Tell Us Your Tales from Your Notebook today!
I welcome the grey, the bleak, the wintry.
I hear of the Northeast, buried. I read of Katherine wishing she had snow pants and I wish I had even thought of investing in such a thing or her, this her fourth winter in New England one would think I would have considered such a thing before she noted on facebook how much she would like those.
I hear the dog barking, my neighbor's dog, and I look there - on one of my numerous bookshelves - to see the bright teal watering can amidst the blues and pinks, lavenders, and I think that teal watering pitcher is so brave.
Perhaps the painter of the pitcher is brave, too, for electing to put it precisely there where it would stand out like a needle in a tortured haystack, moaning and swooning and groveling at the feet of an unseen deity, apologizing for her tealness or the short-sighted chose of covering silver with teal when silver was perfectly fine before.
The thing is, the painter loves color: especially bright, unexpected color.
She doesn't consciously love to stand out because she knows it would embarrass her family and those around her, so she has tried for years to blend even amidst her eccentricity she tries to blend.
She remembers a friend several years ago, the painter does. She remembers this friend saying, "I like to hang out with you because you make me feel normal."
She remembers tittery, girlish tea circle laughter but inside she wanted to shout, "Why am I so different I can't even be with the different people without being more different and that makes me feel wrong... or it adds fuel to the embers of belief telling me I am wrong even after these years."
I can feel the recent reading aloud of a sixteen-year-old Suzanne Vega coursing through my fingers. For a moment I miss my therapist. For another moment, I don't miss my anti-depressants and I wonder how effective they were in the first place, even as a placebo.
I hear a rumbly old truck outside and I don't turn my head.
I note through the corner of my right eye my wicked witch neighbor has left for wherever she goes during the day to torment cat lovers and purveyors of whimsy like her husband who slyly wears a baseball jersey with the name Quixote on the back.
I hear what he is saying.
She is too cranky and self involved to notice. I wonder for the shortest moment what it was that made her so angry in the first place.
For an even shorter moment I recognize myself in her sneering voice saying, "We hate cats."
The thing is, the painter loves cats and doesn't care if the wicked which of Alta Vista hates cats. I won't let any of the neighborhood cats go hungry. Although I could, perhaps, capture the toms and get them neutered.
I wonder when in this flow of words she changed from first person to third person.
She won't correct it.
No, I won't correct it.
She is an actor, after all, and frequently inhabits the fictitious in the first person and the non-fiction in third.
It is Wednesday mroning. In an hour and four minutes she will leave the house to go create elsewhere. She needs to charge her phone but sits at the keyboard, like a soon-to-be-lover sits at the table, sipping her empty tea cup or glass of chardonnay, not wanting to leave the object of her attention and laughing with that girly laugh she didn't know she had in her until her daughter's point it out.
Alice the Cat takes residency on her right thigh.
She decides to descend on the world of networking and leave the word of the subconscious momentarily behind.
Bloggers, Writers and Other Creative Folks: Why not participate in Let Your Words Flow? We offer new prompts to spice up your blogging, writing and creative thinking every day!
Julie Jordan Scott is a writer, creative life coach, speaker, performance poet, Mommy and mixed-media artist. Her word-love themed art will be for sale at a First Friday soon, when it is warmer than it was in December!, in Downtown Bakersfield. Check out the links below to follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.
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