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  • Less noise, more me
  • Good times
  • Not Ken’s Dream House
  • The joy of different
  • This must be the place
  • All of the feels
  • Life update: endings and beginnings
  • Adapting to the lasts
  • At the same time
  • Take a picture it’ll last longer
  • Horsin’ around
  • Surrender, Dorothy
  • College let-go
  • End of summer this-and-thats
  • Aging is for the weak, and everyone else

Archives from 2002-2006

Stephen King’s The Gunslinger begins, “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” Man, what an opening line. (What a great book, too; the first one’s by far my favorite of the Dark Tower series.) I get hung up on beginnings when I’m writing, even the fluffy pop culture stories that aren’t much more than a whiff of personal commentary on a story that’s already been published all over the web. If I can just get the first few sentences out, however crappy they may be, I feel a sense of momentum and I lose that ever-present fear that this time I will finally have run out of words.

Somewhere along the line I lost sight of the fact that this is my personal playground, a place where I can write what I want and it doesn’t have to be formatted, tagged, and summarized in an SEO-friendly linkbaity headline. It doesn’t have to have a perfectly-sized image, the intro paragraph doesn’t have to grab you, the closing line doesn’t have to be a comment-begging question. Best of all, it doesn’t much matter if it gets read or not.

If beginnings are hard, endings are even worse. The fun part, the part that always makes the screen drop open to that place where everything just flows and I get the sense that I’m along for the ride rather than pushing myself along, is right in the middle. Let’s take this place and go there more often.

I have been sitting near rivers lately. The Rogue, tumbling and hurried and gathering itself to burst forward in gasping sprints. The Umpqua, slowed by the deep horseshoe bend in front of the cabin, a spoon lazily stirring cream in a cup. Ospreys and eagles and those improbably enormous buzzards flying overhead. Everywhere a riotous cacophony of green.

All three of my boys like to be active in the water, tossing time-flattened skipping stones or casting fishing lines or easing into that first full-body immersion. I’m happiest in a chair with a book in my lap, as content and still as a lizard on a hot rock. I can feel the weight of the sun on my skin, I feel dopey with the heady pleasure of it. I imagine, somewhere inside me, a charging battery that will get me through the dark winter months.

At some point I put down my book and tip my head back. Breathe in, all that buzzing warmth filling my chest. I can hear laughter and splashes, see flashes of striped swim trunks and the glint off my husband’s sunglasses. Mom! someone cries happily. I smile and wave and I look at the water and I cannot imagine how it all works. How it came to be that this particular ripple, this one right here, has traveled its great unknown journey to splash against this riverbank where I’m sitting with my family. Everything that has led to this exact moment. Every tiny thing that could have changed the trajectory, every unpredictable destination ahead. And on and on it goes, never stopping. The water is forever, and I’m left believing in something like luck, or if not that, believing in my own gratitude. A breeze sighs through the valley, every leaf dances then stills. Everything around me speaks of the uselessness of focusing on the past or future. There is only this, and my god, my god, it is so glorious.

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