Butterfly Mind

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.
Hay Bales

April 1st, 2015

Hay bales are my lily pads. I watch the light on them when I run: the angle, the strength, the warmth. Depending on the time of day, the season of year, the color of the sky, the life on the ground, the hay bales look different every day.

Growing up, I made the drive from Savannah to Athens a thousand times with my family. I always loved to see the hay bales in the fields, dotting the hills as if dropped with parachutes from the sky. Plopped wherever the bale happened to have enough hay and the baler strapped it up and abandoned it. There was no order. No pattern to the bales on the hills, but the bales themselves are so tidy. This appealed to me then and it appeals to me now, the tidiness of a bale of hay. Something that swayed in the wind and covered the earth and that I’d never be able to order myself if I were to reap and bundle it – not without wrestling and swearing and scratching blood on my arms – all of this wildness was now bound in a tight, neat package that looked like a tater tot.

It wasn’t until I was an adult and started taking my runs through the fields around here that I started looking at hay bales up close. The swirl of the straw around the core of the bale, the streaks of stalks like highlights in blonde hair. When the sky is blue, and the land is stubbled, and the hay bale lazes in the right slant of light, it shines like gold.

Do they leave the bales as is and just let cows munch on them? No, that can’t be right – they have that green plastic wrap around them. That’s a new thing. They used to be bound with two or three narrow white bands of plastic or twine. Now they are bound by webbing. Someone must collect the bales at some point. No one has collected mine yet, though.

I wanted to watch the hay at sunrise today, but I was too early. The sun did not rise over the mountains and shine on the bales before I needed to get home to pack lunches. I tried. I ran back and forth, watching the morning sun light the hilltops to the west. But the bales were in valleys and I could not wait any longer. All my bales are golden. I want to see them glow pink.

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.
After New Orleans

March 31st, 2015

I spent a week in New Orleans for work. Six days in the Garden District, near where one of my favorite novels, The Witching Hour, takes place, where Spanish moss and Mardis Gras beads drip from the trees. The fragrance when we decabbed from the airport was heady: warm, moist, earthy, with elusive hints of rose, azalea, jasmine. Every time I walked outside I chased floral ribbons of air. I could not get enough of the scents.

The city is seductive. It is raw, base, and passionate. It is artists and tourists, eaters and drinkers. Musicians. I had a lot of fun there. I cut loose. My work group was small enough, and I was comfortable enough, that I drank and ate, and joked with abandon, as I do with my oldest friends. I ate sweet potato beignets, pecan-crusted redfish, blackened fish tacos, Luca-made risotto, Brie-made cheesecake, lavendar honey ice cream.

I went to Bourbon Street on St. Patrick’s Day, and live jazz on Frenchman St. I walked along the Mississippi River at night, in a blanket of fog, and listened to water lap the shore. I imagined the foggy river in true darkness, without streetlights, and thought, No wonder there are so many ghost stories here.

And of course, I wrote nothing. Not a word. I’ve neglected my 10-minutes a day for several weeks, and as we approach the end of the first quarter of the year, it’s time to change that. It’s time to make writing happen again.

Now that y’all have helped me fill my prompt box (thank you!), I’m ready. For the next month, to hold myself accountable to my goal of daily writing, I aim to publish one ten-minute write per day, initiated by a slip of paper from my prompt box. If I can barely time find to write, I definitely don’t have time for polish, so these will be raw and unedited. The goal isn’t perfection or story, but to get words onto the page. Just warning you now – they might not be pretty.
Call for prompts

March 30th, 2015

I admit. I fell off the writing wagon for about a month. This past week, I began writing again, and I’ve burned through almost all of the prompts in my prompt box. There are only about six more slips of paper in there. Will you help me fill it back up?

Feed me your favorite word, a vivid scene, an unlikely pairing. A piece of dialog, an object, a potent verb. I’ll write them on slips of paper and put them in my tea tin of ideas.

Some past prompts I’ve written from:

rolling pins
ocean
ink
thunderstorms
sun on my skin

You get the idea. I look forward to your words. Thank you!

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Giving away furniture

Ink

Ocean

Hay Bales

After New Orleans

Call for prompts