Spicy Dragons & Dinosaurs

I have just a few minutes before Julia needs to wake up for school. I have been going to bed with her in the evening, doing something on the computer when she falls asleep, and quickly going to sleep myself. So, it is true, early to bed, early to rise. Waking before 6 is easier and I have the energy to keep going throughout the day, but climbing into bed at a few minutes before 8 each night as we do to read before lights out, makes me feel like I am missing something. What? I have no idea.

Julia read her poem yesterday in front of her whole class plus a smattering of parents. She was the second one, chosen at random, to read her poem. She was scared and she missed some words, but she tried very hard to read with expression and she was very pleased to be clapped and snapped at when she finished. The kids learned that snapping fingers was a hip poetry thing from the 50‘s. Ancient history. When we got home from the clinic later last night and were walking the dog, I asked Julia about her experience. This is always a hard kind of conversation to have with Julia but we muddled through after I insisted on talking about the poetry reading a few times. Julia told me that she was a bit scared but that it was easy and really fun to get up and read her poem. Truly, that was what it looked like by the end of her reading. She gained more confidence as she read through her poem and the last few lines were done almost as well as she had done it for me the night before. Ah, those acting genes. . . wait, she doesn’t have my acting genes. Must be something in the very air we breathe.

I am a bit anxious to get on with the sorting. And good that I am feeling this way. I brought the sorted plastic boxes up to the dining room a few weeks ago now, and have not touched them since. Not good. Not good at all. Tuesday, when Ed was installing the last cabinet and mucking around in the basement, he noted that it was really clearing out. Well, yes, it looks cleared out because there are plastic storage boxes in the dining room but more dramatically, all the boxes of kitchen stuff have been put away. With the gaping hole in the middle of the basement where the kitchen boxes stood staring at me in the basement, I have had no inclination to investigate the periphery where much that is unsorted and/or long-stored stuff awaits. I am imagining that it is the tougher stuff to sort. What am I going to do with a box of old sheet music? It doesn’t make sense to save it but I hate getting rid of it. Why? Because . . . no good reason. Just because I’ve packed it up, probably most of it before law school, and carried it around ever since. Does Half Price Books take sheet music? It helped me to get rid of books taking them there. Not that there is any great money to be made selling to the store, but I know those books, some of which were very good books just not ones I was interested in, would find someone to buy them. I wonder if I could find a needy lounge singer in need of sheet music?

Julia has been put on the bus and I am drinking tea, eating my banana muffin and tapping away.

Yesterday, I tried writing a bit of fiction. I’ve had this fragment of a story cursing through my veins for a few weeks now. I’ve always had pieces of stories rumbling around inside of me. I go over the story to get myself to sleep. I day dream about it. Sometimes, I night dream about them. But when I write them down. Uck! I am clumsy and obvious and obtuse. Stories come out nothing at all like I imagined. And yet, here I write without pause. Like turning on a tap. Now, I am not saying that I am any Samuel Pepys, but this is easy and for once in my life, I am going to go with easy, and leave the impossibly difficult to someone else.

I’ve been messaging while I’ve been writing here with a friend and a sister, both of who, I just now realize, have changed their lives drastically in the last year or so. Both have done so a bit more of their own accord that I have, but I see that I have gathered around me some fellow travelers in change.

One describes a coming storm that looks to her list the start of creation. The other has drawn out in me what I’ve learned so far in this fallow year: patience and doing what comes naturally. I write: It is a delicate balance of moving on or forward and considering the lessons learned. I tend to tip in one direction or the other, the middle path, walking in the middle of the river is the challenge. Okay, so that sounds rather wise. Maybe I am learning.