Hear me out, please, before you change this bat channel.
Word Raccoon and I came to the porch pre-Mawgy’s memorial, before it was light out, before doing the remaining tasks for the day.
Something You Should Know:
One of my mottos in life has been Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down.
Obviously, that’s shorthand for not allowing life’s reversals to take away the joy and beauty of being alive.Â
God, WR says, that sounds too Pippi Longstocking by far, minus the profanity, of course.
I agree, WR, but let me finish!
(She wants to insert a juvenile punchline from The Office TV show, but I am not going to let her. I know she’s only deflecting.)
Anyway.
After the Coke Zero this morning, this wee raccoon beastie asked me to head to the porch before dawn and write.
No agenda, not from either of us.
Actually, the last thing we were planning to write was anything grief-soaked.
Grief takes so many damn forms, and honestly, I’m tired of that MF’ing shape-shifter. I don’t think there’s a flavor I haven’t tried. (Flavor/shape-shifter…I will manage my metaphors any damn way I please, thank you very much. We are not charging by the word, WR says. Opposite.)
Once on the porch, I opened a Word doc and wrote the first thing that came to mind. Here are the (for now) poetry titles in the order in which I wrote them:
Just Another Grief Poem (it’s not)
Lifeboat Contestants (this one has a live wire)
Season Tickets to Death (that’s gotta also be the title of the collection, am I right?)
Opportunity Cost (my mom loved that phrase)
Only four so far, but as soon as it gets lighter out there are Things I Need to Do. Like vacuum out the car and put it back together especially since we might provide post-memorial transportation to dinner and it was a dune buggy a couple of weeks ago and I have not taken the time to reassemble it or remove the sand.
Make sure the house is tidied in case out-of-state guests and/or close family come over before or after.
Obviously, get ready for the memorial late this afternoon.
Be on troubleshooting alert, because day-of can get messy:
Did the thank-you card to the minister get prepared with the honorarium inside? (I went to the ATM yesterday, dug out a card as well, but it is not made out yet, as that is not my task, though I would do it if needed.)
Did the message from the aunt who cannot be here get printed so it can be read at the appropriate time?
Check the multiple family text threads to be sure nothing has been overlooked.
Family who were stuck at O’Hare make it in yet? Restaurant reservation made for after? Anyone need transportation? Mints? Kleenex?
Be on deck to run errands if anyone has forgotten anything.
Notice when family members have been standing too long and need a chair or someone to lead them downstairs for coffee/a break.
Give the chattier family members a heads-up when The Song comes on that is intended to lead them to their chairs for the actual service.
On and on…and I’m happy to do these things.
While this is my loss as well, it’s buffered enough by relation that I am glad I can think of these things, since my mind is not overshadowed. And my son will be there. Being helpful and knowing the right thing to say at funerals is his superpower.
(Although we have learned from experience that we cannot be sat beside one another for any serious event, or inevitably one of us will begin laughing inappropriately and the other will catch it. It’s embarrassing, but I can admit it.)
Anyway, this beginning of a poetry collection is a morning surprise and has allowed me to empty the grief tanks enough to move through today with a clearer head, to be there for those who will need me.
That’s what we do for one another, isn’t it?
The squirrels and their kin came to check on me, too. Lovely.
Word Raccoon has taken down yesterday’s red string from the board. Thank goodness. I don’t know what she was thinking, hot tempered little animal.
She looked at the index cards this morning, sighed a very small raccoon sigh, and swept them all into a drawer before I even had to ask her to.
The desk is now clear of everything but a Coke Zero; the rain sings outside.
Dear Reader, sometimes the world gets too loud and distant; all of life’s uncertainties gang up on WR and she feels deserted by hope. The weight of things, so many things, makes her sharp when she wants nothing but to be soft.
WR apologizes for the literary slaps in yesterday’s post. To make up for it, she went deep into the bottom drawer and pulled out a draft she’s been hoarding. I told her it was too raw, too unfinished. I told her I was saving it for publication. She didn’t care. That’s for the birbs, she tells me. Don’t you mean birds? I ask. Poor thing can’t spell.
