Chronicle 2017

PROFILES

Chronicling a lifetime of memories

PLUM LIND JOHNSON 1965

Profile by Katharine Brickman 2007

“When you get to be my age and you look back on your life, you try to see how all of the different threads of your life make sense,” says Plum Lind Johnson, whose touching memoir They Left Us Everything was published in 2014. Growing up, Plum wanted to be a writer and onstage actress, but felt that she lacked the confidence to achieve these dreams. “Now, I feel like all of these doors have been opened. It’s a very exciting time for me.” When her parents’ health began to decline, Plum and her brothers took on caregiver roles, looking after them for nearly 20 years before her father and then mother passed away. They Left Us Everything chronicles Plum’s experience with clearing out her parents’ home after her mother’s death. Inherent in this huge undertaking was a sense of duty that Plum had not anticipated. As Plum touched each of her parents’ things one by one and revisited the memories attached to each, she became more and more intrigued with everything that she was discovering in the house. The light bulb moment came over her one day as she drove to a thrift store to drop off some boxes. The thrift store was packed with stuff that looked exactly like hers and, Plum says, she was “struck by the speed at which people were dropping stuff off. It looked like we were throwing away the whole of the 20th century!” As Plum wrote down her memories, a manuscript

began to emerge. When asked whether she had any reservations about the exposure of publishing a personal memoir, Plum admits to worrying about the mother-daughter theme inherent in her writing. “I was afraid that once the book was published, I’d have critics saying that I was undutiful. I worried that I hadn’t done Mum justice.” Nonetheless, Plum was not worried about giving voice to secrets. In her view, “we help each other if we confess more. We sometimes learn too late in life that secrets don’t do anyone any good.” Plum reflects that the Havergal community contributed to her love of both writing and acting. Two English teachers whom she had while at Havergal (Mrs. Catharine Fowler and Miss Georgia Phillips) inspired her desire to write. Old Girls Kate Reid 1949 and Clare Coulter 1961 influenced Plum’s love of theatre; Kate, a Broadway actress in New York, taught Plum how to imagine and create scenes and Clare, an award-winning Canadian actress, directed Plum and her classmates in plays produced at Havergal. Plum credits these writing and theatre experiences for helping her both write her memoir and stand in front of crowds at speaking engagements about her book. “Mrs. Phillips used to say ‘don’t write until you have something to say’,” Plum recalls from her Havergal days. “Well, it has taken 50 years, but now I have a lot to say!”

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