A Moment of Quiet...

Last night was movie night at our kid's elementary school and my husband decided to take the boys. Both my girls were asleep by 7:45 PM. The dogs were lazy and sleeping.

The T.V. was turned off. There were no blaring video games. The phone did not ring.

The house was completely quiet. I realize how much I miss the quiet.

My life is mostly on sound overload. Our main room is tiled and sound reverberates off the tile. Children laughing and crying. Our beagle baying. 

The television, the radio, the Wii game system and the computer competing to fill the room with sound. 

I usually catch my quiet moments in the bathroom, but this is not guaranteed as a child may bust in at any time, or sometimes driving in the car when one child or another has fallen asleep in between drop offs and pick ups.

I can hardly remember a moment recently when it has been quiet in the house.  

I sat on the couch and enjoyed the moment of quiet. I drank a cup of tea alone in the quiet.

I read a magazine and a book I had started a while ago with no interruptions. No stops and starts. 

A blissful night to be remembered full of moments of quiet.

And then the moment was over...

The gang arrived home, the boys full of stories about the movie and the friends they had met.

The dogs decided to wrestle and growl in celebration.  

My husband began to practice his Piping Chanter (he's learning to play the bagpipes).

The quiet transitioned into a noisy night full of the many sounds of this lovely family.

Also to be remembered.

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It's Bad Poetry Day...

No, I didn't make that up... Today is a very minor holiday- Bad Poetry Day 

In celebration here is one of my own poems:

Ode to a Library Book

Transporter. Personal Time Machine. Thick pages of story.

Narrating me away from stripped hearts and accusations.

You travel past the dingy hall, yellowed by a smoker's haze

Improviser of the written word, you are chosen from many.

Words read aloud reverberate against a wall of silence,

surprising the little me who picked you from a tattered shelf.

My small self in a crumpled dress, library card in hand.

A Wrinkle in time, The boxcar Children, Anne of Greene Gables.

Your worn pages transport me towards childhood's passage.

I hide under a pillow with a flashlight and M&M's.

Living among horses, Indians, and carriages.

Loud voices, empty eyes, but bravery and time travel fill mine.

Father has bloodied mum's lip, but I'm already gone.

Lost in battles of fables, myth and legend.

flying alongside dragons, I make order out of chaos.

It's another August evening, the warmth of families in the air,

but I never want to come home. Hide me in a small corner.

Surround me, soothing voice of fibber, fabricator, reciter of tales.

I wrote this for my writing class. It is a work in progress and I plan to revise it. Reading has always served me as an escape, especially from a tough childhood. 

In the Fall, I will be taking my third class at The Writers Studio.

This upcoming session, I plan to concentrate on writing poetry. This has always been an interest of mine and I'm excited to have a chance to focus on language and imagery in a more compressed way. I hope it will give me a chance to explore poetry more in depth, as well as enhance my fiction writing.  

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

-W. H. Auden

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

-Rita Dove

Life's a Balancing Act

Do you ever feel like this guy?  

Sometimes I do.

This week my writing class starts again on Wednesday evening. I have been taking classes through the Writers Studio out of New York. There is a  small satellite school here in Tucson. It is a great program, and unlike an MFA program it is manageable with four kids. The founder Phillip Schultz just won the Pulitzer Prize this Spring for his book of poetry Failure.   

We have had a month break from classes and I haven't done as much writing as I would have liked. The discipline to write at night after the kids are in bed continues to be a struggle, but I've done okay this week and have worked on my stories two different nights.

My sister and her family are coming to visit on Thursday. We are going to California over the Fourth of July, and the new school year starts for the kids July 14th. We have been reorganizing the house. New carpet, changing the play room into a guest room, reorganizing the kids bedrooms, and revamping our master bedroom.

Life truly is a balancing act...

Here are some things that help me along the way: 

• Coffee. I don't know how I managed all these years without it when I was pregnant or nursing, but now I am happily dependent on it again. It helps a lot. I love coffee!
• My husband bought me this new writing program called Scrivener and it manages all my projects, outlines, and ideas. It is fantastic and reasonably priced too! 
  
• I know that this time with my little children is going by so fast. I'm  trying to embrace and celebrate the time with them now. 
• Keeping organized. When the house is chaotic and I'm searching for things all the time it is much more overwhelming to get things accomplished.
• Trust God. Pray. Meditate. These things help me to regroup and recharge. 

I am working on three short stories right now. My goal is to get them complete and ready to send out to literary journals and magazines during this next ten week class. For my fortieth birthday year, I want to get a short story published. I have four months to go. The writing itself is fulfilling and the publishing part is secondary, but I am more motivated if I have a goal in front of me. I am entering a couple of literary contests for new writers and I have some other publications in mind. 

Here is an excerpt from one of my works in progress:

Watering Holes

The ugly shack behind the house is where you’ll find the Fishing Grandpa. He sits in his weathered, tin workshop among scattered tools, loaded firearms, cheap vodka, and gallons of apple juice in glass jugs.

Up before sunrise, he looks through the makeshift doors, towards his neighbor’s tree farm.  Grandpa watches the Red fir, Norway spruce, and Sequoia marching along in the wind. Their conical shapes, shiny dark branches, and bluish green needles with silver tips shine in the morning air. The fresh, woodsy fragrances mingle with the smoke from his open fire.

Spitting his tobacco in the early morning light, he readies the poles. A simple set up for his granddaughter, just the rod and line. His hands shake a little, and he drinks to steady them. 

No longer able to stay inside, his granddaughter Tessie runs for the shack. Still early, she warms her hands by the fire. She fidgets and squirms ready for her first worm.

“Grandpa’s making moonshine, don’t tell your mom,” he says.

“Moonshine, Moonshine, Moonshine,” she sings.

“Grandpa, will we catch a rainbow fish today?”

She remembers their best day ever, last summer when she caught a fish on the American River.  Grandpa had gone to the ice chest. The line started pulling and bobbing, the pole rising and falling toward the river. 

“I got a bite.  I got a bite,” she called.

She reeled it in. Grandpa came to the edge of the black river, and his big, rough hands moved over the fish. 

“Look at these colors, a rainbow trout. This means you’re a lucky girl,” he said.

Today they hike through a stream from watering hole to watering hole, over here to a point and now to a weedy area with some inside and outside curves.  They stop in an inlet where the creek flows into the lake. He relies on the elements to catch fish, his creel brimming with bass and trout.

Noble fir and Scotch pine line the moving water. He points out the strong, wide-spaced branches protecting the smaller orange and red bark of the Manzanita and the cream-white Elderberry trees. As they walk, he notices the native grasses waving gracefully in the cool breeze and watches the animals take cover, scattered throughout the openings between the islands of woody shrubs. She is ahead collecting stones along the shallow river. He pauses, raising his bottle before the next fishing hole… 

I keep trying to stick to this mantra, writer's write!

I'm not 40, I'm eighteen with 22 years experience. ~ Author Unknown  

Life begins at forty. ~ W.B. Pitkin

We don't understand life any better at forty than at twenty, but we know it and admit it. ~ Jules Renard