Tag: writing prompt

I crave

July 13th, 2018

Right now I crave time. I want to have time to write and think and garden. I crave peace from the guilt I feel when I’m not working round the clock because I want so badly to sit and be alive.

I crave the ocean. I want to smell the salt air. I want to see turquoise shallows and swim in warm tropical waters. I crave the ripples on the water’s surface, and the delight of dolphins and sea turtles and ctenophores and flying fish. I crave warm (but not hot) sun. I crave the glimmer of salt crystals on the white deck of our sailboat. I crave the crinkle of salt dried on my skin. I crave the briny taste of the sea on my lips.

Closer to home I crave a quiet afternoon sitting in the garden and watching butterflies and hummingbirds. I crave inspiration to write. I crave that feeling I get, that satisfaction, of writing something well.

But mostly I crave the time and the freedom for all of these things before my life runs out and I can no longer enjoy them.

I’ve started using the Prompts app to write every day. This came from yesterdays “I crave” prompt.
Fahrvergnügen

April 21st, 2014

1976 Super Beetle (left) and 2009 Jetta (right) keys

My car key is a rectangle of black plastic that fits in my palm like a rabbit’s foot, like any car clicker does these days. Only mine has no protruding key. The clicker is compact; I can wrap my whole hand around it, like a talisman. On my clicker, there is a shiny button I push with my thumb, and when I press it, a silver key pops out like a switchblade.

When we first bought our Passat wagon, I was giddy to have a Volkswagen again. My first car was a robin’s egg blue Super Beetle with a white canvas top. I was the first of my girlfriends to turn 16, the first to get a driver’s license, the first to be granted access to a car and the silver key that inserted into the ignition and (sometimes) made the car go. The key had the letters VW encircled on its round silver head: the logo that I maintain as silly an attachment to as hipsters do to that clean-edged apple with a crescent bite out of it.

My girlfriends and I push-started that car all over Savannah. We smoked cigarettes, laughed with the top down, drove to Tybee Island to go to the beach, not caring if we tracked sand in the Beetle because it just fell through the holes in the floor anyway: the holes that allowed water to splash up on my uniform shoes and my plaid Catholic school girl skirt when I raced through deep puddles on rainy days, in a hurry to get back to class after coffee at the downtown Daybreak Cafe.

So when we got that VW station wagon, my husband and me, and installed car seats in back for our two beautiful babies, I was pretty excited. The dashboard was edgy, lit in reds and cobalt blue in the dark night we drove it home. The engine was solid, the car black with silver details – sexy despite its family wagon-ness – and there, on the steering wheel, padded and filled with airbag (unlike the Beetle), was that circle that embraced those beloved letters: VW. The Passat, like its switchblade clicker, marked a milestone transition, a leveling up of sophistication over the the holey floor and plain silver key of the Beetle.

The key I have now, though it looks so like our station wagon key that we often confuse them, is not for the Passat. It is for the sporty six-speed Jetta we bought when my husband was offered his tenure-track position. For nine years he had lived without a car while we scraped by on student loans and his graduate school TA income. My husband walked to school in the sweltering heat and violent thunderstorms of Florida. He bought studded snow tires to bike to work in the punishing winters of Minnesota. We rented and bought houses based on proximity to his workplace so we could live on one car payment, one insurance payment, one gas tank, one repair bill. Though we owned a Passat, we still lived a Beetle life.

When all my husband’s hard work paid off, we bought him a shiny new-to-us car. And now I carry its key. Come to find out, it’s not just men who take to sports cars when they hit middle age. I love the supple feel of the steering wheel on my fingertips, the round head of the gear shift smooth in the palm of my hand. I love pressing the gas hard and releasing the clutch quick and feeling the car surge, zipping past all these college boys vroom vrooming their engines at traffic lights. I laugh with the sunroof open as our Jetta blasts past them.

I am responsible when the kids are with me, I promise I am. That’s why my husband wanted me to take the nice car and give him the beat up wagon. The sporty Jetta is the more reliable car now, the one that he feels safer about the kids and me being in.

This key I hold in my hand – this black plastic rectangle that fits perfectly in my palm, whose silver shaft snaps out like a switchblade – it carries all of my Volkswagen memories: that first robin’s egg Beetle with the white canvas top and holes in the floor, the Passat station wagon we drove from Florida to Minnesota to Virginia, moving our babies, and finally, the Jetta, the most grown up Volkswagen we’ve owned. And the coolest.

Vroom vroom.

