Spring

After a long, gray winter,

there is little better than spring's

sun and warmer temperatures.

But this, this is the very best bit.

Travel Advisory

On our recent trip to visit my family in Indiana, Flip fell in love with a stray cat that had been hanging around my parents' farm for the last few weeks. Need I say that the felines in our house now outnumber the humans?

Welcome

Willow & Nahum

May 9, 2009

Today The Furrball

soaked up the sun,

ate some Beecher's "Flagship" cheddar,

watched the birds fly by,

posed on one of his porches,

enjoyed a harness-free yard adventure,

and breathed his last.

We miss him terribly.

Roller Coaster

This weekend was a belly-dropping dip in the feline chronic renal failure roller coaster we've been riding since September.

The Furrball, hospitalized under protest.

It's beastly, and he doesn't like it much, but he's on a 48-hour, continuous IV drip that's supposed to flush his kidneys. We'll find out if it worked on Monday.

Oh My

It's been so long, I fear I may have forgotten how to write, though every day I sit in front of my work computer and type more than a sane person should in eight hours. Funny, I hadn't thought to consider my paid work writing, but most of it is.

It's just that I'm not writing at GraceNotes, or in my journal, or on any of the scraps of paper that litter my workspace here at home, and so it feels as though I've forgotten how to write. And this scares me. But what I most fear is that I'm forgetting the fledgling, but hard-won, skill of tapping into my heart, of opening my mind and my time to inspiration—and just seeing what happens.

I don't know if setting a creativity goal for myself will get me any closer to learning to write my heart in the minutes I have available between tasks, but I know that if I don't start stretching my creativity muscles again soon, I'm a goner.

So, I snapped a few photos on my lunch today. The exercise felt good.

Exercise

Directions: Write a four-paragraph story using one of the following four words in each paragraph: serendipity, gargantuan, corncob, Popsicle.

-----
It was a hot afternoon. He thought he might get a Popsicle, but he didn't.

He'd intended to be on the road by noon, but he'd missed his chance. Though if he looked at it from another perspective, he could almost see how serendipity had kept him there.

He thought about how cool the freezer would feel if he could make himself get up and move through the gargantuan heaps of newspapers, Farm Journals, and boxes of paraphernalia that littered his parents' house.

He looked across the porch at his father's body, still sitting upright in the rocker, corncob pipe gripped in his hand. He remained in his chair, just for a bit longer.