Choosing to Write

I’ve had my head, heart and fingers in the writing all spring and summer. Total focus. Each day I see progress both with the work I’m editing and learning the craft. I love this. When everything is working with my writing, but when that is happening, I can dang near bet that the rest of my life is a gone-wrong flash-mob. (You know the one—where no one gets the timing right and everyone gets the steps wrong)

I’ve been writing all my life and as I tell my grandkids, I’m older than Spiderman, but still I have so much to learn. That just amazes me. Just when I think I have it, I learn something new that changes everything. Still, isn’t that what keeps me excited? Yes.

 Previous years, my garden pretty much rules my summers. I never could quite help it. I’d let the gardening win out too many times when there was a time crunch. (I regret that, fought it even, but winters are so long and I love my fingers in dirt.) Slowly, over many years and for many reasons, I’m learning to have it all. Well, not really, we really can’t have it all, all at once.

Anyway, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve redesigned, eliminated and consolidated every bed, but this year, this summer I’m finally pleased with the yard as a whole. In all the years we’ve lived her, it looks better than ever. I like it and it doesn’t take a lot of time to keep it looking nice.

Well, of course, something has to be awry. My honey locust. It suffered damage in a terrible windstorm in January and we ended up cutting it back to what was, basically, a stump. It branched out and turned into a decent looking tree. A little Dr. Seuss, but I like it. It had a lot of potential, but this summer’s hot winds have just plagued us. The tender new branch shoots just couldn’t hold up and they’ve have broken, bent down and in general, frustrated me.

There’s just not enough time for us to ever see a new tree to the size that it will shade our yard. The locust was just to the size it did and so perfect. All last summer I was commenting on what a perfect tree it had turned out to be for shade and looks and…I’m not going to start over and I’m not going to take it out. It will be what it is. It won’t be perfect. It will be like me. Scarred, life-worn, but stronger for it. (I hope).   

A favorite spot:

I’ve let my garden take on a more natural theme, simpler, easy-keeping plants, and I’ve relaxed my standards. (Some things the experts tell you to do don’t really need doing.) And I’ve been rewarded.

I love the new look around the place as do the bees and butterflies. I’m enjoying the garden, not just working the garden. Better yet, I haven’t once made the agonizing decision to get the gardening done instead of writing because the yard was screaming neglect. I haven’t wrestled with that choice once. I just plop myself down at the computer and write with guilt. At least not because the yard hasn’t been groomed.

As a writing mother, primary care-giver, wife, chief cook and bottle-washer, I’ve always had to agonize over priorities. Struggled with the guilt when I choose writing. Guilt is just a truth of it, I think, and for women, more so. There is no escaping and I’m a dang slow learner. Putting my writing first has always been a struggle, much like grammar for me. Do you put the comma here or there? Do I garden, clean the house, do the wash, and check on mom, do a five-minute meal, thirty-minute meal or do I go all out? (Thirty minute meals are my friend. I gather good, quick and easy recipes like emergency funds. Squirreling them away for those days, I cannot pull myself away from the computer.)

I’ve learned you put the comma wherever and move forward. You keep writing. You write now while the fingers are moving over the keyboard and worry about dinner and commas later. But…you plan; hedge your bets as much as you can. (I take advantage of every time savor that makes sense and I can afford. Crockpots are crucial.)

And the hardest thing to remember: Your writing is never as important to anyone else as it is to you. No one else will hurt, cry or shrivel away if you don’t write. You have to care about it enough to face down everyone and everything else. Not all the time, but most of the time.  (You’ll have to remind everyone you explained your writing schedule to, not once in a while, but all the time. It is so hard for anyone to understand what you are really doing in that room alone for hours and hours. No one will understand the need for uninterrupted time, least of all those that love you. They try, they really do, but I’ve not found anyone who doesn’t write or make music or art that can understand that writing isn’t typing: that the words don’t just run down your arm to the keyboard onto the screen as if you’re speaking into a recorder. The process is hard to understand because you can’t really see it being done.)

The world goes on whether I write or don’t, the same as for anything else I choose to do. I have to choose to write every time.

You will find a great many of the truths we cling to rely greatly on our own point of view. Obi Wan Kenobi