Happiness is a Warm Sun

Sunshine is dancing through my windows today, hardly enough to melt the eighteen inches or so of snow dropped on us last night, but sunshine anyway. I crave its warmth as some crave the melting of Godiva chocolate on their tongue. When the snow is piled higher than my knee caps, I usually have to get books about pioneer women out of the library in order to realize that I don't have it all that bad.



But my words freeze. My bones bleed ice. My fingers are numb to type well from too much shoveling, from walking the dog (who can never catch enough snowballs, ever) . All I want to do is crawl under the covers and not come out until the sun shines.



And today it shines...brightly. May the warmth of this winter sun melt away the snowbanks in the neighborhood and AND the word freeze in my brain.

The Coming of the Snow

That's the title of a Rod MacDonald song I love. Well, I love listening to him sing it in the summer anyway, not when the snow has actually made its way to us. We've missed most of the horrible storms of this season, until now. I cannot see the street because of the snow piled on the branches of the tree in front of my office window. I can't hear the sounds of traffic either, maybe because every school within twenty miles is closed.

I actually like the hush this kind of snow brings with it, and am thankful that I can remain in my pjs and sit here typing words no one reads. Didn't have to shovel and hubby walked the mutt this morning. Didn't even open the door to wave goodbye to them. I'm hunkered down over this laptop trying to edit the poetry manuscript I finished yesterday. My deadline is Friday. I have today to find all those words I am absolutely certain are spelled correctly that the very first person who picks the book up finds at first glance.

Editing is not what I like to do. I'd rather be wrestling with my words, rearranging them on that computer screen until they fit right, not staring at those crisp, white sheets of paper until every word seems wrong. Yesterday I grabbed the dictionary to check on "jump" after staring at it way too long.

I'd much rather sit here and look at the snow today, get tangled up in it, write poems about the way it's so softly layered on the tree branches, how it keeps falling, falling, falling, how my early morning silence is lulling me back to sleep, and when I peek outside, I see a field of white, except for the cherry red ski cap the Iraqi girl wears. She's waiting at the bus stop in her usual spot. She is new to the neighborhood, new here period. Perhaps no one has explained "snow days" to her. I'm getting my boots on.

Under My Tongue

That's where the words were stuck, right under my tongue.

I snored myself awake, after dreaming of wading through tall prairie grasses, swirling a walking stick beside me to stir away any critters that I might not want crawling up my skirt. When I pulled back the covers, set my bare feet on the round rag rug Grandma Priscilla made that sits on the floor by my bed and stumbled to the bathroom, the dull awakening that it's another day of mid-winter in an apartment in a place that calls itself a city with not one ounce of the hustle and luster of Manhattan, I groaned, looked at myself in the mirror and said, "She hadn't found the time to let herself grow up."

What might that possibly mean?

Now that those words have escaped from under my tongue, I need to examine them, toss them around a bit, allow them to somersault across my computer screen until I know what they want to be when they grow up. I doubt they apply to my almost sixty-year-old self. Perhaps it was the beginning of a story about a girl on the prairie, although I can't think of a more boring subject to write about, personally.

And so I must ponder this.......

If You Should Read My Mind....

...this is what you'd find first thing in the morning.

These words filled my head this morning as I showered. Someday they may grow up to be six stanza poems, the first line of that short story where things almost seem as if they might get back to normal by the end, or a line or two in a novel where the hero realizes that he hasn't the power to fix everything around him and simply gives up. Who knows? Their journey has yet to begin. I'm pasting their baby pictures here, and we'll have to wait to see how they mature, which ones pull on purple hats and develop wide toothless grins and which ones hide from the camera.

comfort softens the morning

the grace of accepting

curb your wanderlust

beyond this pale horizon of snow

She slept through the blizzard again.

inconsolable

Alfred was afraid his mother would send him more books and then he'd have to read them all.

Hummm...only time will tell if this has been a productive morning or not. But I believe somewhere within these lines there's something I'll be working on that shall make me sigh by midnight.

Morning Has Spoken

In the morning the words in my head rattle around upon rising. They begin to whisper to me even before I lift my head from my pillow. Sometimes it's the beginning of a poem teasing me awake, a sing song pattern of nonsense words easing me into the day with the promise of rhymes to come if I'll just open my eyes to the possibility. Or it's the dialogue needed between two characters in the story I've been working on.

Often it's an idea for a story, as it was this morning when I was in that half-dream state, wrapped tightly in the covers when hubby bent down to kiss me good-bye before he took off with the dog for their morning walk. Of course, I then bolted awake and whatever I was dreaming floated away into the lands of lost ideas.

Once the curse of what has to be done creeps into the daily routine those words that seemed so glorious upon rising evaporate.

I also discover words on long car rides, possibly because I do not drive and have the luxury of riding in the passenger seat and pretending to observe. My mind automatically begins writing after about an hour of this. There was a time when I was able to simple repeat my words and once I found paper I'd have a complete poem; now I must have paper readily available or such delights are forever gone. Of course, I fight to read the finished product as it's often difficult to write in the dark in a moving vehicle.

Wish I could remember the rest of what started out yesterday as..... never more and often less/haunted by my second guess. It might have been "the one".

Tangled Up in Goo

While I slept, a quiet spider worked her magic and spread a gigantic web around the bedposts. I'm covered with the delusion that I can make it through another day as if I lead a normal life, when all I wish to do is wrap myself in this luscious goo of failure and waste my words here where no one reads them anyway.