Butterfly Mind

Wildflowers

November 7th, 2015

Waving in the wind, white faces of daisies, pink petals of cosmos. On the ground, sprinkles of periwinkle, or the white stars of asters at the mossy bases of shady trees. Trillium in the understory of a mountaiside forest. Masses of yellow dandelions and white clover and purple thistle and all their weedy green leaves on the open prairie.

I love them all.

Butter yellow daffodils on the Georgia roadsides between Savannah and Athens. Pink lady slippers on Old Rag in Shenendoah. The white peep of dogwood flowers in spring, when all the forest branches are brown and bare and you can see through to the interior of the woods to glimpse sprays of white on the dogwoods, the first of spring bloomers.

In Virginia, the magenta of redbuds along the interstate: so bright, so intense, so crazy beautiful you think they must have been planted. But their placement is irregular. There are seven trees in an uneven clump, a couple scattered behind at the edge of the forest. Another two over there, a thicket up the road.

They are wild.

I don’t know that there are many things that delight me more than finding flowers out in nature. They still surprise me, after all this time. “This beautiful thing just grows here. Nobody planted it. It exists without our interference or initiation.”

On hikes, I spend frame after frame on photographing flowers. Even if they are the little junk flowers that are everywhere in the world. They are magical. They are designed to attract. To attract pollinators who will ensure their survival.

And to attract me, who merely admires them.

For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
It was the candle that did it

November 6th, 2015

I use my office as an office. I work at my desk. Until this week, I piled junk on the table.

I did not choose to write in that room. In the room I painted in the basement.

The table was ready. It waited for me.

In our previous house, I wrote at the table. It sat next to a bright window in the kitchen. I drank coffee there. Flowers brightened vases there. I spread composition books there and read novels there.

Here, the table sat alone in the corner under a small dark window in my key lime office. Until this week, I wrote upstairs. Until this week, the table gathered dust instead of words.

The candle changed everything.

At the beginning of the soccer season, my son and I carpooled with a friend to Winston Salem, NC, for a tournament. The boys warmed up. Lisa and I sought a Krispy Kreme. The donut king is headquartered in Winston Salem. Lisa told me about donuts in L.A. About how the neighborhood Krispy Kreme staff knew her family.

I told her about swerving across lanes of traffic in Savannah for the neon red “Hot Donuts Now” sign. About how I owned Krispy Kreme stock.

Lisa and I bonded over donuts. We bought two dozen. We delivered them to parents on the team sidelines.

Last weekend, at a different soccer game, Lisa said, “I have something for you.” She pulled a small cellophane package from her bag. In it was a green and white polka-dotted box marked “KK.” The box was a bit smaller than a Rubik’s cube. In it was a donut-scented candle from Krispy Kreme.

Back at home, in my office, I cleaned the café table. I removed the candle from its box and placed the candle in the table’s center. During the week, the donut candle burned. I worked. The candle flickered on the round table.

It made me want to write there.

The candle transformed the room. Now, each morning, I sit at my writing table. The candle flickers there. I drink coffee there. I spread composition books there and scratch words across the page there.

As mentioned in yesterday’s post, The tension between sentences, for this post I attempted to write only in simple sentences or fragments. A compound or complex sentence may have snuck in. Simple sentences are hard!
The tension between sentences

November 5th, 2015

A single crowded sentence means giving up all the possible relations among shorter sentences — the friction, the tension, the static electricity that builds up between them.

— from Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg

I love Hemingway for his sentences. I did not know this is why I love him. I would read his books and be unable to explain my ~~infatuation~~ admiration. “His writing is lean,” I’d say. “It is tight. The words are simple but the implications are complex.”

“He says so much with so few words.”

There is story happening behind his words. And I don’t know how he does it.

The sentence I quoted above, from Klinkenborg’s small, concise book, gives a clue. When I practiced writing as a craft, my group once wrote pieces using only simple sentences: no conjunctions, no clauses. When we read our practice aloud, our works sounded like Hemingway. Lean. Simple. Direct.

The lack of transitions, the absence of explanations, the periods without ands or buts — these vacancies create tension. They credit the reader with the intelligence to make leaps in the spaces between the words, in the gaps between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next.

My homework tonight is to study the simple sentence. Next write, I will use them.

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For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
The firewood debacle

November 4th, 2015

I’ve had “get firewood” on our family Trello board since we moved into our house in June. In July, when we had our chimney cleaned, I asked the sweep if he had any recommendations for where to get firewood around here. He tilted his head and said, “Most people don’t share their firewood sources. It’s not easy to get good seasoned wood around here.”

I tilted my head back at him. I was skeptical. We are surrounded by forests and pickup trucks.

In August, I wrote about getting excited for autumn. In September I started calling around. I called the one number our chimney sweep gave us. I called numbers from “Firewood for sale” signs we saw by the road side. I replied to “Seasoned firewood” ads on Craigslist.

Sold out.

