Category: Ten Minute Free Writes

Rubies and Pearls

April 7th, 2015

I wanted to name our daughter Ruby. The word is beautiful to me: vital, vibrant. Deep. I had an Aunt Ruby, whom I don’t remember, but I always loved her name. I also love the name Pearl. Both are elegant, refined, rich. Precious. They evoke rare beauty, luster, shine, value. They are natural. Earth and sea made.

My husband wasn’t sold on Ruby. He wavered. He was close — really close — until happy hour with coworkers one night.

“Have y’all thought of names?”

“Yeah,” my husband replied. “We’re thinking about Chloe. Or Ruby.” Testing the waters.

His coworker said, “When I think of Ruby, I think of a prostitute. Skinny and scraggly, leaning against a lamppost. Bright red lips.”

My husband came home that night and said, “We’re not naming her Ruby.”

My mother’s engagement ring is a ruby. I always admired that — that she had a non-diamond. The red is deep and beautiful. It pops. It is unexpected.

My mother also has pearls. Had pearls. She gave them to me, and they are stunning. I never knew how lovely pearls are until I held a strand in my hand and felt the weight of them. Rubbed the lustrous luminescent rounds between my fingers. I wear them sometimes for no reason. I like beautiful things. I wore them one day “to work,” which is a desk in my basement. I just felt like wearing pearls that day. So I doubled the strand and clasped it behind my neck. I wore a baby blue sweater and jeans. Nothing special. I touched the pearls absently all day, their slow perfection formed beneath the sea. When I signed on for a team video hangout, the first thing my teammate said was, “You’re wearing pearls!” And she smiled, as if the unexpectedness of the pearls brightened her day. I had forgotten I was wearing them, though my fingers were constantly on them, and I was embarrassed, but also pleased. I don’t get out much in my job, and it felt nice to bring some pretty into the day.

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. Trying to get back into the writing habit.
Humic

April 6th, 2015

Humic is moist and earthy. Soil. Dirt. Decomposition. It is rich and fertile, the adjective form of humus, which is a favorite word of mine. It’s in my lexicon.

Humic is forest floors, especially when they are damp. Humic is the way the air smelled in New Orleans in the Garden District: resurrection ferns, cemeteries, life and decay, moisture just below the surface of the earth.

Humic. Humus. Human. I wonder what the roots of these words are. Earth? Humans from the earth? From Genesis, yes, we were made from earth. I’m going to have to look up the origins of the word human. When and where, what its root is. It seems coincidental for it to be so similar to humic and humus.

In evolutionary terms, it would make more sense for the name of life to come from the sea. For the name of us to come from the sea. Except I guess that would be the origin of all life, not just humans. We walk on land, so there’s the earth part, but lots of animals walk the earth. Am I’m even getting my evolutionary biology right? Surely the first life was in water, the first single-celled organisms?

My brain has lost so much.

Back to humic. I can’t wait to move to our new house and dig in the dirt again. I want a butterfly garden. Our garden in Florida was my daily delight after cultivating it for three or four or however many years. Searching for caterpillars and chrysalises, watching butterflies emerge. The way they perch on a leaf and dry their sticky wings before flying away. I know Florida butterflies but not Virginia ones. I’ve no idea the native host plants, the nectar plants. I can’t wait to start learning.

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From Online Etymology Dictionary, Human (emphasis is mine):

(12c.), from Latin humanus “of man, human,” also “humane, philanthropic, kind, gentle, polite; learned, refined, civilized,” probably related to homo (genitive hominis) “man” (see homunculus ) and to humus “earth,” on notion of “earthly beings,” as opposed to the gods (cf. Hebrew adam “man,” from adamah “ground”).

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. Trying to get back into the writing habit.
Favorite Easter Memory

April 4th, 2015

We spent a winter in Maine when we were still a family of three: my husband, myself, and our 13-month old son. We spent a winter in Maine when our home was in Florida. I don’t think we saw the earth the entire four months we lived there: it was hiding beneath a thickening batting of snow.

The place we rented was across the street from the beach, and the finger of land we occupied was empty of people. The houses were dark night and day for this was a summer community. While we lived there the snow piled high enough that it reached the icicles dripping down from the vacant houses’ eaves.

We didn’t have a washer and drier in our “cottage,” which is more accurately described as a mobile-home. On laundry day I would pack our baby and our giant mounds of laundry — giant because it was winter and winter clothes are bulky — and I would take us to the laundromat. I struggled every time: what do I do with our baby while I carry the laundry in and out? How do I get around this five-foot snowbank between the car and the sidewalk? I walked many trips, baby in one arm, giant bag of laundry in the the other, to the end of the block where there was a passage in the snow bank, then back up the block to the laundromat where the car and laundromat were side by side with a ridge of snow between them. Each trip that would have taken four steps in summer took at least two minutes in winter.

Which is why Easter was so wonderful. Easter morning, a fresh snow sparkled under an April sun, and after so many weeks indoors, we could not wait to go out and feel sunlight on our faces. We bundled our son till he looked like a red starfish pillow with a face, and we took our brightly dyed Easter eggs out into the pristine, glittering landscape. We “hid” colored eggs in the snow, and they popped like flower buds in the crystal powder, promises of a coming spring.

Photo credit: My mom, Beth Smith. Interestingly, the photos prove my memories wrong (what our son wore, how much snow was on the ground).

