blog for female travelers, and other publications. One of my photographs, “Skywalker,” was chosen as a National Geographic Photo of the Day in 2015. But many of my favorite stories still come from the nearly eighteen years I lived in Asheville, which you can read about in my blog, "On the Edge of Appalachia." I also invite you to join me on my newest adventure – "Oceans of Love" – in which I move to a small farming village in the mountains of central Portugal and nothing goes as planned. View all posts by kristin fellows