reflex

daddy's doctor bag sat in the back floorboard of his Ford for as long as i remember. he'd take it out for house calls, or when one of us was sick, opening up the brown otoscope case, popping on one of the the bluish-green tips before pulling open my ear to peer in it to see if i had plugged a nickle in there somewhere that was clogging me up. then he'd pop off the tip, flick on the penlight and ask me to say 'ahh', me hoping i could open wide enough so he wouldn't have to use a tongue depressor.

it was like an appendage to him, that black bag that never quite stayed shut. when he worked in the office, he'd go from room to room, ink pens lining the top pocket of his white coat, stethoscope and prescription pad deep in the pocket at his hip.  

on some days when Daddy was in the hospital over the winter, i would find myself in the cafeteria alone, waiting for him to to be bathed, to wake up, for the doctors to come by on rounds. on one of those days, i found myself trying to name everything that the black bag held, trying to hang on to this memory since i knew, honestly, that Daddy would never open that bag again and take anything out.

here is the list i made that day:

stethoscope

reflex hammer

prescription pad

blood pressure cuff

rubbing alcohol

Band-Aids

as i made my way down the short list, i could feel the cool metal of the stethoscope on my back as he listened to my heart when i was a girl. i saw myself sitting in the kitchen chair trying hard not to giggle — and to hold my knee still as stone as he tapped it with the reflex hammer.

i couldn't think of the name of that thing he used to look into my ears, but i could see it. 

when i got back to his room, he was awake, and before long the speech therapist came in the room to place the speaking valve on his tracheostomy tube, to see how well he could tolerate it.

they had been doing this off and on, and on some days, usually when my brother or i was there, he was able to talk a little, his graveled voice not sounding much like his pre-hospital one. 

daddy, i said that day, i was wondering: what all did you keep in your doctor's bag?

and in seconds he began the litany: stethoscope. reflex hammer. prescription pad. blood pressure cuff. thermometer. syringes. Penicillin usually. alcohol. ace bandages. tongue depressors. otoscope. 

otoscope. that was what i couldn't remember. in all those weeks, though he seemed in and out of confusion at times, it took only a moment for him to rattle off the tools of his house call trade.

that day, my brother happened to swing by, and looking at him in his white coat i realized i'd never seen him with a doctor's bag of any kind. he was not Daddy's doctor, but even if he once or twice grabbed a stethoscope to listen to his chest, he took it from Daddy's bedside, not from one hanging around his neck.

to treat a patient these days, a doctor might grab sterilized gloves from one of the boxes on the wall, a syringe from a dispenser in the hall (well, usually the nurse does that), log into the room computer to print out a prescription. sometimes i wonder if all that is better than the laying on of hands my father required to do his daily work.

+ + + 

the morning after Daddy died, i went to his car and climbed in the back seat to take in his smell. the rubbing alcohol was there, and i looked around the floor board for the bag, but it was not to be found. made sense, since Daddy hadn't practiced in a few years, that he would have taken it out. seems i recalled that for awhile, it sat on the old chair at the door of my room, where he now kept his office.

back in the house, i looked and it was not there.

a few days later, my sister and i stood in our attic, looking around. there, on the floor was an old doctor's bag, empty and worn from decades of travel, but it was not his most recent bag.

my mother has been looking for the bag for weeks. she has a purpose for it, but though she has been through every closet and looked in every drawer, she's been unable to find the one thing Daddy used every day of his career. it's troubling, like if she opened their closet one day to find his yellow sweater missing, or that someone had misplaced the letter opener that has always been on the desk of the secretary right where he left it the last time he opened a letter. these are the small things that mean much to each of us. especially is doctoring tools.

it was saturday afternoon, and we had gone through closets and sat on the phone to india for 58 minutes trying to get the computer to work, only to find out we couldn't. we had gone through papers and a scrap book i had never seen (that's another post), and my mother, who is back on her feet now, gave me a roll of quarters Daddy had been saving for me since 1968.

then she told me how she had looked for the bag but couldn't find it.

