Category: Ten Minute Free Writes

Thunderstorms

April 25th, 2015

Blue grey. Cloud soufflés. Thundering rumble. Neon grass against blackening sky. We wore minimal clothing because of the heat. I leaned against my boyfriend in a bed in Key Largo, and it was dark outside, and the windows were open. Palm fronds crackled in wind. We stroked each other’s skin while thunder shattered the air and lightning lit the room. Hard rain clacked against glass.

A wall of clouds moving onshore from the ocean, blue black jellyfish in the sky, rain trailing like tentacles.

I remember being in the skiff with Dad near Williamson Island. The Olympics were over and the Day Marina was littered with pallets of Coke and Powerade. We looted, Dad and I. The place was abandoned. We saw a storm coming and hurried. There wasn’t another human for miles, and we floated in the mouth of a river on a marina, surrounded by water, no shelter.

We were in the river behind Williamson when the squall caught us. The boat was small and open; I could hold both sides from the middle of the mid bench. Lightning struck the water and the nearby island, and thunder cracked in our ears at the same time we saw the lightning flash. Wind whipped the green-brown river to a froth, my hair whipped me in the eyes, in the mouth, got caught in my teeth. Rain stung my skin. Rain puckered the river. It smacked the water, slapped my skin, rattled the floor of the aluminum boat. It made a racket like ball bearings clattering on a metal floor. The sound was deafening.

Lightning bolted, thunder boomed, and Dad and I hunched forward in the boat so our backs would take the needling rain instead of our faces. I shivered with cold. I thought about being struck by lightning. About the boat capsizing. About how Mom would worry if she knew.

I felt electric.

Dad and I grinned at each other and prayed we wouldn’t die.

For the month of April, I will be publishing a 10-minute free write each day, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page.
Muzak

April 24th, 2015

Our daughter’s music — Katy Perry, Run-D.M.C. — and our music, especially when we play hard hip hop, make our son cringe. He has specific and limited music tastes. He will tolerate classical, and jazz without singing, but rarely has he said he likes a type of music, and never would he seek any music out.

One day we went to the mall, and as I power walked to whatever store we were destined for, in my hurry to get the shopping over with, our son strolled behind me and said, “I like this music.”

I stopped to listen. It was some horrible generic Muzak whose blandness offended me. I scrunched up my face, one nostril raised, and said, “You do?”

“Yeah,” he said, with his contented Buddha smile. “It’s quiet. And sad.”

He was 10 at the time. And he liked quiet and sad music.

He didn’t seek out or buy Muzak after that, thankfully, but the moment was enlightening to me. A little window into our son’s sensibilities: he did not care about music, as evidenced by his appreciation for Muzak. It just wasn’t his thing.

So when he started requesting a song in the car recently – “Can you play the whale song, Mom? – I was happy to play it for him. Over. And over. Again.

“What is it you like about this song, buddy?” I asked him after the fifth or sixth request.

“I like that it tells a story,” he said. And he shrugged. “I don’t know. I just like it.”

“Oh, well maybe you’ll like the rest of this band’s songs then. Most of their songs tell stories.”

“What’s the name of the band?”

“The Decemberists,” I said. “You want to listen to another of their songs?”

Since then, we have put 39 Decemberists songs on his tablet for him. I’ll be folding laundry in the living room and hear, drifting down the stairs,

We are two mariners
Our ship’s sole survivors
In this belly of a whale*

He listens while he does his homework. He listens while he curls up and reads. He listens while he lays in bed and stares at the ceiling, doing nothing at all besides absorbing the stories, and the music.

*From “The Mariner’s Revenge Song” by The Decemberists.

Artwork from University of Toronto Wenceslaus Hollar Digital Collection.

For the month of April, I will be publishing a 10-minute free write each day, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page.
I took the road less travelled by

April 23rd, 2015

Wow, this is a hard one. Because I don’t feel like I’ve taken the path less travelled. I’m a middle-class white woman who went to high school, went to college, married a man, is raising a family, and now has a job. Isn’t that the most travelled road for my demographic in the developed world?

I guess the only way I may have taken a less travelled road is to follow my heart in terms of the work I do. When I realized my college degree wasn’t in a field that I felt passion for, I lost interest and pursued my love du jour, which was helping with fundraising and athletic endurance events for a not-for-profit. I cared about my work and threw myself into even thought the pay was terrible and the hours were long. I think a lot of people put a lot more financial value on their time than I ever did. I couldn’t stand the thought of being bored in my work, so if a job sparked my passion, that passion was a higher priority to me than money.

Likewise, when we started our family, we knew we wanted one of us to stay home with our kids while the other worked. Since my husband was on a career path, I volunteered as tribute. He was a graduate student on a teaching stipend, and me staying home without earning was not the wisest financial decision we’ve ever made. Having a second child under the same circumstance was even dumber (financially). We will be paying for those years for at least another decade.

During those years that I stayed home, though, I bonded with our kids, I launched a business, and I began writing in earnest, all of which led me to the place I am now: working at a dream job that pulls from my my random skill sets, that I’m passionate about, that keeps me at home with our kids, and that actually pays well. So I guess following my heart, if that is a road less traveled by, did make all the difference.

For the month of April, I will be publishing a 10-minute free write each day, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Thank you to Writeanne for the prompt, I took the road less travelled by, And that has made all the difference, from “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost.
I loafed

April 21st, 2015

I found a secret for loafing. I spent almost the entire weekend loafing: in a hotel room. Our son had a soccer tournament this weekend in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and thanks to the spread of his games on Saturday, we had hours and hours of down time.