But she does like a sharp-dressed man. Back away from Father John, WR!
She’s so funny.
Here’s hoping you like the poem. I wrote it last year.
Paging Father John Misty
Kind Sir,
Please fling your arms
out from your sides,
those long levers
of pleasure.
Consecrate
at your leisure
my cathedral.
Sigh us a tune,
our salvific muse.
And now, WR, I think I will invest in a roll of duct tape for the days you need it! I imagine everyone who has met you would be relieved at that.
Word Raccoon asked me recently why there are so many novels in which characters slap one another.
WR, where did that come from? There’s no point in asking; she is off on a tangent.
Okay, raccoon of mine, what are you talking about?
She clears her throat, shows me her non-murder board (you’ll get that joke when my novel comes out) and slams her pointer across it.
Exhibit A: (for no good reason she did not label her other exhibits)
Wuthering Heights
Well, obviously a Brontë is involved.
In Wuthering Heights, Catherine Earnshaw wants Nelly Dean to leave the room so she can be alone with Edgar Linton.
Nelly refuses.
Catherine pinches her.
Nelly still refuses.
Catherine slaps her.
Unfortunately for Catherine, Edgar is there to see the whole thing.
WR writes COURTSHIP GOING WELL?? on an index card.
I tell her that’s editorializing.
She informs me that this is not the only slapping going on in Wuthering Heights.
Of course it isn’t.
It’s Wuthering Heights. And let’s not forget Heathcliff’s slapping Cathy when she tried to grab the key from him to secure her freedom. (How exactly did he become a romantic figure?)
Great Expectations
Then, what the Dickens? (Couldn’t resist.)
Pip tells his sister Estella that she isn’t as insulting as she used to be, so…she slaps him.
Then she asks:
“Now?”
Reader, do we call that efficiency or dastardliness?
WR writes COUNTEREVIDENCE on the board and asks permission to add dastard to the list of curse words.
I have no objection.
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
WR brings me Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
I already know this isn’t going anywhere good. Even if I have stood in front of Stonehenge reciting passages from the book. Maybe. I think so. Been too many years and it’s too good a story to say I don’t remember, so sure, I did that.
Alec has returned to Tess’s life and continues trying to exert power over her. When he disparages Angel, Tess slaps him across the face with her glove hard enough to draw blood.
WR and I confer.
Does a glove count?
She points out that there is a hand inside the glove and Hardy calls it a slap.
The tribunal accepts it.
GLOVE: COUNTS.
No further questions.
A Farewell to Arms
And then there’s Hemingway.
Early in A Farewell to Arms, Frederic Henry tries to kiss Catherine Barkley.
She tells him no.
He tries anyway.
She slaps him hard across the face, then apologizes for what she sees as a mere reflex because she is grieving and then says he may kiss her.
WR looks at me.
I look at WR.
She already said no.
WR nods. “But then she apologized.”
I refuse to quibble with her. We are not researching motives. We are looking into instances.
CONFIRMED SLAP.
Then WR clears her throat.
What?
Apparently A Farewell to Arms contains another slap.
Who?
The baby.
What?
THE BABY GETS SLAPPED.
During Catherine’s labor, the doctor holds the newborn by his feet and slaps him.
Twice.
WR, I hardly think…
“It counts.”
I hate this project. Why is she doing this? We have a perfectly respectable poem we are still working on, plus the Genette book came in today. AND we downloaded the newest Allende, which is a book on writing, and we are eager to read what she has to say, particularly because we used to be very interested in magical realism.
Their Eyes Were Watching God
At this point WR has begun to suspect she needs a larger board.
There are multiple slaps in Their Eyes Were Watching God, and this is where our investigation becomes heavier.
Early in the novel, Nanny slaps Janie during their argument about Janie’s future. Janie wants love. Nanny, whose understanding of security has been shaped by everything she has survived, is desperate for Janie to marry Logan Killicks and have the protection she never had.