i knew of nothing else to do but begin the search. so we opened the closet in my room and began taking things out.

a portrait of my grandfather from the bank where he served on the board. a box filled with tax returns. old coat hangers, skirts, a robe. a box filled with photographs, still framed, that had come from my grandmother's house. 

and from the clothes rack, a new vinyl satchel i had never seen. 

i lifted it off the rack, pulled open the velcro and the tears pooled in my eyes. the brown case that holds his otoscope— scratched from his own fingers, so many years of opening — two stethoscopes, the reflex hammer, all well worn and placed there carefully by my father's own hands, hung up like carpenter's tools, a long life of repair finally complete.

those who know more about these things than i do tell me that grief is like this. you go for weeks thinking now i've gotten past the worst of it and have worn out the tears and can go on my daily life without thinking of it, and then one small thing presents itself and there you are, weeping quietly over some small memory from childhood that hits your reflexes like a soft hammer to the knee. no matter how hard you might try to fight it, your throat closes tightens and there you are. there. you. are.

to me, it is like the mercurial atlantic. how one day, the air is still and the sea slick as ice, waves barely breaking, tiny ribbons of foam lining the beach where water meets sand. a day later, swells rise and fall but waves don't break, foamy tides climb up the sand, rip tides form, pulling just below the surface. and then you wake the next day and the sea roils, waves crash into each other long before they ever reach the beach, and you barely remember the calm, ice-slick day, from all the roaring.

susanbyrumrountree.com is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

summer sentence

it is on the third day

that the words come back,

letters long absent 

from your page, 

but as you figure out how

not to spill the water

as you pour it into the 

rented kitchen's coffeepot,

there they are, 

stretching ahead of you 

like line to a new boat, 

and you grab hold 

of that line

and hold on

because you know 

what's coming

finally coming,

so you think twice

about the pink sunrise

you saw just a bit

ago

as you scramble the eggs

and scratch the grandog's nose

butter your toast

and serve up breakfast 

for your kids who 

are almost never 

under the same roof

anymore,

and you think 

some more

as you

butter yourself up 

for a stretch out

in front of the ocean, 

when you

will crack open 

that new book

because you've already

read two 

in the past days 

as you listened 

to the ocean

talk to you 

for the first time 

in many, many months,

you catch yourself thinking again

that you are

relieved 

that the first book

is done because 

you feared

so for the woman

and the boy

in that story,

and you found yourself

weeping at the end 

of the second one

because you could

imagine how the man

and his wife, and 

the girl 

all felt 

at the end of that one,

and yes, 

you think still more

as you listen 

to the churning

of that blue ocean

and watch

the pink-tutued baby

next door dabble

in the saltwater puddle

at her feet

and remember when

the daughter sitting 

by you

with a book 

in her hand

was just that size,

doing just that thing,

dabbling, 

trying to 

carry 

a small bit of wave

in her tiny hands,

when you first brought

her to this beach...

