I write today from the newest room in the house, the one that is added every year about this time (usually earlier, since we’ve had such a chilly spring). That room is … the deck.
It comes in especially handy now, as the other rooms are, like the poet said, “too much with us.” I work in them, eat in them and sometimes (when napping, which is rarely) even sleep in them. In short, I am almost always either in the living room or the kitchen, and since these rooms have no door to separate them, this can become a bit monotonous.
Enter the deck, which runs two-thirds the width of the house and which has two distinct divisions of its own — the sunny section, where there’s a chaise lounge, a grill and two wooden rocking chairs; and the shady section, where there’s a glass-topped wrought-iron table and four chairs.
I’m sitting in the shady section now, having wiped the evening’s moisture off the glass and parked myself and my two computers at the far end, where I can look over the yard, the garden and the Siberian iris. It’s good to be back.
If the aroma of cut grass is the soul of summer, then how do you describe the way it smells on a cold April afternoon? To me there has always been something both melancholic and hopeful about the scent.
It’s the promise of warmth, not the actuality. But it’s also freshness without qualification; when it’s young and hungry, when its juices flow freely.
To catch a whiff of a freshly mown lawn on a brisk spring day is to imagine all the delights that lie in store. But it’s also to imagine how quickly they can wither.
It is the seasonal reverse but the poetic equivalent of what Gerard Manley Hopkins describes in Spring and Fall:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
The headline caught my eye yesterday. “We have a lot more time now. Why can’t we get anything done.” What’s happening with that novel? Where are those sonnets?
They’re no further along than they were before, perhaps because we’ve lost the usual markers that make us more efficient, says the time management expert who wrote the article. Or perhaps — and this explanation is infuriatingly accurate — we just don’t have the will.
The author, Laura Vanderkam, quotes the caption of a recent New Yorker cartoon: “Day 6. Couldn’t decide between starting to write my novel or my screenplay. So instead I ate three boxes of mac and cheese and then lay on the office floor panicking.”
Not exactly my life — but the windfall of time I thought would appear without commute, appointments or social engagements has not exactly materialized. I’ve tried to figure out where the time has gone. I’ve slept a little more and cooked a little more and worked a little more. Could that be where the days and weeks have gone?
Maybe living through a pandemic is not when you should expect to get caught up on all your creative pursuits — as well as staying in touch with friends and family and strategizing grocery store runs like battle campaigns. Maybe I should be content with whatever words I can eke out of the day, and with this as with so much else … simply soldier on.
(This is an old photo of stickies pulled off page proofs I read with my old job. But they remind me of — sigh! — completed tasks.)
An email newsletter I edit has a feature we call Team-Work. We decided to use a hyphen, though the word is typically spelled without it. I can’t remember now exactly why we did that, except it had something to do with emphasizing the separate nature of those words, the “team” and the “work.”
I bring this up today because, perhaps like many of us, I thrive on a mixture of teamwork and solo endeavors. The percentages of the mix depend on many things, including how busy I am and how protective I am of the product in question.
Lately I’ve realized that I wouldn’t make a very good ghostwriter. Though most of what I write now is without a byline, I’m well compensated for it and believe in the institution. In other situations, I enjoy getting credit for what I write. Not exactly teamwork, but there you have it.
Which is why I chose the multicolored rag rug photo to illustrate this post. It reminds me of the power and the beauty that’s possible when many become one.
All is calm on the back end of the blog this morning: 3,000 posts, 3,000 published, no drafts. There’s a sense of fulfillment and completion. Which means there’s a part of me (the tired part!) that wants to say, let’s take a break.
But of course, that part of me won’t win out. Not because thousands of fans are clamoring for each new post. Hardly! But because life is all about starting over.
So this is a post about doing that, every day. It’s time to begin again … like it always is.
According to the great sage Mary Poppins we should be wary of piecrust promises — easily made, easily broken. I would like to issue another recommendation, mostly for myself, and that is to strive for piecrust prose — to avoid the dry, overly worked and sometimes unsalvageable product that results from too much fussing and instead fashion a more pliable product.
Pie crust dough, as bakers know, must be handled lightly. It isn’t kneaded like bread dough, but turned lightly onto a floured board, then rolled, trimmed and tucked gently into a pie pan. Words are like that too. They must be handled lightly enough to fit and sing, but not so much that they lose their juice and joy.
I have been known to belabor the writing process. Words may tumble out joyfully enough in the beginning but I often work the poor things to near oblivion. It was in part to sidestep this tendency that I started A Walker in the Suburbs.
But such is the power of the nemesis that I now have two writing styles: blog-writing and everything else. Instead, I should have just one — and the light touch, the piecrust promise, must apply.
(Photo: Wikipedia)
A few weeks ago I heard an interview with writer John McPhee on the radio. He was explaining a series of pieces he’s writing for the New Yorker, which he calls his “old man project.”
The idea is that he doesn’t have the time to explore in depth a drive through Spain he made decades ago or a dairy farm in Indiana with 25,000 cows or any number of other ideas he’s been saving up to explore, so he is dipping his toe in them, then moving on.
McPhee is basing his project on a long-ago encounter with a 66-year-old Thornton Wilder, who had decided to catalog all 431 plays of the playwright Lope de Vega. The younger McPhee didn’t understand why Wilder was doing this. The older McPhee does: it’s a project without an end, a way to keep yourself going.
This got me thinking about what I do, am doing, to keep myself going, specifically my writing self. And the answer, right now, is simple: Every day, I write a blog post. And I’ve written one most every day for close to ten years. A Walker in the Suburbs is my Middle-Aged Woman Project.
A nascent meditation program at the office has me listening to guided exercises that instruct us to “breathe in, breathe out” and to exist in the present, because that’s all we have.
The irony of doing this in the workplace does not escape me — future-oriented as it is and has to be — but my neck and shoulders constantly remind me that I need to chill out, so I close my eyes and try to float in the moment.
I concentrate on the breath, on the inflow and outflow, the filling up and the releasing. It’s true, the present moment is really all we have. There is a seat on Metro, there is a journal I can write in. And, later, there is a walk that will take me where I need to go.
Breathe in, breathe out.
The other day, while doing some routine editing, I thought about my attitude toward capital letters. I follow the Associated Press Stylebook, which means that titles, position names and the like are lowercase unless used as an official title before the name.
I duly strike down all the errant capital letters I find, but sometimes, I’m afraid, a bit too gleefully. And then I realized: Yes, I’m doing my editorial duty, but in my own mild-mannered way, I’m also sticking it to the man.
Take that, you inflated title! Take that, you uppercase “T” for “The” in front of a showy corporate logo! Take that, you self-important word that’s never supposed to be capitalized ever, ever, ever!
ah, yes, i feel better now.