Later, Joe slaps Janie after a dinner doesn’t turn out the way he wants. WR and I are not a fan of Joe. At all.
And later still, Tea Cake hits Janie out of jealousy and possessiveness, including slapping her. That’s not why Janie shoots him later. It’s really not. (And sorry for the spoiler, but damn, if you haven’t read it by now, are you really going to?) But she does shoot him.Â
Anyway.
WR reminds me we’re counting slaps, not deaths.
Right.
WR looks at the board.
She writes only:
MULTIPLE.
Then puts down the pointer while shaking her head.
Beloved
In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Sethe remembers her mother showing her the identifying mark on her body. Young Sethe asks to have one too.
Her mother slaps her.
Sethe doesn’t understand why.
Not then.
WR quietly puts down her pointer.
We leave that one alone, too, and regret some of our earlier unintentional lightness while investigating these slaps. Except the baby slaps. That was funny because they were not malicious on the doctor’s part.
The House of the Spirits
WR brings me Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits. (Oh, shoot. I should have mentioned her new book here. Oh well.)
It’s been a long time since I’ve read this one, but I own a battered, second-hand copy full of lovely scribbles. In it, Esteban Trueba strikes Clara across the face during an argument so violently that he knocks out some of her teeth.
Clara never speaks to him again.
Not for the rest of her life.
Horrific behavior by him. Understandable reaction from her.
But.
Was it technically a slap? I mean, since that’s what we’re recording.
Checks notes.
We can establish the blow to the face. We cannot establish that it was specifically an open-handed slap. We are not convinced that a slap could do such damage.
WR is displeased.
STRIKE: INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE.
“That’s ridiculous,” she says.
Your rules, raccoon. Now if we were to expand this to include violence in literature…
WR raises her tail and hisses.
Okay, okay. Enough said.
The Great Gatsby
And finally, because apparently Tom Buchanan wasn’t awful enough already, in a scene that sounds a bit like the one we just mentioned, at the drunken apartment party in The Great Gatsby, Myrtle Wilson repeatedly says Daisy’s name.
Tom tells her to keep Daisy’s name outta her mouth.
Myrtle:
Daisy. Daisy. Daisy.
(I had an aunt named Myrtle. My grandfather’s sister.)
Fitzgerald doesn’t actually use the word slap, but he describes Tom making one “short deft movement” and breaking Myrtle’s nose with his open hand.
WR points violently at OPEN HAND.
Yes, I see it.
She points again.
Fine.
OPEN HAND: COUNTS.
I look back at Allende.
Wait.
Didn’t we just reject that one partly because we weren’t convinced a slap could do that much damage?
WR freezes.
I believe there is a precedent problem.
She reaches for the Allende card on the board.
No. We are not reopening the case.
WR, I feel like this post is a little messed up. What are you even doing?? Why are we spending perfectly good writing time writing about such a depressing topic?
WR steps back from the non-murder board. She looks wounded, because she thought I knew that she enjoys her tangents, however morbid.
In the meantime, the non-murder board has become considerably more murder-boardish.
There are index cards everywhere threaded about with red string.
CONFIRMED SLAP.
GLOVE: COUNTS.
BABY: ALSO SLAPPED. (At birth, WR!)
MULTIPLE in several novels.
OPEN HAND: COUNTS.
STRIKE: INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE.
And, in increasingly large letters:
WHY ARE THERE SO MANY?
I don’t know, WR. And we are aware of other novels with slaps and plays that we decided not to mention. Apparently, once you start looking for literary slaps, they are everywhere. They deserve a proper deep dive, but this is not that.Â
WR has suggested a spreadsheet.
I have declined, although something about the idea interests me, too. Not just for slaps, but some sort of literary database for the color blue in novels, and those featuring raccoons, for instance, or paintings, and so on.
WR considers this.
Then she nods. She nods again, concluding her slap search.
Thank goodness.
I start gathering the books.