so you take 

a short walk

in and out

of other people's vision,

those

lining to beach

propped under

a kaleidoscope

of umbrellas

watching

the gulls, 

the tattooed 

girls, 

lanky

 boys

skimming

the surf 

with their boards

and you wonder how they

can keep from

falling, 

and you peer to see

what other folks are reading

on iPads and phones and

in actual books,

like the weathered woman

sitting where the seafoam 

laps at her feet

who is in the final pages

of a good book about dogs,

so you walk on

and find yourself beneath

the pier, 

and at once you recall

your 

grandfather's

knotty 

fingers

cutting blood worms

with an old knife

on the splintered pier bench

then plying 

the bloody bits 

onto a hook 

for you 

to cast

over the side,

and you think 

how many times you 

watched the water

and felt the tug

not knowing whether it

was fish 

or foam

but you pulled it in 

surprised

at 

seaweed 

or silver fish

biting,

and as you think 

of those times 

all those years ago

you remember

your father's thin

tanned fingers as he 

stood on the pier

and slid his serrated

scaler on the surface

of the fish, 

the fingers of his other hand

holding tightly to the 

surprised

mouth and fins 

of the spot

or bream

as scales flew 

in every direction,

and you think of that summer

when he grew a beard

and you didn't like

that at all

or how that year,

the beach didn't 

seem to soothe him

like it always did,

and on your way back

you look out over 

the sea and the foam

and think of 

how many times 

you 

walked this beach

with your dad

and how this

is your first

time, really,

without him 

being here for

even a day or two, 

when you are

and there you

are, making new

prints in the 

moist sand

without him

by your side,

and as you make your way

back 

you 

wonder who

that girl was

so long ago who

wrote a story

about this place

that her daddy 

loved so, so much,

then you spy your children

sitting there

by the sea, 

your son's fresh beard

irritating you

just about as much

as your daddy's did, 

and you

think how

many more stories

there will be

to tell of this place

even though 

daddy can't

sink his 

narrow

toes 

in this 

sand 

anymore.

as writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

what's the matter?

i've been using my fridays in january as writing days. holidays done, no time-sensitive lists to check off, so there are no excuses not to get back at it. (though i write for a living, this kind of writing i do for my life.)

for three fridays in the past month i actually did. write. i've gone through the umpteenth revision of that novel i have been working on for so long it is now a period piece. but on this friday so far, i have ordered a couple of things online, checked FB for updates, read my daughter's blog, responded to 12 emails, made two phone calls and served my dog a piece of cheese, all the while hearing this tiny inner whine: why are you wasting time?

is the fact that february is here an excuse?

there were many days in the past 35 years when it like felt writing was wasting time. it didn't seem to matter to anyone but me, really.

writers, though, are vain people. we want to be read. so i kept at it, thinking one day somebody would read something i had written, and it would matter to them. i did get a job as a writer, eventually. so though it never really paid my rent, that was something.

as a working writer, i've had my share of articles published, some mattering more than others. i once wrote a story for my college alumni magazine for the anniversary of the nursing school there, and i stumbled on a vocal administrator who revealed the true story in nursing at that time: that every hospital in the country was short many nurses, which endangered patients. a dear nurse-friend agreed to be interviewed about how this heretofore undocumented nursing shortage affected her job, and she almost lost that job because her employer didn't want that particular story told. we rewrote the lede using her story but not her name, and after the piece ran in the alumni magazine, stories about the shortage showed up in newspapers and magazines all over the place.

in the late 90s i wrote a newspaper article about one of my favorite places and soon  began researching a book that led to actually writing one* (and finishing it), which led to a tiny little book tour. i felt pretty much like cinderella the summer the book came out, people showing up to see me. finally, i had the kindergarten storyteller's stool again. it had been a very long wait.

that year, i also reached another goal: my words showed up once a month in the paper i had dreamed of writing for for years. my assignment was to write my life down — something i had been doing pretty much all my life, but now, well, a little over hundred thousand people might actually read my words. and i'd get a check for a couple of dollars to boot. i had been working toward this particular goal for years, finding one editor who loved my work, another who said essays didn't matter to people reading the daily news. so when yet another called and asked me to submit one for consideration for a new column in the works, i thought finally, this will matter to someone besides me.

my first story ran on Feb. 13, 2001, and i (sort of) made fun of my husband — who dislikes Valentine's Day with a passion — and revealed that my favorite flower is the bachelor's button. i shared the foibles of his attempts on our first Valentine's Day to find a bloom you can't find anywhere in the middle of winter. special order only.

late that afternoon when i went to check the mail, i found a giant silk version of my favorite stem stuck in the ground next to the front stoop. as secret admirer perhaps? (it serves as the background for this blog.) proof that at least one person had read my little story.

the next 17 months of columns would take me through college applications and acceptances, a daughter's leave-taking and a son's guitar picking. a 20th anniversary & my parent's 50th. my husband's sailboat and an accident that claimed the life of one of my daughter's classmates, all served as fodder for the story of my life. 9/11 begat two columns — one, me trying to cling to some sense of normal by chronicling the years of my daily walk, the other, at Christmas, when i just didn't feel like doing Christmas at all.

