In a series of craft notes, we’re illustrating Point of View. If you want to see the first step in this process, click here to see Alice Munro’s version, in First Person Informant: First POV Post.
Here is the story told in Reminiscent first person– a verb tense change and a different tone, often an aged, wise narrator looking back to understand and evaluate a life lived.
In those early days, my father would often say, “Want to go down and see if the lake's still there?” He never tired of the same ironic implication, that there could be some vast change in life or landscape, even as he reassured us that the ridiculous could not occur. We would leave my mother sewing under the dining room light – the best in the house – making clothes for me against the opening of school, school clothes I hated, praying each year for store-bought like other children wore. Mother had ripped up this year [we're moving into simple past and to specific time] an old suit and an old plaid wool dress of hers, and she had to cut and match very cleverly, as she tried to please me. She also made me stand and turn for endless fitting, sweaty, itching from the hot wool, ungrateful though I never said so. We left my brother in bed in the little screened porch at the end of the front veranda, and sometimes, he knelt on his bed and pressed his face against the screen and called mournfully, “Bring me an ice-cream cone!” but indifferent to his abandonment by me and my father, I called back, “You will be asleep,” and did not even turn my head.
The move to the simple past there is the kind of thing I find confusing when I write. I'll be watching out for it as I rewrite! I can be delusional in the Reminiscent 🤣