Behind me, I hear the squeak of a marker and get gooseflesh.
WR!
She is writing on a fresh index card.
NEXT INVESTIGATION: SLAPS THAT DON’T INVOLVE HANDS BUT STILL STING LIKE HELL.
Word Raccoon and I spent early yesterday morning rereading a beautiful little book with passages that need reading aloud, for sure.
We took notes on our phone, as well as screenshots of particularly moving sections.
We paused in the middle of reading it to write some stanzas of a poem. It is, to date, most likely the longest poem we have written.
We paused in the middle of writing the poem to write notes for an essay.
We returned to the novel and finished it with a contented sigh. We had only “read” it with our ears before, and this one certainly merited reading with the eyes.
It was a warm blanket of a place to be, just what WR and I needed. It was the best place we’ve been in days.
We have a couple of posts prepared, but now is not the time. They will keep. This is just a quick check-in.
And maybe, since we’re checking in, we can admit something.
Maybe, I think sometimes, I should avoid mentioning the tough stuff. Maybe I shouldn’t mention grief or adjusting to arthritis meds or that I miss people. Sometimes I think I should just stick to talking about the writing, like I’m some machine, but that feels like living without oxygen. The vulnerable places are how you dare to be known. How you offer to be known, which can feel just as vulnerable.Â
It also shows (however embarrassingly at times) the temperature at which many writers run.
Anyway.
WR and I are up before God because we have a medical appointment and routine lab work early today before the fun stuff.
WR and I also took our longest walk in years yesterday (still testing the machinery), and it was delicious.
The angel of death is apparently on overtime, and I’m pissed, exhausted, and sad.
Last night, my mother-in-love, Cheryl, died.
I called her Mawgy.
Her remarried name was Gohman, and I wanted a special name for her when I married into the family, but I didn’t want to call her Mom because I had my own. So I came up with Maw G. Mawgy, get it?
Eventually, she signed her cards to me that way.
From Mawgy.
EVERYONE loved her, and often people who found out who my MIL was told me what an amazing and gregarious woman she was.
And she was.
However.
I was twenty-one when Barry and I married. Barry was Cheryl’s only son, her eldest child, and they were close. If you have ever married a woman’s only son, who also happens to be her eldest child, well, need I say more?
It’s like you snuck in at night and raided the silver cupboard.
It took a few years, but eventually, I won her over. Or maybe we won each other over.
When Barry and I lived in Nashville, she would take me clothes shopping when she visited, which I appreciated because I had no clothing budget at the time. We had a good time as we hunted for a pair of the then-popular wing earrings. We cooked together, making her signature spaghetti and her “cherry flip.” (I had a poem published about that cherry flip last year.)
Once, Barry and I took her to dinner at a Grammy winner’s house. Mawgy and I were both a little out of our element, so we made each other comfortable.
Apparently, we made each other too comfortable, because before long we were laughing too loudly and embarrassing Barry.
Barry.
Who is usually the louder of the two of us.
And me, the one who was usually more reserved.
She adored our children, and it was mutual. She adored her children beyond belief.
Somewhere along the way, she truly became Mawgy to me.
My Mawgy.
She was gorgeous, fashionable, and multi-talented. When she was younger, she sewed all of her own clothes. She could have been a concert pianist. She loved to paint when she was younger, too, though in all the time I knew her, she only painted one bench, and that was for the town’s park program. I always smiled when I walked past and saw the Dalmatian she had drawn and I wished she would paint more.
She was the last sitting judge for our town. There wasn’t really anything she couldn’t do if she set her mind to it. When she married Barry’s stepdad, she learned to drive a semi so she could team drive with her new husband. They traveled the U.S. in their truck.
She could even parallel park that thing.
I could never.
How can you sum up a 35+ year relationship in a few sentences?
You can’t.
I am glad that we will be able to celebrate her life this coming weekend with family, friends, and people from our community who loved her. The condolence messages are pouring in, and when her ex, Barry’s dad, wants to come to the funeral, well, doesn’t that say it all?
