A Trip to the Dump

“Why do you write?” a fellow blogger asked in her post. “To find treasure in a heap of garbage,” I muttered to myself.

Writing reminds me of when I was a kid and my dad or uncle would fill up a trailer with broken chairs, mattresses, ceiling tile and carpeting to haul to the dump. (Yes, my brain ties thoughts like these together…)

Dumps weren’t giant landfills then. Junk was strewn around and you could spend hours looking through it. My cousin and I begged to go along on these trips, even though we were warned that going meant helping to unload the trailer.

We found bookshelves, old lamps, even an old black and white television that still worked but was tossed out because you needed a pliers to switch the channels. Our mothers sighed and rolled their eyes at the sight of the trailer returning home, just as full as when it had left.

My cousin and I brought home things that we thought we could use to furnish our hideaway in the rafters of the garage at my aunt and uncle’s cabin. The space had been a pigeon coop in a former life that we spent many hours digging out from under the pigeon poo. We covered the rough floor with gray swirly-patterned carpeting that had been torn out of my parent’s living room and replaced with a more modern, yet equally obscene, turquoise number. We found cans of white paint left over from painting the boathouse and coated the walls with it. At an early age, I learned to reuse and make do.

I’m reminded of this as I hit rock bottom to the cadence of writers’ blues, scanning my screen and printed pages for something gem-like. I can’t give up and not write, even though it seems like it would save me a great deal of grief and free up time for other things.

Maybe my writing problem comes from skipping the step of first loading up the trailer with old garbage and leaving it behind at the dump.  There’s no room to take home what life keeps offering up in treasures and tragedies.

I’ve got a hard drive, journals, and file cabinets full of stories. It feels like such a waste to have them sitting there doing nothing, but they take me to places and to a self that I don’t want to visit right now. There might be a great story there, but I can’t approach it, not straight on anyway.

On Monday, I started writing in the third person, which helped put some distance between the story and myself. It made a surprising difference, freeing up a block of crap in my brain waves.

I have sorely missed that irreverent, writer girl, the one that swears and says shocking things. Not everyone loves her, but writing in her voice is an expression of my insides coming out and riding a roller coaster naked with arms held high peeking over the edge of a rise and racing around the curve. It’s a hard feeling to express…

But yes, She made an appearance. A bit more tentative in her delivery than she used to be, but she was in the room.

I know I can’t rely on the elusive Muse showing up or feeling a buzz of creativity or falling into a flow of words that removes all the constraints of time and space. These things happen, but for the most part, glowing coals have become gray ash. Now I have to rely on showing up and doing the work and being thankful when magic happens but not depending on it.

But enough about me… or just a bit more:

• I am in the second week of my Master Gardener classes and feeling quite over my head. And yet I persevere.
• I am SUPER busy at work, which has meant some longer days and too short evenings.
• The egg production is WAY DOWN to only one egg every other day right now. I think the chicks are weather confused, as am I, with temperatures in the 40’s one day and the single digits the next. I hear that February, with the increase in daylight will help this situation.

• Luke has not been ridden much by me because of my insane schedule, but fortunately, another boarder is riding him a bit for lessons. He’s a good horse to help build a rider’s confidence. Heck, he’s just simply a good horse.

• Shy is still playing with her Christmas toy and when tires of spinning balls, she uses it as a bed after the loss of her beloved Christmas tree skirt.

• The Brew Babes are sorely missing their regular walks, which have also taken a beating from busyness.