WILDFLOWERS

I’ll confess. For the past three weeks, I have not been writing, revising, or querying. I have been spending my time in a much more productive way. With a manic surge of energy, I have spread hundreds of photos, and dozens of albums, the flotsam and jet-sam of our marriage, on the bedroom floor. The piles grow in front of me, Paris in one pile, grand children in another, my first attempt to organize twenty years of prolific if not artful scenes and faces. I tell myself that I’m doing this for our children. So that they won’t have to sort through this mess after we’re gone.

Except that I’m lying to myself. I huddle on the carpet at the end of my bed, Willie sleeping amongst the debris, because I don’t want to write. Now and maybe forever. After the albums and the photo boxes are lined up like totems on an high shelf in the hall closet, I turn to the next project.  My recipes, tossed for years into folders or scrunched in wads at the back of the cupboard, are calling to me. 

“Oh, god,” my husband murmurs as he makes his way to his side of the bed and pauses to pull fragment of scotch tape off the sole of his left foot. “Another disaster scene. What’s next?”

“My left-over glass, I think.” A box of large and tiny shards of Bullseye glass wait for me in the storage unit. It’s difficult to give up a hobby that has left me scarred but fulfilled. It is also hard to throw away glass that cost a small fortune just because I decided to become a writer. Now that I understand that my novels aren’t going to be discovered, won’t bring me fame and fortune, or even an agent’s request to read the whole manuscript, the glass beckons. At least I may get a wedding present for a nephew out of the effort. And I’ll have created something that someone will say is wonderful even if he doesn’t know what it is. “It’s a deviled egg dish,” I’ll whisper.  I begin to get inspired.

The recipes are now back in the cupboard, all in folders, Meat, Vegetables, Bread, etc., and I begin to clean up. The vacuum doesn’t fit under the bed and I lie flat on the floor and scootch until I can reach the papers hiding there. When I have them between my fingers and pull myself out, I see that I am holding four pictures of myself, pictures I set aside and forgot in my relief at finishing the photo project.

Me, forty some years ago, dark-haired, red lips grinning, holding a three-month old baby who stares, mouth open in surprise, at the camera. Me, twenty years later, grinning through a veil of sadness at the end of marriage, retreated to a beachhouse deck, Dino the Dog, my faithful companion, panting next to my knee. Me, my graying hair trimmed and stiffened as befits a professional photo session, grinning so broadly my gold tooth glitters because this picture will appear in an anthology along with story of mine. Me, only few years ago, sitting in a field of blue and orange wildflowers, grinning at how good life has become.

No, I guess I won’t stop writing. I’m just taking a break to acknowledge those four women who were me.  A pause to consider the story the next photo will tell.  

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TRAINS, RABBITS, WATERMELON SEEDS

A friend went out of my door the other day saying “What’s a girl to do?”  I had just said something like how happy she seemed despite a few downturns in her fortunes lately. We both laughed.  Neither of us are girls and our realities are, for the moment, out of our hands.  No doing by either of us for a while.  Just being done to, not that great a feeling, actually.

Then I started thinking about the question. Who asked it the first time, before it popped out of my friend’s mouth like a watermelon seed?

I had just done a Google search on dog diarrhea and knew if that very special subject was included in the lexicon of Google knowledge, so might the phrase, “What’s a girl to do?”

It is.  It appears that the question has nothing to do with two older females  moaning about finances and query rejections. It concerns rejection of a different ilk.  A young girl, who is at best thirteen, sings  a song as she rides a bike in the dark and rabbits (big ones) run behind her. She doesn’t love her lover anymore. How will she tell him?

Perhaps I’m missing something. My speakers only whisper at me when I listen to YouTube. So I find the lyrics. Maybe I will learn a little more about what I am to do, or at least get inspired for the short story I am thinking of entering in a local contest.

“When you love so long/ That the thrill is gone/ And your kisses at night/ Are replaced with tears/ And when your dreams are on a train to train wreck town/ Then I ask you now, what’s a girl to do?” (Bat for Lashes, 2007)

Well, I’d advise her to get off the train. Quick.

Shit, did I really say that?  I mean, this girl and the rabbits are not really singing about love, are they?  What do rabbits know about love? They’re singing about failing dreams, about deflated hopes, loss of self esteem in those ridiculous costumes.  Maybe about rejection slips.

Am I advising myself get off my train before I wreck?  To quit while I’m still alive?

As I type this,  a “ding” sounds.  I have an email.  I have two more agents and a publisher to hear from. .  I click on the email symbol. I’m not quite ready to get off the train