Yes, You Can Have a New Dress

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I’m overdue for a post. When my daughters are around, underfoot, messy, loud, social (we always seem to have three or four extra kids here), I’m convinced that if they would just go away — just for a few days! — I would get some writing done. Then, they all take off and I stumble around the house, bereft, cleaning, calling people I haven’t seen in ages, reading novels that I really don’t need to read.

Finally, today, I stayed in my chair. Remember BIC? Butt in chair? Whenever I felt really really frustrated, as though I would explode if I sat for one more moment, I conjured up someone like Jane Yolen or Anne Lamott, those masters of getting-work-done, and they told me to keep sitting.

I thought, often, of Naomi Shihab Nye who I  once heard proclaim at a poetry reading (was she reading or just proclaiming?): “Sometimes I pretend I’m not me, and I just work for me. So I check in. I ask, ‘How are you doing? How’s the work going?'”

Today, after several hours, I could finally say the work was going fine. Now, with 55 pages cleaned up and printed out (and a new character added!) I can stop. I have a wedding to attend this weekend, and I think I will go buy a new dress.

Two Quotes

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“Somewhere it is written on a wall, ‘When life is sweet, say thank you and celebrate. When life is bitter, say thank you and grow.” -Joan Chittister, The Monastic Way

“The world–or the part we humans are in charge of–is a mess. A huge, unconquerable mess. You cannot fix it, nor can you put it all on the page to create a vast novel that encompasses and somehow solves the chaos. All you can do is write your own small corner of this world, how you, or the characters you make up, see it, feel it, and are affected by it. And maybe figure out one tiny thing in the chaos that you can help make right or illuminate.” -Barbara Abercrombie, The Year of Writing Dangerously

 

Making Potato Salad

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(image from tasteofhome.com — I chose this picture for the bowl)

I am pleased to share a poem written by my friend from Writing Lab, Kathryn Johnson. Feeding people seems to be one of our basic instincts in the face of grief.

 

Making Potato Salad

It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting because that is the end of every man, and the living takes it to heart. Ecclesiastes 7:2

A hundred miles away
Your voice crackles out the cell phone staccato message
Your father is dying.
So you’ll stay another day on the farm to arrange
The hospital bed in the windowed room
Where your mother
And your grandmother
Slept their waning nights next to the moonlit pasture.
I ask what I can do from here,
You list people to call, mail to send, then add
“Make potato salad.”

On the last picnic weekend twenty years ago,
The call came that the old man who had built our new church
Was dying of heart failure.
We arrived behind the ambulance
Too late.
You sat in the living room to comfort the widow and son,
I drifted to the kitchen with the at-loose-ends daughter-in-law.
Aimless strangers in a house of fresh mourning,
We found boiled potatoes and eggs
Pre-cooked for holiday lunch
Hours before this cloudless day tolled
Dark, somber, brassy.
I sliced the pickles, she peeled the eggs,
We measured mustard and mayo in a large mixing bowl,
Believing later
The grieving would be hungry.

But now, since you don’t eat potato salad,
I’ll mow the lawn, front and back,
I’ll wash your navy blue sweater and pin-stripe shirt,
I’ll pile up pictures of your father driving his tractor,
Smiling behind his commissioner’s desk,
Cradling his dark-eyed baby girl,
Sitting on the couch with his middle-aged sons,
Standing by the canal’s edge with the radiant blond wife of his youth.
I’ll fall asleep reading Ecclesiastes,
And tomorrow,
I’ll make oatmeal cookies, timed warm for your arrival,
In case you’re hungry.

Kathryn Duncan Johnson, May 2012

Begin again…

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Syringa in my sister’s yard above Lewiston, Idaho.

Recently, driving to Lewiston or Chehalis or Mt. Vernon, I saw a woman lunging a horse in a round corral. It was a young horse, a paint, and I imagined it as a filly, though (driving along the freeway) I couldn’t really tell. It looked so simple. And then I thought of how it isn’t simple. Training a horse, writing a book, both begin with simple steps that don’t much resemble riding or writing. But one has to get up in the morning and take those steps. Eventually, they begin to accumulate. Eventually it can be called riding. It can be called writing.

I have been getting up every morning — every morning I’m at home — and scribbling, waiting for the muse to strike, hoping my life hasn’t become too busy to allow her access. Yesterday, thinking of that young woman in the corral with her paint filly, I decided to try retyping my novel from the beginning.

I cut ten pages from the prologue. I typed twenty pages. I cut a lot of phrases such as “she thought” and “it seemed to her.” I think it’s working. This morning I reread aloud everything I’d typed yesterday. I typed in more changes, and then I typed ten more pages.

“[I]t seems to me nonetheless that a book you write, like a dream you dream, can have more healing and truth and wisdom in it at least for yourself than you feel in any way responsible for.” -Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets, 22