His first game was at 8am on Saturday, so we arrived in the early morning for warmups, walked the dewy fields as the sun rose over the trees, and were finished with the game by 9am. We returned to our room for the few hours until our next game, and since we weren’t home, where there are endless chores that need to be done, our down time was truly down time. For loafing.

I lay in our bed and petted my husband’s head while I read and the kids watched cartoons on TV. For hours. We did the same thing in the afternoon after our son’s second game. We killed most of the day in our room, laying around in the white sheets of hotel beds, doing a whole lot of nothing.

It was bliss.

Now I’m sitting on a window seat in our hotel room, a version of the bay window I have day dreamed about since I was a kid. I’m sitting in a window seat, and I’m writing. The remainder of the soccer tournament has been cancelled due to rain, which is a huge bummer. But I’m sitting in a window with a cup of coffee and a book on the sill next to me, watching wind blow treetops, and grey rain fall, and cars splash puddles in the streets below. I’ve got a pen and notebook in my lap, inking words on a page, with my whole family cuddling and lounging in leisure, and with no work to do. It’s kind of awesome.

Since we won’t get to play or watch soccer today, we’re salving the wound by going out to breakfast. A real breakfast — not the stale bagels and muffins the hotel offers in the lobby. Breakfast is my favorite meal to eat out. I love the clatter of breakfast dishes in a restaurant. I love the liveliness of morning, with the whole day stretched before us, and I love endless coffee and savory breakfast foods. And my favorite part, now that we have kids, is that on the menu, there’s always something for everyone.
An unexpected vice

April 21st, 2015

I like coffee too much. I am dependent on it. I consider it a vice because I crave it and feel like life would just not be as pleasant without it. It’s part of my daily rituals: coffee in the morning, coffee in the afternoon. On special occasions, when my husband and I are on a date, one of my favorite treats, one of my favorite indulgences, is having a cup of coffee with dessert. It’s a small thing, but is the perfect end to a fine meal, and is the part that is most special to me. It’s the one thing about an evening meal that I don’t do in my normal life.

My husband doesn’t think coffee is a vice. He does not drink coffee, which may or may not be relevant. But he considers a vice to be something harmful. I’m sure he is right, and I’m sure coffee has some disadvantages or health risks, but I certainly wouldn’t call it a danger.

Feeling dependent on something though – even something harmless like coffee – makes it feel like a vice to me. Maybe I consider a vice to be something I do that feels like it is out of my control. Which really is probably more the definition of addiction: being powerless over a substance. Like I am with coffee.

I’ve tried switching to tea by it’s not hearty enough. It’s not thick enough. It’s not dark or potent enough. When I tried to switch to tea I ended up drinking a cup of tea and then drinking a cup of coffee. Or sometimes I’d drink multiple cups of tea, hoping the caffeine would take care of the coffee craving, but it didn’t. I could jitter across a room jacked up on the caffeine from a whole pot of tea, and I’d still want coffee. It’s not just the drug in it, it’s the everything: the flavor, the richness, the ritual, the strength. I am powerless over it. I succumb.

vice n. 1. an immoral or evil habit or practice… 5. a fault, defect, or shortcoming 6. a bad habit, as in a horse.

Note: Given these definitions, I agree with my husband: coffee is not a vice.

Photo credit: Colombian Coffee by McKay Savage

For the month of April, I will be publishing a 10-minute free write each day, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just trying to get back into the writing habit. Thank you to Lori Carlson for the prompt “An unexpected vice.”
All those feathers

April 20th, 2015

All those feathers in our down comforter, in our pillows, in all the pillows and feather beds and nests of the world. They are hidden away in those places, but I think of them bursting out and flying free and floating, drifting on air pockets like little boats till they land softly, silently, onto the skin of a lake, like those insects — water gliders? Water skiers? What are those those things called with the long legs and they skate on the surface of the water? It doesn’t matter.

All those feathers on the surface of lakes, drawing your eye to their softness, making the water look hard, like sliver glass that would cut you like the sharp edges of a mirror, but if you dip your hand to catch the feather, your hand goes in smoothly, the water cool and soft, not sharp or hard-edged at all. And if you pull the feather out it’s no longer fluffy and downy like a soft-edged boat, like a fur-lined coat. It is scraggly and bedraggled, bony and dark, weighted down and dripping, skeletal and heavy in air where only moments before it was light and wispy in water.

What would fish see from below of those feathers sailing on the surface? A tiny rib? How much would break the surface, if any, and how much would the fish see that is out of the water? Probably not much, unless it is a flounder or a walleye lying on the bottom with both eyes up because all the other fishes’ eyes are on the sides of their heads looking sideways not up, and a flounder wouldn’t be in a lake anyway because it’s a saltwater fish. So forget the fish and the feathers and just think about the birds and their down, and how warm it might be in the pit of a bird wing, where geese slip their bills on cold days – for warmth?

I know nothing about birds except that blue is not always blue. I saw a bluebird with a friend and she said there’s a blue bird and I said but it’s not blue (it was red) and she said, oh but it is, just not at the angle you’re looking right now. Their feathers refract light differently at different angles and it’s blue though you may not see it that way.

Photo Credit: Feather from a swan, floating on Hatchet Pond by Jim Champion

For the month of April, I will be publishing a 10-minute free write each day, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just trying to get back into the writing habit.

Category: Ten Minute Free Writes

Thunderstorms

Muzak

I took the road less travelled by

I loafed

An unexpected vice

All those feathers