My god, could I place more products here on my blog? WordPress last week, Volkswagen this week. I swear nobody’s paying me for this. Anyway, this piece came out of a prompt in our writing group: keys.

*Fahrvergnügen is German for “driving pleasure.”
Orange and maroon on the move

September 26th, 2013

Orange and maroon are on the move, like a river burbling down the sidewalk, like burgundy water roiling with golden Koi.

From my perch on a grassy hill, I see a sea of wine and oranges, a teeming tide of tee-shirts that streams towards the stadium. I hear the laughter and drunken hoots of Hokie fans. Children run with pom poms rustling. They laugh and lick ice cream and rattle plastic plumes while Dad slips a flask into his sock, or a fake camera with a liquor cavity into the diaper bag. On the way to the game, they – parents and children and college kids alike – are full of excited energy.

As the crowd thins – kickoff is near and the fans have funneled into the stadium like fish over rapids – I hear the hum and the sputter of a biplane in the crisp autumn air. Its hum heightens to a whine as it approaches, then recedes to a buzz as the plane banks towards the stadium. It pulls a banner, flapping like clear tape behind it, advertising pizza or insurance or the used care lot down the road.

The sidewalk is empty now, clean even, and I hear a gathering roar, carried across a mile of blue sky from Lane Stadium. The sound builds – rooooaaAAARRRRR – as football fans stomp and cheer for kickoff. A yellow butterfly floats over a bush near my knee.

After, when the tide recedes from the stadium, it will leave debris, just like the ocean. It will leave behind peanut shells and empty cups, abandoned pom poms and maroon and orange hair bows. If the Hokies won, the party will continue all night, a crash of waves under moonlight.

I wrote this at the beginning of football season in Blacksburg, VA, home of the Virginia Tech Hokies, in response to a writing workshop prompt “orange and maroon on the move.”
I do it for the comments

August 15th, 2013

When I first started blogging a little more than two years ago, I didn’t know what I was doing. I owned a handmade soap business at the time, and because I love to write, I launched a blog to build my company’s brand. A good friend of mine, Liv Lane, happened to roll out a blogging ecourse around the same time, and I enrolled in her course expecting to learn basics like how to choose a blog host and how to build readership. I did learn those things, and with her guidance I succeeded in building a thriving blog. But more importantly, through simple yet soul-probing queries, Liv helped me find my voice and my self. Once I began Liv’s course, and began digging deep to contemplate and respond to material she presented, I realized I enjoyed my business’ blog, and writing, far more than I enjoyed making and selling soaps (I have since dissolved my soap company).

One of the first simple yet probing queries Liv posed to us was “Why do you blog?” It seems like such an obvious question to ask ourselves, but I can honestly say that when I began blogging, it was not one I ever stopped to consider. And curiously, one I never asked (or answered) when I started my (now-defunct) business. My responses now are almost identical to my 2011 answers to the question of “Why?”

I blog for the comments. Duh. Doesn’t everyone? I like for you to tell me you are here, and I like for you to tell me I’m awesome. Heh heh. Just kidding. I do like to know you are here, though, and I do love when you share your reactions, your thoughts, your feedback. Which leads me to the second reason I blog.

Blogging is a form of communication. When we had our first child, and I chose to stay home with him, let’s just say the transition from workplace to home was a challenge. I need brain stimulation. Pre-kids, I had a very people-oriented, interactive job recruiting and managing participants, mentors, and coaches for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Team In Training program. Before that I worked in ecology labs, hanging out with fun people and constantly exploring and experimenting to answer questions about the world around us. At home it was just me and our infant son. Not a lot of thoughtful, funny, or stimulating conversations going on there. Blogging, and the dialogue it inspires, helps fulfill my need to communicate with other adults.

I love words. There is nothing quite as satisfying as writing the perfect sentence.

Writing is a free art form. When I first began making soaps, I realized very quickly that if I didn’t start selling them, there was no way I’d be able to afford the supplies I would need to bring all of my ideas into creation. Likewise for painters, potters, jewelers, photographers, scrap-bookers. Most forms of creative expression require materials. Writing requires very little that must be purchased. My composition books cost $0.59, and I could get pens cheap too, if I wanted. As for keyboards, even if you don’t have a computer, you can go to the library and use one for free.