by then i was receiving emails from readers, sometimes more than a dozen if particular words hit their mark. the Christmas column garnered one angry reader, who said my job was to make light of life, not to remind readers of how dark it sometimes is. another said i was depressed and needed medication. a few thanked me for articulating their post 9/11 feelings. somehow my story became everybody else's.

you never know, when put yourself out there, how people will take you.

when i wanted to write about my book being published, my querulous** editor said it would be self-serving. i asked her how, if i was supposed to write about my life could i not touch on finally reaching a life-long goal? she relented, and the story became not so much about the book as my life as an essay writer living in a family who doesn't really care for their lives being lived out on paper. 

what i thought would be the pinnacle of my writing career ended the week the Pea left for college. after 18 months, the column was gone.

"what they don't tell you about babies is that they leave," i wrote then... "right from the minute they're born, they are leaving you. you're ready, of course, because your toes are swollen, their knees crowding your rib cage and you say, if only they would go ahead and come out. and then they do and you say, oh, i didn't realize. didn't realize... that soon enough they'll learn to walk without holding your hand, put on a shirt by themselves even if it's the wrong color, draw out their ABCs in large blocks. later they will learn Algebra, which you never could do, and spell words like plethora, which you can. and while they're learning all these things, they're looking into your eyes, saying 'i will never leave you,' and they are lying. and you didn't realize when you look back and say, 'don't ever leave,' you're lying, too." *

i wrote those words quickly in 2002, not even thinking about them except that i had to get them out of my head or else i would break apart. i was upset that my child was leaving and that a lifelong passion was as fleeting a raising a child seemed to be at that moment. i wasn't thinking about who might read my words, or how my feelings might affect someone else's (except maybe the Pea, that she would say, awww, (lying) i really wish i could stay with you.)

no. i was just being selfish. 

i certainly never expected that i would almost forget i even wrote those words and then 11 years later, would pick up my phone at my day job and the caller would tell me exactly how my words had changed her. 

but that's what happened. a work call one morning this week about an event i'm helping plan, from a young correspondent for the same newspaper where my words once appeared. at the end of fact-checking, she said: i sent you an email — me fully expecting her to follow with: weeks ago, but you never answered — but instead she said: years ago, when you wrote a story about your daughter and how you couldn't wait for her be born and that spoke to me.

so much so, in fact, that she emailed me to say thank you. and that she was a young mom at the time who dreamed of being a writer. like me. 

like me. 

i had been that girl, 30 years ago.

though i don't remember it, i had written her back an encouraging email which she had saved all these years and now she is one. a writer. for several online publications. her 3-year-old is now 12. and doesn't want her mother writing stories about her anymore.

and here i have been thinking these past weeks that i am just to the light side of awful. 

i probably don't need to tell you that a choke took hold in my throat right then, and the tears swelled at the edges of my eyes. and all i could say was thank you. you have changed me with this call. (when i confessed that i don't read her column about being a mom, she said: that's ok, you're old. (old?) 

well, yes, i guess i am. 

'all the stories are written,' she said of her column, which she is thinking of ending, but i say no. hardly. new stories come around every single day, stories of you, with those around you as supporting cast. you just have to start.

later, i shared all this with the Pea. i know how her daughter feels, she said.

mattering matters. whether we are writers or weeders, caregivers or takers, loafers or sprinters, makers or menders, swimmers or water-treaders. all of us want to believe that somehow the ripples we leave even as we tread that water badly sometimes, will mean something good to our little corner.

it is a rare day when we find out that yes, they do. 

so i keep at it, treading through my day, weeding and weaving the stories, about the Pea and her brother, the Skipper and the dog who loves cheese, hoping that as i put one word after another, the story laid there will matter, if just to me.

now... back to that book.

