I’m very pleased to announce that I won the West Virginia Writers 2015 Annual Writing Contest in the Nonfiction category with my piece Marybelle.
Marybelle is a memoir of Vietnam and my fourth-grade year.
The story is special to me and I’m very pleased, and honored, that it won.
You can read it here:.marybellenarrative
A few weeks ago, I fell for no good reason and landed on my knees. The impact was such that I’m quite sure I left an impression in the concrete sidewalk. One knee was torn up and developed a horrendous scab; the other swelled to the size of a softball. Both of them astonished me with their cries of pain.
The pain took my breath. For a good four days, I couldn’t stand or sit or walk or lie down without pain so intense I was reminded of labor. The pain wasn’t baby-producing intense, but it did provoke the same sort of awe.
This week, I got news that sucker-punched me. No. Nobody died. My relationships are all intact except maybe for the relationship I have with myself. For several days, my self-esteem has been crying out with the same level of pain as did my knees.
I have decided to get over it.
Today, I spent my time in the much neglected garden doing triage. I didn’t get as far as I had hoped due to the electric lawnmower dying, but I accomplished much in getting my equilibrium (and self-esteem) back. The puppies frolicked in the warm spring air and I tended to tender plants while guiltlessly executing weeds and banishing leaves.
Gardening season is upon me. I much prefer the awe of an Appalachian spring over the awe of surprise pain.
Off and on, like many things in my life, I journal. I got started in earnest when the book The Artist’s Way was popular. For a while, I was pretty good about my morning pages – 3 notebook pages of morning brain dump.
I’ll journal somewhat regularly for a bit and then abandon it for even longer, mostly because I find myself journaling over and over the same things – the things I need to do that I continue not to do and the self-improvement activities I should do, but don’t.
The blog is like this too, to some extent. I love blogging, but as my life becomes more and more mundane with more and more left undone, I find myself with nothing to write about. This becomes a problem, like the journaling, in that I need to write.
The act of writing clears my mind and focuses my thoughts. I often say I don’t know what I think about something until I write about it. So here I am writing about why I’m not writing. And I’m stumped.
If anyone has an ideas to help me through this impasse, I would like to hear them.
It’s Saturday morning and I’m in the study. Lord, this room is a mess. All the flotsam and jetsam of the past couple of years that I don’t know what to do with has landed in this room. Couple that with the fact that it needs a good cleaning and you have one big mess. Yet, it’s a comfortable room — dead bugs, cobwebs and heaps of junk, aside.
I haven’t been able to write and to some extent, I still can’t. But I want to and that’s a huge step forward.
I’m oddly happy these days. And bored. I’m not sure if those two things are related. There’s more than enough to do which is to say I have no good reason for being bored. Perhaps, I’m just in a time out.
As usual, I have an ambitious to-do list. With the change of weather has come some ambition after the long lethargy of the spring and summer. Perhaps, it’s time for me to be done with this time-out.
I think I deserved a season or two of inertia, but I’ve reached the point where I’m tired of being bored. Tired of unfinished projects. Tired of having my life on hold while I wait for something – a something undefined. I think I’ve been waiting for now – this time when I’m unaccountably happy. A time when I could be content if the to-do list wasn’t about to topple over and kill me.
Contentment – what a sweet word and lovely idea. To be content must be the greatest blessing. The trick, I think, is to be content in the midst of chaos and I’ve yet to learn that skill. I’ll put it on the to-do list.