Writing helps me direct my life. It gives me clarity and focus. Selecting a topic, figuring out how to give life to it, finding the right words – all of these guide my thoughts, my attitude, my perspective, and therefore my life, in a direction that I choose. For my previous blog I wrote a post called “Best. Day. Ever.” It was one of my favorite things I’ve ever written. I confess that on that day there were some not so “best day ever” things that happened. But because I was focused on writing about the awesome things that did happen, the negatives didn’t register as being important, and they rolled right off my back. I have no recollection of what they were anymore. The beauty in that day, however, is preserved now forever.

Other writers’ words, voices, choices, and experiences enrich my life, teach me, and help me strive to be my best self. This is the only new response I have added since that original list I made, and as I’ve matured as a writer and a blogger, I realize that this is the real reason I write and share my writing. Even though writing publicly often makes me feel very vulnerable, it is my hope that my words, voice, choices, and experiences may have a similar effect on my readers as other writers have had on me. That something I’ve written will enrich your life, or teach you, or help you strive to be your best self.

I highly recommend Liv’s ecourse, Build a Blog You Truly Love. Along with my husband and my childhood friend, Amy, I credit Liv with helping give me the confidence to put myself out there and write. If you are interested in blogging, and think this might be a fit for you, she is offering the course only one more time. The final session begins September 15, 2013.
I remember

January 26th, 2013

I remember how pretty the marsh looks in summer, when a storm is coming, and the grass looks neon green against a blackening sky.

I remember the Fourth of July in Savannah that year with Brian. We rode in his Jeep with the top down, drove down to River Street to watch the fireworks. But it was so hot and humid we could barely breathe, like we were sucking air through thick layers of hot, wet gauze. We sat with the crowds by the river, skin burning under a setting sun, sweating, asthmatic in the thick atmosphere, and decided we didn’t want to be there. We got back in his Jeep, a navy blue Wrangler with a tan top and round headlights instead of the rectangular ones, and we drove toward the south side of Savannah. Even with the top down, and the sun down, and the wind blowing by at 50 miles per hour, we still suffocated in the heavy summer air. We drove to the theater, where it was cool, and we could breathe, and we drank iced fountain Cokes, and watched a movie on the Fourth of July.

I remember when I was training for the AIDS Ride, and I rode my bike in a 50 mile ride for the American Lung Association. The ride was in Maryland, where we lived at the time, and it was hilly. About two miles from the end, there was a hill that veteran riders called “The Wall.” I was an amateur cyclist at the time, a total neophyte, and when I got to that hill, and I started pedaling up it, I had no idea what I had gotten myself into. My thighs screamed with the effort, my lungs burned, and as I fought for every pedal stroke, red-faced and gasping, I passed a hand painted sign on the side of the hill that said, “This is what it feels like to have asthma.”

I remember dropping periwinkle snails in the black mud of our creek at low tide, how surprised I was every time that those lightweight little snails, smaller than the acorns of live oaks, would sink so deep in the softness, leaving holes like someone had stuck her finger in the mud.

I remember making marsh romping shoes with my older brother in summer. Nailing old sneakers to 18 inch squares of plywood, fashioning snowshoe-like footwear so that we could walk above the mud instead of sinking deep, to our knees or our thighs, in the slimy black muck.

I remember when my husband (then boyfriend) was thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail. His hiking partner’s girlfriend and I would drive through the snowy mountains and meet them in little towns along the trail on the weekends. One weekend, we couldn’t visit them, so she and I planned to have dinner together instead. When she knocked on my door that Friday night, I opened it to find a grizzled man on my doorstep, smiling at me with twinkling eyes. I stared at him, dumfounded, before I squealed and grinned and hugged my husband (then boyfriend).

I remember repairing Bun Bun’s ear. I remember researching stuffed animal hospitals because this was too important a task for me to screw up. Bun Bun’s ear was the part our daughter loved, the part she rubbed against her cheek as she sucked her thumb, the part her fingers worried absently as she stared out the window in the car. When the tip of Bun Bun’s ear came undone, when our daughter had worried it til the seams unraveled, and the tip wore through and dangled like a hangnail, it needed to come off before more damage was done. I remember our daughter had a doctor kit, and she took Bun Bun’s blood pressure before I commenced with surgery.

Our daughter and I journaled together today. We set a timer for 20 minutes and used the writing prompt “I remember” from Natalie Goldberg’s Writing down the Bones. This is my entry. (edited 8/6/13 – see The Daily Post Weekly Writing Challenge: I Remember for more details and other writers’ entries)

Tag: writing prompt

I crave

Fahrvergnügen

Orange and maroon on the move

I do it for the comments

I remember