* (the next year i self-published a collection of essays, ahead of my time apparently... and ever the poor marketer, i am now practically giving them away.if you'd like a copy of either book, contact me. both books are now out of print! 
 ** i could probably use her now, though i hate to admit that.

writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

this friday is so much better than last

.... everything came out ok, in the end, so to speak.

so we trudged through our week with temps over 100, the air so think in the morning that one of my friends posted on FB that it felt like living inside a cantaloupe. she was right on. the air, which smelled like smoke last week because of coastal fires and a wind shifting inland, smelled a little sweet now but can you imagine having your nose stuffed up against one of those cantaloupeon walls with no knife to cut yourself out? each morning we met at the end of the driveway and by the end of our 40-minute dog walk we truly felt like those cantaloupe seeds were stuck to our skin and we had no air.
but today i woke to 65 degrees. 65! and a breeze outside that felt like fall might indeed not have forgotten the way here when we're ready for it. but right now it's still summer, and we just want to be able to be outside. tomorrow, as some song says, that's just where i'll be.

the brownies are just out of the oven, and my dining room floor is covered with grocery bags filled everything my family will need for a week looking out over the crisp blue atlantic. towels and sunscreen, Fritos and Butterfly crackers, body wash for the outdoor shower and my husband's favorite black seal rum. 


and these. i grew them myself, all of them, plopped that plant in just the right spot and now here they are, ready to go with me to my favorite spot on the planet. by sunday i hope they find themselves in a pie or a blt or something like that. (the green one fell of the vine and even if he was a different color, it just didn't want to be alone.) he gets to ride along, and maybe he'll catch a few rays on the porch while we are there and be just right with a little goat cheese and some bacon and basilon the side.

we are celebrating, not just our annual vacay but the birthday of that book i wrote about this beach and blogged about a few posts ago. now that i am a paid writing hack, i have to be reminded sometimes that the dream i had since i was six actually came true 10 years ago this week. wow. and all because i have loved it here since my earliest memory.

but we are also celebrating family.

my daughter, cute in her bikini, will play her beach music, take in too much sun and shag in the kitchen with her dad (and me)... her husband will likely make the shrimp scampi (that is too spicy for me, but still — he's the only family member that actually lets me sit while he prepares) — and my son will fish and eat my marinated shrimp and have his beer and wax wryly about the people who walk across our path in front of the cottage and those who cross his path every day at work... and maybe by thursday, our boatless skipper will relax, finally. though he will miss the dog.

my father will sit on the deck and look at the ocean he's known since he was a child and think about things he won't share, and my mother will bring her caramel cake, along with a story, to share with us all.

i will read and wear my hat and get sunburned and maybe write a little and i will watch it all. w-a-t-c-h...breathe in the movement of my family, as changing as the ocean these days.

i first knew the atlantic when i was one, when we stayed in a cottage named the Coolamee in a second story room that stretched from streetside to beach. i remember feeling rocked by that ocean as the breezes blew through the windows, and how after a day on the beach, my sister and i would get our baths, then clean and warm in our clothes we would go back out and look for shells. i remember a pot full of crabs on the stove, my father using his pocket knife to clean the croakers on the porch and in my memory there was not a minute that i was bored.

and though i don't often swim the ocean anymore except to cool off on a hot day (the reason why is a story for another day) just listening to it and watching it fuels my soul. i have seen it calm as a kitten and as angry an an arching, growling bob cat... i can't explain it, but the rushing and the roaring and the calm gathering at the shoreline as all those angry waves almost hug each other somehow make sense to me. and i miss its absence in my life. but it'll be there tomorrow when i get there, changing, but forever the same.

me, as me

When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way; you shall not discern the foot-prints of any other; you shall not see the face of man; you shall not hear any name;—— the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and new. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Can you remember a moment in your life when you had life in yourself and it was wholly strange and new? Can you remember the moment when you stopped walking a path of someone else, and started cutting your own?

Write about that moment.