No answer.

Won’t deliver.

We’re flooded and can’t get to our wood.

Come get it with your own truck.

Will deliver a minimum of two cords for $485.

We wanted half a cord. We don’t own a truck. We’re not spending $500 on firewood.

For eight weeks this went on. “We can deliver a 6-foot pickup bed full.” How much is that in cords? No call back.

As of October 31, we’d had frost on the ground more than once, and we still had no wood. I was completely baffled by this. In Minnesota we had our choice of firewood options. One phone call and we’d have a standard measure of seasoned wood delivered and stacked the following weekend.

On Halloween day, before we even bought our pumpkin to carve, I was on the phone again. I finally found someone who sold in a measurement I could identify, and who would deliver. He sold in loads twice the size of what we were prepared for, but given the trouble we had finding wood, that was fine with me.

Derek, who is my new best friend, pulled his truck alongside the rack my husband built and dumped it within feet for easy stacking: a pile as tall as me of beautiful, seasoned, hard wood. He eyed the rack. “That will hold about half of this,” he said.

He pulled away, and my daughter and I started stacking. We filled the rack in about 20 minutes. I turned around and the pile didn’t look any smaller.

Hmmm.

I didn’t want to leave the wood piled there, where it would kill the grass, and we didn’t have a plan for where it would go, so I made a makeshift stand out of firewood and started stacking again.

Proud of my stacks.

There were a couple of times I thought my pyramid would tumble, like when you pull the keystone apple from a produce display and the whole thing collapses, apples rolling everywhere. I don’t think we’ll be sending our kids down to get firewood from that stack.

I love wood.

But it’s there. We have wood. Winter is coming, and we are ready for it.

Lots of wood.

For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
Salt

November 3rd, 2015

Salt on my lips when I sweat. A crust of salt on my skin when I swim, SCUBA dive, snorkel. Salt makes my eyelashes stick together, and my skin feel dry and tight, and when I open my mouth underwater, I taste the brine. Salt water stings the inner membranes of my nose if too much goes in it, drawing water to my eyes.

Salt is earth. It is flavor. It is crystal. It is crust.

Salt is foundation.

Salt is strong and vital, sold and earthy. And we eat it. We eat earth. And we want more. “Worth his salt.” Doesn’t that come from back in the days when salt was more valuable than gold?

I love thinking about consumables being precious. Not because they were rare, but because food was valued. Saffron. Spices. Salt. Do we value food anymore? Most of it is so cheap I feel like we don’t. Of course, that’s the McDonald’s aspect of food I’m talking about. Fine dining still exists, thank heavens.

But Salt. I like it on my skin. I like it in the sea. I like it in the air so I can smell it. I like it in my sweets to balance the sugar. I like pouring it into bowls, coarse sea salt especially, though Kosher will do.

There has been a gourmet salt thing recently — whole shops dedicated to pink, white, black salts. I wonder if the flavor differences are that noticeable? Or maybe it’s not just flavor but aftertaste, or compatibility with other flavors, or structure, or aesthetic. I’ve never tried a specialty salt. All of our salts are white: baking salt, fine and iodized and in a cylindrical canister; Kosher salt in a heavy box with a spout; coarse sea salt, also in a canister, though smaller and with one of those annoying plastic dispensers on top where you spin the lid to create different openings.

For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
Derelict

November 2nd, 2015

Oh boy. This must be a prompt a reader left for me. I don’t know the meaning of the word “derelict.” It sounds like it should mean shabby or abandoned, like a crumbling house with broken windows, a porch that’s caved in, boards falling off the exterior. A derelict house would have once been smooth and honey brown with the color of fresh wood, but in it’s abandoned state would be grey and splintered.

Like a haunted house. The thing with haunted houses though, is that they are not truly derelict, if derelict means what I think it means. A haunted house is abandoned by the living, but not by the dead.

Growing up in Savannah, Georgia, I did a report for school on the haunted houses of our town. My friend and I borrowed a video camera and interviewed the owners of some of the stately old houses of Savannah — historical homes downtown on the squares, and the Victorian columned homes on Victory Drive. We interviewed the owners and asked them to tell us ghost stories.

The only one I remember is one on azalea-lined Victory Drive. A kind elderly woman walked us through the rooms of the house, telling us strange hauntings that had happened in each. The room I remember was a bedroom. The walls were plaster and were painted a soft color — a subtle mint or a pale blue — and the gentlewoman told us of footprints on the ceiling. The room was for visitors, and guests had awoken in that fluffy bed, looked up, and seen impressions of shoes indenting the solid white ceiling. The footprints moved as if two people were dancing.

I loved that story. It didn’t seem scary at the time, but it was daylight and there was no dancing on the ceiling.

So is a haunted house derelict? I don’t know. I don’t know if even an abandoned house is derelict. I think I need to look it up.

*Derelict does mean abandoned. Score! Thank you to LRose for the prompt.

For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.