Writing for exactly 12 minutes

Spent all day yesterday at Writers Day, sponsored by the New Hampshire Writers Project – and for those of you who are New England writers and don’t belong, I urge you to consider joining (you don’t have to be from New Hampshire).
     One of the workshops included an exercise I had never done before – writing on a theme for exactly 12 minutes. (I don’t know how or why the facilitator, Joni Cole, chose 12, but it seemed to work well.)
     It’s amazing how eloquent some people can be in so short a time, as many of the pieces that were later read blew me away with their uncensored, unfiltered beauty.
     I didn’t read mine, and it’s not sterling prose, but it did bring back a memory that blurred my vision with tears as I wrote. The theme was to think back on something and write about “This is the time when…”  Here was my memory:
     “This is the time when all the magic between us is so palpable. We sat around a campfire, my mother and I, each with a plastic wine glass in hand, sipping and laughing into the night. She was in her late 70s then. The campground was Vista Linda, outside Jemez Springs, New Mexico, and the campsite had a ramada with tiles the color of New Mexico – that kind of peachy adobe and sky-like aqua – and it covered the picnic table next to the tent we had just erected.
     “The night was still and in the distance, just across the shallow river, the Jemez Mountains rose up, and in them were coyotes and snakes and the ghosts of dead Indians, which did not frighten us, as we were part – though not very much – Indians ourselves. The firelight reflected in her face and we may have worn jackets or sweaters against the night chill, and we just laughed and talked  and I’m not even sure about what and it doesn’t matter – memories from my childhood, maybe, or whether she really loved my father – but it wasn’t so much the talk as the being there together in a place we had both come to love, with its mysteries and its starry night sky and the crack of the fire and the smell of the juniper and the dance of the shadows just beyond the perimeter of our sight and the taste of the wine and the sound of her laugh, with her head tossed back, all happy and full. I think we got a little bit drunk that night. I loved her so much.”