But please, Angel of Death, please pass over us for a spell. We’ve had enough.
Unrelated to post, but I rearranged the shelf over the stove yesterday to include the plate and salt and pepper shakers that Zack and Erica bought me. Also pictured, the teapot from the last version of the cafe that closed down that I was gifted, as well as a 1950’s cookie jar from the thrift shop, repurposed. Yeah, we do kitsch. Also, that wall is going to get painted later in the fall.
Dear, Dear Reader,
Today, Word Raccoon and I are feeling much better. Though the medicine kicked our rear in new and unexpected ways yesterday, so far today we believe we have turned a corner and have maybe gotten over the worst of the side effects. We remain hopeful. I say this to say it feels good to feel more myself after days of not.
Anyway.
When WR and I were excavating a scene for the novel from that dictated block the other day, I noticed what the scene had become. Well, it was this: scene, narrative summary, ending on a semi-scene. I was concerned, because although I know and practice Kenny (K.L., not that other one) Cook’s valuable “You can do anything you can get away with,” I stopped to ask myself if where I had ended was a legit, logical, and satisfying ending point. Because it felt tenuous, if I looked at the bones of it all.
I knew the distinctions among scene, semi-scene, and narrative summary from a lecture my Writing Mother gave, and she credited the notion to someone whose name I cannot remember, but I have found considering these distinctions invaluable when writing. Actually, what I’ve discovered is that on a second pass, much of my writing is narrative summary, almost akin to an outline or the bones, and then I decide if it needs to be a scene or not. Often, it does.
Out of curiosity, I asked Google if there was a name for what I was doing and Reader, (well, of course YOU know, but I must confess, I did not; I assume my readers know more than I do) there IS a name for it: Narratology! WHAT??? ALRIGHT, WHO HAS BEEN HOLDING OUT ON ME??
Although I will say, reading about it, apparently he uses Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past to analyze literature. I have said not-kind things about Proust in the past, and yet maybe it just wasn’t the right time for me to read him. I mean, I was in China, working on my own first novel, fearing I was being self-indulgent. (I tossed out all 100 pages of Victorine that I wrote in China; I don’t know why they didn’t work, but they didn’t. I may have saved a bit of it. Yes, I believe I did, now that I think about it.)
I know Genette’s book is going to be theory-heavy, and I imagine I will have to keep my mind perfectly still while I try to understand what he’s saying (which is why I normally prefer craft books; there is some relief and common writer-to-writer ground in them), but even if I have to read it over and over again, I believe I can learn from him.
And if I can’t, well, attempting to learn is its own kind of learning, wouldn’t you say, WR?
WR?
She’s gazing out the porch window, feeling partly reborn after having felt in an absolute bubble the past couple of weeks.
Oh, and yesterday she finally separated out her poems from last weekend instead of leaving them in the unceremonious lump in a file that she had originally preserved them in, and sure, they were jagged and unfinished, but there were some not-terrible spots, as well as several lines to put into the “poetry idea” file.
That’s a relief. She was afraid of what her writing life might look like if she had to choose between her body and her writing mind.
WR, that’s awfully sombre for a gorgeous porch writing session.
We keep it honest over here, she says.
I do believe she just did a cartwheel in the pinked grass.
But I happened to be wearing llama earrings, so naturally I said something about llama drama, and for a few seconds this seemed like a perfectly reasonable use of everyone’s time.
I declare, if another coffee shop opens in that building, I think I’m out. It’s a nope for me. Nopity nope. I cannot let WR’s little heart get curb-stomped one more time by a place she loves closing.
But since they’re taking the equipment to a new location, I find it doubtful that’s what will go in next.
Have WR and I dreamed of opening a bookshop there that happens to sell tea (and fine, coffee)?
We sure have.
But the last thing our town needs is another bookshop, and I’m not even sure the building is big enough, though WR has built an annex in her mind and finished the basement and/or turned the upstairs apartment into The Attic.
She hasn’t thought of it AT ALL.