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. Trying to get back into the writing habit.
Giving away furniture

April 4th, 2015

My grandmother was a shrewd woman. She drank gin all day and kept Rolaids between the couch cushions for her constant heartburn, and she had strong opinions — about politics, about taxes, about us doing well in school. She paid me for straight As and after dinner she’d get all the grownups together so she could hold court and talk about her Southern Democrats. My grandfather, the retired diplomat, would sit quietly in the other green armchair in his seersucker suit, and he’d smile at us grandkids while Grandma opined.

Grandma had lots of thoughts about lots of things, and one of those things was taxes. She had a large estate as she grew older, including several waterfront properties on St. Simons Island, Georgia. Properties she paid $10K for and were worth upwards of $500K when she saw her end coming near.

She was ready to go as early as her 70s. She lived a full life around the world as the wife of a diplomat. Her sons were grown and had their own families, and she was proud, and she was done. She was ready to Go to her Reward.

Grandma put her sons on her property deeds before she died so that they wouldn’t have to pay estate taxes on them, she put us grandkids as joint owners on her stock certificates for the same reason, and every time we’d come over, even when I was just a kid, she’d say, “If there’s anything you want, let me know. I’ll put your name on it and you can have it when I’m gone.”

Going around her house, I liked to inspect things things. I’d check the back of an oil painting and see my uncle’s name, “Rob.” Lift one of the heavy glass seagulls and on the base see my dad’s name, “Henry.” I chose a round end table with a drawer, and I remember every time I went to her house after that, I’d pull the drawer open and see a narrow slip of paper in there, barely wider than the piece of clear tape that secured it. In my grandmother’s handwriting, shaky from her old age, I saw my name, “ANDREA.”

I left the slip in there after she was gone. Every few months, I’d open the drawer, just to see my name, in Grandma’s blue ink, and I’d smile.

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. Trying to get back into the writing habit.
Ink

April 3rd, 2015

Ink. I love the way it feels. I love the way it stains. Ink in different forms changes the way I write. When it’s super liquidy I write messy, but my thoughts can come quickly. When ink is sticky — ball point — my handwriting is nicer, but thoughts are slower. I wonder how that affects my product? I don’t like messy writing. I prefer it neat. But messy writing is quicker and allows for messy thoughts. Which I like.

Squid ink in a paella pan in Spain. A harpist plays in the flat above. The music drifts in from the open balcony. The paella is black from the squid ink. Did it have flavor, the ink? I do not remember. I remember the anchovies. Not anchovies packed into a tiny tin, not anchovies as small as my pinky. Oh wait – those are sardines. Anyway, anchovies from the market in Barcelona. Anchovies with silver skin, charred in the pan. Anchovies with fins and faces, served whole on my plate. Do I use my fork? Joaquim delights in my propriety. Wiggles his oily fingers covered in scales and tender meat. “Like this,” he says, and picks up a silver fish with his fingers, pulls bones from it, pushes white flakes of fresh fish into his mouth. Smiles and tips his head at my plate. Go ahead, he nods. It’s okay.

Ink makes my mind tangible. Thoughts with no form, airy, floating, nothingness, are made permanent on a page in black liquid lines that dry to solid. Indelible. The invisible becomes visible. Nothing becomes something. Gas to solid. Not gas – not anything. Thought is not matter. Ink makes not-matter into matter. There are experiments where thoughts influence matter, right? Something with subatomic particles and thoughts influencing where they move. I could be making that up. If I’m not, which I don’t think I am, what does that make thought? Is thought energy? A force?

I smell rosemary. It makes me think of New Orleans. Of the rosemary hedge on the way to the Thai place. Of Luca’s roasted chicken.

Photo Credit: Frédéric Glorieux

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. Trying to get back into the writing habit.
Ocean

April 2nd, 2015

Marine blue. A wash of green. Navy at depth. Pacific blue off Kauai. Turquoise in Bahamian shallows, where tropical sun penetrates aquamarine. White sand below.

Ocean with galaxies of starfish, shivers of sharks, smacks of jellyfish. With animals as big as houses. With beings who are our kin, warm-blooded, intelligent, playful, zen. I had a dream once that I was a whale. I lay in a field with my pod, and we were not dying. You’d think whales on land would be in their death throes, but the field was irrelevant to our health or well-being. It was a dream.

What I remember from the dream was a state of non-thinking, non-analyzing, non-questioning. I lay in a field, as a whale, with my pod, simply being. I felt the sun. I knew my podmates. I was alive. I had no worry. I was like the TED speaker who had a stroke and lost language, whose mental chatter was silenced. Who in her wordless existence experienced life in the present. Feeling it. Absorbing it. Living it without judgment.

The ocean moves. It is fluid. It is never the same and always the same. On the scale of seconds, it is like snowflakes: each ripple is unique, no cubic inch is filled with the same light, the same particles, the same ctenophore larva, diatoms, coral spawn. On the scale of centuries, the ocean is constant, dependable: tides bulge and recede, hurricanes gather, currents flow like ancient rivers, waters evaporate, condense, rain down. Water always streams downward into the salty basins of the earth. Into the sea.

And blue. Always blue. The ocean is all of the prettiest blues. Aqueous sapphire. Liquid and light.

Photo credit: Jellyfish by domo k

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. Trying to get back into the writing habit.

Category: Ten Minute Free Writes

Rubies and Pearls

Humic

Favorite Easter Memory

Giving away furniture

Ink

Ocean