Laughing as leaves fall, making spirals in their descent,
Through elegies of air.
So still he moves,
Leaning into a soundless void.
Planets in their orbits spin
And yet no shift in his equilibrium shows
That he is out of synch with a world
Built for words.
______________
Images from a recent walk with my son, I was inspired by the drape of his blue blanket to wax poetic. Happy Halloween everybody. Nanowrimo begins tomorrow. Do not expect great things from me until December.
It is my one day off this week—a Monday filled with unfettered freedoms. At least, it will be just as soon as the window guy finishes up giving an estimate of the possibility of installing one more escape route for my child to threaten my sanity with.*
I should write.
But first I will rake some leaves. And then there is the pile of socks to sort and fold along with approximately 1 billion pair of underwear that, for some reason, are all inside out when they come out of the dryer.
I want to be a writer…but I need to return the clothes that didn’t fit and pick up the prescription at the store. Plus—as always—groceries.
I should WRITE!
Instead, I have managed to fill seven tiny plastic bags with assorted non-edible goodies for Halloween treats for my son to take to class—a class of children who really couldn’t care less if they get stickers and pencils instead of sugary products to rot their teeth. I will try to feel virtuous and not imagine the rubber duckies winding up in a landfill instead.
If I write, will it be of the grandiose imaginings that drift through my mind? Will I finally dig up the series this blog’s title is based upon? Will I manage to untangle the Gordian knot of plot threads that are choking the life out of the beastly thing? History suggests: NO! I won’t.**
Maybe I will write today, but the clock is winding down. Time is a super-stellar suck of obligations, an enemy to creativity. It whisks away the should-have’s and could-have’s and leaves me with unfolded laundry and indecision.
I ShOuLDWrITe, dAMmIT!
But will I?***
Asterisk Bedazzled Footnotes:
*So, how does everyone feel about egress windows? Thoughts? Opinions? Dire predictions of home invasion or child escapism?
**My friend suggested a numbered list of reasons why I don’t write. I hate the click-bait ploy of lists, so I opted for this rambling mess instead.
1st Place goes to Kiri at The Dust Season for the “A Happily-Ever-After Story Involving Break-Ins and Police Action”. It takes a village to raise a child, but those villages often wait to show themselves. At just the right moment…
She was sent one Green Study Coffee Mug, a postcard from Minneapolis and $100 donation was made to the American Red Cross on her behalf.
“A Happily-Ever-After Story Involving Break-Ins and Police Action”
My son is an escape artist. He revels in finding ways around the protective prison cocoon of his home life. This would be fine, if my son were normal. But he isn’t and this story isn’t. So, before everyone gets up in arms about my use of the word ‘normal’ in relation to my son, let me get one thing straight: something beyond ordinary happened—and that’s okay.
Fall is here. The farmer’s market is overflowing with knobby, thick-skinned vegetables. The pumpkins are a little lopsided and I am drawn to long, creamy-skinned butternut squash.* When I pass mounds of earthy cabbage, I am haunted by my father.
I have a distinct memory from childhood of my father, out in the front yard, kneeling in the grass and chopping cabbage with the savage ferocity of a Mongol Horde bent on conquest. Why does this memory stick, you may wonder? He would buy cabbage in bulk, you see. A head of cabbage probably cost something like 60 cents back in the day—but if you bought a bushel, you’d get ‘em for a steal.
If you buy even a half-bushel, like my father did, that’s still a lot of cabbage. That means a lot of coleslaw or–gag–sauerkraut.** Nearly every weekend, my father was outside wearing plaid shorts, a white undershirt, black socks and work boots that he left unlaced, crouched over a butcher’s block cutting board committing cruciferous homicide. He would do this for a good hour or more. He did this with sufficient repetitive monotony that it has become one long reel of boring dad-moments, with only a minor variation on a theme if the bushel contained an elusive red cabbage–which made for an extra-bloody looking pile when he got done.
We have no pictures of my father hunkered in all his glory, but it is burned forever in vivid Kodachrome on the part of my brain where random, goofy memories are stored.
So now, whenever I visit the farmer’s market to check out the goods, I linger for a moment before the veiny, green-white disembodied heads…and remember.
Asterisk Bedazzled Footnotes:
*And before you go all phallic on me, I like to chop them into cubes and broil them until they cry for mercy. Try to make a sexual innuendo outta that!
**I survived several winters’ discontent of consuming sloppy, homemade sauerkraut by vomiting dramatically whenever forced to eat it.
If this picture makes you squeamish and just a little ill–you might be a man.
1st Place goes to Kiri at 
TheDustSeason 