It’s 6:38 a.m. this Thursday morning, and I still don’t know. The Wall—more stubborn creature than inanimate object—sprawls in front of me, and I drink my coffee like it'll move in a minute so I can get through.
The block irks me. Uh, excuse me. I just need to get by you. Did you hear me? Move, please. Move. Now.
But it doesn’t.
I double-click on my blog idea file. At this point, every topic will take too long. I pad to the bookcase, roving my gaze over the spines of writing books. Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird peeps back at me. I bet it would unleash funny and inspiring ideas, but I instead extract Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg and lift its cover. My cousin’s handwriting decorates the inside. She’s written a date, November 2000, and has it really been that long? She says she’s sending the book “all the way to Arizona in a burst of exuberance,” and I’m free to keep it or pass it on. Turns out I’m keeping it. The family can pass it on when I pass on.
I could’ve put the proverbial pen to paper one day this week when the temp was sixty-two. Instead, I walked 16,000 steps with Husband because I heard 15,000 steps a day will drop a person’s risk of heart disease to exactly zero. The no chance whatsoever of heart issues for that one particular day moved me more than the writing did.
Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka—the youngest freshly home from Panama, and if you can say the name of that place without belting out Van Halen’s hit song from 1984, then you’re likely not a Gen Xer—distract me with the loveliness of their very existence and talk of wearing sandals today when it’s in the low forties.
And now it’s 7:47 a.m., and I have to go to work.
Next week, maybe I’ll write about Dad’s magic trick shows or understanding Arabic at a school book sale or suffering tribulations in the world of passwords.
For now, this is what you get. I love you.
Yep.
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*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family, neighbors, and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.