(Author: Bridget Pilloud)

It was a summer sunday afternoon just like this one when i hugged my kids goodbye at camp and instead of driving south, toward home, i headed north. i had never been on this particular road right by myself — had actually never been alone on a trip in fact — and with each mile marker i passed, i knew i was plotting new ground.

a few weeks before, a plain brown box had arrived at my door with books inside. books with my name in 64-point type stretched across the cover. books that as i cracked open the spine, for the first time in my life i knew the plot, the sentence structure, almost by heart.

and on this particular sunday, i was headed out on my very first book tour. first stop, richmond and a radio interview. r-a-d-i-o? with my squeaky voice? (let me say to any of the book writing folks out there: choose radio over the talking heads of tv.)  the pr flack i share bed space with had spent months with me it seemed, rehearsing talking points about the regional history i had put to paper — the people and the houses that had shaped the beach i had loved my whole life. how was it, that i, an outsider to this provincial world had been the one to capture it? or that the 12-year-old girl inside me who had always dreamed of writing had actually gotten an advance check (however small, it was the largest one-time paycheck i had ever gotten... a record that still stands.) that my publisher actually expected to see 7,000 books. Seven t-h-o-u-s-a-n-d! dear lord. a third of those in hard cover.

yet i had already sold some. many to the very people i wrote about. had a book signing party in an old cottage on the oceanfront on a glorious blue-sky day. and now i was going all over the place, it seemed, all by my little pea-picking self, to talk to strangers about why they should buy it, too.

at the time, it felt as if my whole life's work had come to this moment, me rambling down the highway to THE FUTURE. all those poorly constructed sentences in third grade, all the dangling phrases in 9th, the misspelled words that first year out of journalism school... in time my grammatical ineptitude shape-shifted into something real enough to be clipped and posted to refrigerators in homes of people (not just my mother) i didn't even know. how had that happened?

but seven t-h-o-u-s-a-n-d books? i had never sold so much as a stadium seat cushion sporting my high school mascot without apology. 

and yet i would not apologize for this book. not the three years it took me to write it or the year it took for me to convince the publisher that my vision was right. (oh well, i would apologize about the cover, just a little because i had no control and i didn't like it at first. but it has grown on me.) and i did apologize to my pr flack for the money we spent just trying to realize my vision. (i do think we have realized about a nickle profit.)

but on that Sunday afternoon, i was thinking about none of that. just that in the back of the car i had a box of books and they were m-i-n-e. my own creation (with the help of many, many others and of course G-O-D) but my words. at least those that lay outside the margins of quotation marks.

on that drive north (well, richmond is not too north) i thought about the summer morning three years before when i sat in the parking lot of the episcopal church across the street and looked at the grand old ladies i was writing about, thinking: what do they look like to me? just to me? and came up with it, right there (G-O-D loves and helps people, even if all they do is sit in church parking lots) staring at the ladies' wide porches and how they are just like wide-brimmed summer hats. they surely surely are, their propped shutters like eyelids, looking out toward the open sea.

that, come to think of it, is just like me. or where i will be in a couple of weeks, celebrating the 10th anniversary of this remarkable experience, remarkable if only that i wrote the damn book and sold those seven t-h-o-u-s-a-n-d books (and then some). funny that my publisher didn't think of putting out a 10th anniversary edition. but still.

after richmond i drove to norfolk (arriving two hours early for a tv interview. the tv part of this story is a whole nother story...), then back to north carolina through the great dismal swamp with the windows rolled down — a swamp that on that day was not dismal but promising, for some strange reason. it reminded me of a high school girl a few years before that on her first solo drive to and from that marvelous beach in an un-air-conditioned light blue ford maverick, driving down a country highway all by herself but not afraid of anything. oh, how i wish i could connect with that girl again, out on a straight stretch of road, windows open, headed to what yet awaits.

Santa Baby... Hurry Down the Chimney

Beyond avoidance. What should you have done this year but didn't because you were too scared, worried, unsure, busy or otherwise deterred from doing? (Bonus: Will you do it?)