I mean, what if it became a destination bookshop? What if it held events and hosted authors and, and…
WR, you KNOW you cannot do that. For many reasons. Just because you think it would be fun does not mean it would be. You’d love it for approximately two weeks and then you’d hire someone to babysit it when you want to write.
There could be concerts on the porch again, and artwork on the walls.
But you’d have to hide some of the lovely windows, WR, to install enough bookshelves.
No, WR, I do NOT think customers would like to bend down below them to reach the bookshelves!
I’d want a new and used bookshop, anyway. With a nice big box of free books.
And oh my goodness, what if the upstairs apartment could be like Shakespeare & Company and host writers for retreats?
What, you said books would need to go up there?
Well, writers aren’t very big, are they?
I know, I know. There is no way in hell this town is big enough to support another bookshop, no matter how many frills you add to it.
Yesterday, I didn’t want to do anything on the writing front. This was particularly annoying because physically I am feeling better. Mentally, however, I feel a bit as if my brain had been packed in shipping peanuts.
This wasn’t exactly writer’s block, which wouldn’t have mattered because I invented tricks long ago to keep myself writing, if I really must.
I had ideas. I still cared about the results. I just couldn’t seem to muster any enthusiasm for sitting down, putting my fingers on the keyboard, and doing it.
It probably didn’t help that I’d been watching The Rooster, the Steve Carell campus comedy, the night before, which is so damned good. (My novel is set on a college campus, so comparisons are inevitable, I suppose.)
My novel is nothing like The Rooster and doesn’t want to be. But there is something intimidating about watching an exceptionally polished piece of art set in your own novel’s setting while standing knee-deep in your own unfinished one.
And spoiler, the feeling sucks.
Meanwhile, you have seventeen versions of the same paragraph and a note to yourself that says something like FIX THIS.
How, exactly?
Intellectually, I know this is ridiculous. I’m comparing a finished, professionally produced television show to a novel that is still being written. I might as well stand in my kitchen holding a raw potato and feel inferior to the fries at a restaurant.
But apparently my intellect was not running the meeting yesterday.
(I think I forgot to mention that this medicine also gives me headaches, so that’s fun.)
So I decided not to write, exactly. Instead, I opened the Notes app on my phone, set a timer for ten minutes, and decided I could at least talk about what I might write.
Ten minutes. That was it.
By the time I stopped, I had dictated somewhere around a thousand words.
But what interested me wasn’t really the number of words. It was how different those words felt from the ones that come through my fingers.
They were raw.
I repeated myself. I could hear myself circling the same thought, apparently hoping that if I came at it from another direction I might finally say what I meant. There were false starts. Thoughts that began confidently and then wandered into a ditch. Sentences I would never have allowed to survive if my fingers had been involved.
Because when I type, apparently I am editing much earlier than I realized.
There’s a little invisible space between my brain and my fingers where all kinds of things happen. I hesitate. I change a word. I delete something. I begin again. I decide I don’t mean that at all.
By the time the thought appears on the screen, it has already been through some degree of processing.
Speaking took that away. And Word Raccoon says she is not a fan of the method because she likes balancing on my keyboard and watching me.
I could hear the repetition. I could feel the false starts. But the timer was running, and the bargain I had made with myself was not that I would speak beautifully for ten minutes.
I just had to keep speaking.
Some of those words will probably disappear completely. Some may exist only because I needed to say the wrong thing before I could find the right one. But there are ideas in those thousand words that I didn’t have before I started talking.
And on a day when I couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for doing anything, that seems pretty good.
I didn’t force myself to do the thing I couldn’t make myself do.
I made it smaller, then I changed its shape.
I couldn’t write?
Fine.
Could I talk?
Apparently I could.
Did I enjoy it? Not really. But I might have discovered another way into the work for the days when the usual entrance appears to be locked.
Today I’m going to look at those thousand words and find out what my mouth knew before my fingers got involved.
Send help. And Coke Zero. Wait, maybe not that.
