Hello my dears! My break from posting hasn’t exactly been deliberate; it was more like neglect that had my full permission. Because. Because. I dunno. Last winter I seemed to head into a long droop. I suppose I had reasons. Last fall I had meniscus surgery on my knee. Then there was my increasingly infirm and deaf father, requiring so much more care. A phone for the deaf. New hearing aids. Then there was my bilateral inguinal hernia surgery (look it up). As we were waiting for his hearing aids to be ready, and as I was lying on the sofa, still in pain from my surgery, my father died. I was sunk in grief for a while. Then came the astoundingly complex financial paperwork. A bit later, I caught a terrible cold that ended up needing an antibiotic. The residuals of that cold held on from late July till sometime this October.
Then somehow, recently, within a week’s time it seemed, I started un-drooping. The earth turned out to be in living color again. I don’t know how these things work. I don’t have hormones anymore, so I can’t blame them. Maybe I was a little sick all that time. It felt that way. Now it’s the same world, but brighter. I was dragging around, and now tra-la! I’m relatively perky.
Also, I couldn’t write worth squat. I began to wonder if I was finished. If I’d said everything I needed to say in my life. And who cared, anyway? Seriously. So guess what I did. In the depths of my fallowness, I decided to sign up for an online 30-Day Nonfiction Writing Challenge. You get prompts sent to you every day and have 24 hours to submit your piece. Whatever you could get done in a few hours’ work. I started looking forward to the next day’s adventure. Even more so, I have to say, because the people who ran the Challenge didn’t know what they were doing. They’d previously focused on playwriting and on poetry. This was their first run at nonfiction. They didn’t know an essay from, as my mother would have said, a hole in the ground. Some of the prompts cracked me up. One day they asked us to watch a short video on “the essay form” by some professorial-looking British person who taught us the long-defunct five paragraph essay form. Jerry and I lay in bed howling with laughter over it. They wanted me to write riddles. They wanted me to write a speech for the UN. It was a riot. But I completed the Challenge and got 75% of my money back, which was the deal. Although I donated it back to them, as many did, I’m sure. They need the money to go back to school, I’d say.
I feel as if I’m starting over, somehow. I have a new website, as you can see. All simple and sleek. I’ve written two essays in the last month or so that I am happy with. I’m pulling together a poetry manuscript and a collection of essays. Pulling like taffy, I should say. No sooner than I send one to some contest, I decide to make a total revision. Neither manuscript has stayed the same for long. I am writing a lot of prose-poems, and can’t decide which manuscript they belong in. Hmmm, that’s interesting.
I am not at all sure emotions are driven by the exteriors we think they are. Feelings do not necessarily correlate with life events. I have a really crummy case of sciatica, my sister has multiple health problems, my step-daughter has serious cancer, the country and the world are a ghastly mess. But my spirits are better. Who knows how these things work?