Remember me?

Wow. So I had to slog through all sorts of cyber debris just to find this journal again. But here I am. And boy-oh-boy, aren’t YOU glad!

Hello?

Um, anyone still out there?

Hmmm. Well, just in case someone happens by, here’s an update. We’ll start with a news flash: The holidays are over! This is good news–not that the holidays were bad, because they were awesome. I’m just ready to get back to “normal,” which of course means all sorts of various, not-so-normal things around here, but at least I get to set the pace a couple of notches below frenetic.

Much to my deferred delight I wrote a chapter of my novel this week. I hadn’t written a single word on it since late November, thanks to the holidays, which were not only not over at that point, they were picking up steam. I have two scenes left to write–maybe twenty-five or so pages–and I’ll be finished! Hot-diggidy-doo-dah-day! I think the break from writing, though a bit frustrating, was good for me. Before I wrote anything new I read the last four or five chapters to remind myself what these folks had been up to, and I was pleasantly surprised by what I read. This is so much better than being horrified. Of course, when I finish this draft, I’ll have to go back and revise a couple (dozen) times. But even so, I can already taste the pleasure of typing “The End.” (It tastes like strawberries and clotted cream.)

Yesterday the wind captured my fancy and swept me away to a place where the ache overtakes you. I’ve been there many times before, and the only way to escape the ache is to find words. Photographs won’t do, and memory might as well be teflon coated. The beauty slips away quickly unless it meets its metaphor. Words alone have the power to hold it like a trembling bird, not crushing but calming, echoing the fluttering heartbeat with music that can bring the scene to mind again and again with only a few simple notes. And so I’ll try to find words.

This is what I saw as I drove through town. The gutters were filled with brittle oak leaves, small and inconspicuous. The dregs of fall, having nothing spectacular to offer by way of color or form, they persisted in pedestrian piles–leaf society’s middle-class masses, forgotten by everyone. Except the wind! Like an invisible pied piper, she swept in among them, transporting the unsuspecting company, lifting and swirling them into the street where they rose like a wave of coffee-colored paper scraps, sweeping up and around into quivering pillars, then rushing back down to chase each other across the pavement like happy children on a playground. First one way and then the next, she tossed them laughing into the sky where they dipped and dove to rise again on her roller coaster currents. I watched with wonder, sure that each enchanting dance would be the last, but all over town mischievous mistrals twirled their leafy trains in a frenzy of spinning splendor. I felt as though I’d driven into a command performance of an elite, arboreal ballet. Was it for me? Or was it for the One whose voice the winds obey? Perhaps both.

And now, alas, I must make dinner. But I’ll be back, for there’s much more to tell. I hope you’ll be back, too. Until then . . . ♥