The Color of a Winter Storm
With each Tuesday that came and went, I scratched through the word "write" on my calendar more often than I marked it with a check. The deadline for the Byline short story contest passed as I did mental calisthenics to keep up with the holiday hoopla. Once the insanity finally wound down just after we'd rung in the New Year, I received a gift while Jim was off hunting. It was delivered by Mother Nature in the form of a foot of snow. Ah…the quiet was sublime.
The snow-pack drove the gulls, which were normally perched on the lawn, into our little cove on the lake. The neighbors came out one by one, throwing bits of crackers into the air, and the birds circled, nabbing whatever crumbs they could from the dank sky the same color as their wings. In between feedings, they'd bob contentedly on the surface of the water, looking as if they'd had a royal supper. I'd never noticed how these birds, which have always seemed to me to represent summer, are actually the color of a winter storm.
I wandered around the neighborhood with my camera, snapping photos of lush red berries caked in snow and bald rocks dripping with icicles. I'd barely run my fingers through my hair, and had thrown on Jim's mustard-colored down jacket, which pretty much swallowed me, before heading out into the frosty landscape. My sweats were tucked into beat-up gray running boots that barely cleared the deep mounds of snow. I picked through vegetation, looking for any image I felt conveyed the creativity I wanted to express for my first photography workshop.
Being exacting with some of the shots put me in some pretty precarious poses while Sam limped along beside me in the plowed parking lot, lifting his snow-packed paws for me to clean every so often as he made his way from bush to bush and snow-bank to snow-bank. It was blissful—the hush that had come over the snow-plunged world brought such peace with it! I stayed out as long as my numb, reddened fingers would allow before herding Sam back into the house, my heart set on a warm cup of cappuccino.
I spent the rest of the afternoon with writing exercises from Brande's book, describing the mechanic at the local service station who couldn't figure out how to service the Jag after he'd professed to be an "import expert." Striding up to the sitting area where I was waiting, he asked me how much oil the car should take—like I would know! I looked at him as if he'd sprouted an extra head and he got the message, loping off to figure it out, his grimy fingers digging into his greasy scalp as he scratched his head.
In another exercise I set out to "tell myself how I comb my hair without using gestures." The entry trailed off in my writer's notebook, the ringing phone signaling it was time for me to begin the machinations that would pave our way back to Costa Rica. I sat thumping my pencil against the page wondering when life would slow down enough to allow me to have more time to be creative. I prayed it would be soon while knowing it wasn't likely to happen at all.
I'd received another rejection for a poem and realized that in my headlong rush to submit, I was forgetting to pay more attention to the quality of my work. The words came rolling out and in my excitement I let them be rather than taking them to task by forming the sentences into something finer than their raw, undigested states. No verse is free, I thought as I looked at the poem I'd sent out into the world, which had come back to me unappreciated. Each line of it had taken a piece of me with it and would now leach more from me as I struggled to hone and perfect the poem's structure and meaning.
I actually wondered if I was being beat into submission by blaring magazine ads noting contests. Was I forgetting that the importance of writing was in the creating rather than the submitting? I wondered. It also occurred to me that I was far from the well-rounded, fully developed writer I wanted to become. How could I expect my short stories or poems to be sophisticated if I had not reached full ripeness as a writer? I questioned. I wanted to really "get" this so that I could have more patience with myself and with the writing process.
These realizations were bringing a rawness to my life that made me feel exposed—like a peeled cucumber, its cool flesh dangerously delicate. As we dined at one of Chattanooga's finest restaurants far above the city lights one night, I enjoyed how the valley stretching out before us looked like a finely decorated holiday village. It occurred to me as I was admiring the view that the woman seated next to me, whom I'd come to know socially, was always so happy that I was doing whatever I was doing, even when what I was doing felt like nothing!
She had the sweet drawl of a woman raised in the deep south and I wouldn't say she was especially pretty but her warmth brought an openness to her expression that always drew me in. She was only mildly feminine, I guess; maybe the word handsome was a better descriptor given her dark brown hair, olive skin and somewhat masculine face. We sat at the elegantly set table exchanging pleasantries while I tried to gage her life and she tried to gage mine—a social give-and-take with which I had become achingly familiar.
At that moment the lights of a ball field in the distance flashed on and I was shunted into the memory of myself as a little girl—face smudged with dirt and sneakers caked with mud as I furiously argued with the boys on the tiny diamond in elementary school because they'd needed me to play in the outfield but wouldn't let me bat. I'd punched one of them and had landed in trouble with my third-grade teacher, whom I adored. I hadn't cared about getting in trouble, per se, because Donny had deserved the bloody nose. But I did care that I'd disappointed Mrs. Oliver—one of the rare teachers I'd had who seemed to see my potential as a brainy girl.
The woman at my table nudged me from my reverie, realizing, I guess, that my attention had wandered. I nodded and smiled as she droned on, thinking of George Gabb's statement, "Let your heart hold hands with your beliefs," for some odd reason. I realized then that I couldn't imagine anything this woman might fiercely believe in and that made me sad for her. But wasn't that arrogant of me? I vehemently believed in plenty and yet I was far from having it all figured out where devoting my life to my passions was concerned.
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. I'm still so far from actualizing myself in my writing at this point in my story, but my writing life does finally gel. To see a recent poem, visit this post on Roaming By Design. Thanks for stopping in!