The other day, I was trying to redecorate the Christmas tree, which after I had put the lights on I had handed it over to the men in my house and of course I should have known better, but I wanted them to have a part in it. Or at least pretend. Anyway, as I was redecorating, I was looking through the top drawer in my living room chest, which I never look in except for at Christmas, for those ornament hooks that are all tangled up together so much so that it almost looks like they have been propagating like gerbils since last year. And then, as often happens with someone who has never been diagnosed with anything like ADD but who has an ADD brain sometimes, I started rifling through the stuff in the drawer. Christmas napkins (hey they were supposed to be in a different drawer). Old baby books, including my own. A neat pull-out Victorian Christmas card I got as a child that I loved, and then a bunch of papers my mother gave me a long time ago that I had forgotten about. Inside I found this:

(Facebook friends, please humor me).

How funny, I thought, that when I was 8, I wanted a typewriter. (Please, those of you who think I should have known that Santa didn't exist at 8 (ok, 9) don't tell me because he still does, at least in Scotland Neck, NC, so of course he did in 1966.) 
I had no idea how to type, wouldn't learn until I was a senior in high school, and even then I didn't think I needed to know how. That was not a skill I would ever use in my career. Typing was for secretaries and such. And the whole typo thing I am so good at? Apparent, even in my very best 8 (9)-year-old cursive.  Where was my proofreader, is what I want to know.


But reading this letter to Santa, I got to thinking. (Oh no, not that again) Though there are other things I have avoided this year (many) the BIG THING is owning the whole writer thing (again) and actually doing what I have been talking about doing for a long, long time. I have wanted to be a writer since I was six. I can't tell you exactly why or when, but I can say it might have been because of Hitty, that Newberry Award-winning story about a doll somebody gave me a long time ago. I could never quite get past the first few pages, thinking surely I could write better than this. There were no pictures! Though I hear it has been remastered, whatever that might mean.


And I am a writer. But I have lost that identity along the way of being one, of trying to pay a few bills. So, as I have written before (these questions are beginning to seem very repetitive) what I didn't do in 2010 is finish my funny novel, I think because it is so unlike anything I have ever written before that I am worried about what folks will think of me. (and not just my folks.) And I didn't even pull out the other one I have not finished, the one those "real writers"  I know said showed so much promise. 


IN 2010: Yes. Too scared too busy too worried too unsure, all of that. Aren't y'all tired of hearing that now? I am. And I'm sorry to repeat myself.


So here we go. The promise: I'll make Santa Claus glad he gave me that typewriter. Now... If I could only find it in all the clutter around here.

I Beg To Differ

Reverb10: Beautifully Different. Think about what makes you different and what you do that lights people up. Reflect on all the things that make you different – you’ll find they’re what make you beautiful. (Author: Karen Walrond)

What makes me different? Tough question. Do I have to brag?

I put pretty good sentences together in writing, though I have a penchant for typos.

I move at my own pace, but I get the job done.

I probably share too much of my story, but when I do, I usually get an even better story back. I can pull a tale out of anybody — especially in writing — and just when they think it's done, I can pull just a little more.

My favorite food in the world is a summer-ripe tomato. 

I can look into my pantry or my fridge and in 30 minutes, create something good out of what I find. 

I'm pretty good at arranging flowers but terrible at growing them.

I've taken some nice photographs.
I can get very lost in thought, get drawn full tilt into a good book.

I listen (though my children would not agree.) 

I still believe in Santa Claus, despite the fact that he never brought me that Mystery Date game. 

I like to surprise people, and I write creative cards on their presents. (And I can't WAIT until Christmas this year because of the surprises I have planned.)

I am obsessed with bluebirds.

I collect nativity scenes and Santa Clauses.

I think I'm funny, sometimes. 

I believe in God
My eyes have been described at "ice water blue" (35 years ago, and tired as they are today, I still can't forget it.)

I've been told my stories have been posted in the fridge (and not just in my mother's house.) Not that's different!

I have written three books, (only one of which anybody really knows about.)

I'm a sucker for a puppy.

I remember my dreams, even some from childhood. (I once dreamed that Jesus was walking down the road with me.)