P.S. Apparently my supposedly useless self also submitted three packets of poetry last night, which is not nothing.
September is just being rude to me and Word Raccoon. What with the arthritis medication side effects, which apparently include feeling meh about writing (since when??), making our Coke Zeroes hype us up WAY TOO MUCH, and not really being able to settle down to do anything, well, my friend, it’s not looking like a promising month.
Even still.
We wrote 1K words on the novel yesterday, though WR resented them because they were framing words and not finishing, but you can’t finish an unframed scene, WR!
We also wrote poetry during our dunes trip over the weekend, and our first vertical, though the whole lot is so bad we are still snickering at ourselves. (There’s a line, “Until then, I’ll be Spider-Man,” cribbed from the movie we saw, and somehow we thought that needed to be tucked into a poem??)
We are staring at our House Gorgeous list and wanting to erase half of it, because WHY?
We are staring at four packages on the porch and rolling our eyes at the Drema that ordered them, considering she will need help hauling two of them to the garage until needed.
Yesterday we sorted our household project/redecorating items (well, we started) and discovered we have enough wallpaper to paper the entire town. We loaded some of the stuff into the car to donate. Some of it was excused to the garage. More of it is upstairs tucked under a table, awaiting its eventual putting into a bin for a particular project.
And why is that, WR? BECAUSE SOMEONE DIDN’T TAKE THE FLAMINGO-COLORED PAINT OUT OF ITS BOX FOR THE PROJECT WE WERE WORKING ON YESTERDAY, AND WE HUNTED AND HUNTED BEFORE DECIDING TO CHECK THE BOXES. IN A BOX. STILL SEALED.
SIGH.
We did that project, finally: we painted the outer door edges yesterday and today stamped them with gold. We found the trend online, but others were doing strips of tape and layering the paint, and WR and I were like, nope, let’s make it easier and just as pretty.
Are the gold flowers we stamped regularly placed? Nope. Do we like them? Yes. We. Do.
Oh, this medicine (it’s really helping the body but) can also cause insomnia. Hello, my old friend. I’ve been up since four bargaining with Stanley over my schedule. Every time we agree, I decide to switch something around. For reasons. He has been pretty flexible, but he says he must insist I preserve my writing time today, that just because the latter part of this week is all social, apparently, does not mean I should not write.
I would gladly write, Stanley, if I thought I had anything meaningful to say.
Anyway, I truly am going to try to see if WR can recover any of the razzledazzle of her poetry or the novel. (We’d made a pretty startling discovery regarding our novel before we left for the weekend, but even that kinda seems whatever atm.)
And now it looks like it’s going to rain. Insert tiny motivational word umbrella here. Or not, as you please, reader.
As Word Raccoon and I were working on a different blog post this morning, I was stopped by something in the distance.
It looked like an incredible sweep and funnel of greenish butterflies.
And I wondered, do I know of any butterflies of that hue?
But then I looked closer, and I could see the tree releasing leaves, and I felt a slight shudder.
And then the tree right in front of me also let go of a leaf, as if to say, Yes, it’s happening already.
And then I realized that October will make a year since I lost my youngest sister.
And I thought, I’m not ready. I’ve just begun to be able to press on the loss and it not ooze, just ache.
But even as I write this, slowly, here and there, leaves give up.
And I’m resigned to bare branches too soon.
Here’s a notebook poem from last year that I ran across this morning. It’s not a grief poem, exactly, but today its late-summer leaves feel different to me.
The Earth is a Hive
The earth is a hive and none of us truly alone. Let that be a comfort or no.
From the bees that dance with the unwilling late-summer leaves, from the squirrel that chases his brother up one bouncing branch and down another,
the cars that flit and flee, evidence of life, nonetheless.
Even our bodies are stuffed with bacteria.
I don’t think I want to consider that.
But it’s clear, we are never alone.
I know, I know, WR had to go and twist that last bit. It’s what she does. And it may be a bit muddled all the way around, but that’s why it’s a notebook poem, duckies.
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