I can spell paraphernalia.

I love to sing but don't know how.

I like to look at the world upside down.
I can see the big picture, but can capture the moment.

I cry (a lot)

I think (a lot)
I get homesick, even now.

Letting Go

Reverb10... writers out there, join me!

December 5 – Let Go. What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why?

I have been writing my whole life. When I was too young to know better, I imagined myself as a playwright or a poet but never told anybody. Never mind the fact that I didn't know any poets or playwrights, novelists or even journalists, really, it was my dream to string words together into something from the first time I took the storyteller's stool in kindergarten. When I got to college, I actually felt the dream dangling close enough in front of my eyes on occasion to almost grasp it. I wrote about it in my Freshmen journal... "It's that dream again," over and over. My professors said they believed in me. My father said he knew I had a talent and wanted me to go to college to learn how to use it. I can recall exactly where I was at that moment.

Through the years I have had a pretty good grasp of the dream at times. Most people would think that having a book or two published, and hundreds of newspaper and magazine bylines would mean I had finally caught up with the dream, grasping it as firmly as Harry Potter did his snitch, and I would say so, too, at least for awhile. But in the last year, it feels as if I have let that magical snitch go.

Oh, it's hovering... in two novels not fully abandoned but almost. In essays I thought about writing but didn't.

Why? No time.

But really, I'm afraid of finishing.

Afraid my words will not be beautifully strung together like the pearls I imagine them to be. That I won't have anything to say that matters. Afraid it won't matter to anyone besides me when I'm done.
But that should be enough, though, shouldn't it? Because it matters to me.

Taking part in the Reverb10 challenge is a start, one small way to get the snitch hovering in front of me again, teasing me along every day, at least for the next two dozen days or so.

I have always heard that you have to let your children go before you get them back. And so, perhaps, it is the way of dreams. And so I hope that this year's letting go will lead to next year's catching up, that  the snitch will hover close at hand again, close enough to grasp it firmly in my hand.

She Didn't Fall Far

My daughter has started a blog in the past couple of months where she waxes poetic about being a young, Southern twenty-something living in the Big Apple. I've been posting her entries for my Facebook friends to read, and one of them sent me the comment: She didn't fall far from the tree.

Well, in a way. Gravity did play a trick on us, as she found herself drawn northward, toward a city that I only saw from afar until I was 40 years old. My first trip was ours together, and at 13, she looked up into the glitter of the forest of skyscrapers and said: One day, I'm going to live here. Oh, surely, I thought, she'd rather find herself a nice grove of sugar maples, but mothers can be wrong on occasion.

"One day" came in May, 2005, when she packed her suitcase and moved into a dorm for college students, then set about finding a job that would pay her enough to eat. (We paid her rent that summer.)

The next summer she graduated, found an internship and became the itinerant boarder, finding places with friends of friends who were out of the city for the summer. By fall, she had landed a "real job," and though she could barely afford the rent, on a frigid February day in 2007 my best friend from high school and I moved some hand-me-down furniture and dishes into a third floor walkup on the Upper East Side. And I cried.

Warming the homemade spaghetti sauce I'd brought from home in her tiny kitchen a couple of nights later had me pretending this was my apartment, and that I was 22 years old, setting up house and my laptop in a city where I would one day write something remarkable. For just a few New York minutes, I was living vicariously through my child, hopeful for her, that her own new life would allow her to create something remarkable for her own self.

As we head into her third fall of living away from home, my not so little apple has indeed created something remarkable for herself. A new job, a newer apartment, and a new husband now occupy her own New York minutes, her days likely filled with the dreaming I once did when she was just a small blossom hanging from my tree.

She keeps, though, a slender tether to home, writing about the things she misses about North Carolina, and where in this swirling place, she can find small pieces of home.

I knew she could write, but I hadn't actually read anything she'd written since she was in high school, so I was surprised, a bit, that she chose to start a blog. It's a movement I would have so been part of as a young writer, just testing out my words. Now that I've written so many in my life, I'm not sure I have all that much more to say.