Good ideas flutter by. They don’t choose opportune occasions to land—like when a person is poised before a notebook or sitting in front of her keyboard. No, they pick the worst times and places to inspire, and if they’re not caught instantly, they die.
When lively words flit through my brain or fly around me, I fumble for a wrapper, napkin, envelope, or receipt; here’s hoping I have a pen too, but I’ll manage with a broken-down pencil or almost dried-up marker if I have to. What do I do with my little pieces of creativity after that? I cage them up in my purse, my wallet, my nightstand, my glove compartment, my junk drawer. And maybe they die there too.
Or maybe they don’t.
I clean out my purse one day, reread a scrap that’s a little sticky from an old cough drop, and smile. Can I make something of it? A story? A blog installment? No, it’s not long enough. Another scrap emerges, this one from an old notebook. Is it usable? Maybe, but it ends abruptly. A third scrap springs from between two business cards in my wallet. What about this one? It’s kind of embarrassing, and what’s the point? Now my scraps make a small stack.
A thought comes. If I release the scraps into the wild, I’ll have them out there. So, here I go. They’re free now.
*****
From the wallet:
Ricka and Dicka romp around, almost breaking the furniture.
“They’re like two puppies,” I say.
“Put ‘em in a bag with a rock, Little House on the Prairie style,” Flicka says.
From the junk drawer:
The American Legion in Cable, Wisconsin, has a potluck: venison and taco bites, chili in a crockpot, dilly beans (pickled with hot peppers), and warm pretzels. “Win a gun,” a sign says. It’s a Remington 770 bolt-action 30-06. “No profanity,” says another sign, but I hear talk of “good s*&%” (manure) for the garden.
“Welcome to Cable,” one woman says to us. “Where we bury our own horses. But I wanna dig mine up.”
“Why?” another woman says.
“Because I like the skulls.”
From the notebook:
I think of soil and seeds, fruit and harvest, these days, and I wonder where I am. I remember the kids in our old neighborhood and how I watched them grow up on our driveway—or slab of cement out back, rather—swishing basketballs through our net over and over again on days of sun and warmth and clouds and coolness. Those kids made their metamorphoses there. Teenagers to adults right in front of us. Over the years, I gripped the shoulders of one or another of them, speaking truth into their faces—“I love you. I believe in you. You have a big calling on your life”—and I wonder if anything I uttered made it past ears and into hearts because I only heard about the juvie, the murder, the gangs, the prison sentences.
My hope flickers; it’s a delicate thing close to extinguishing. What good did it do? I know the fruit can be long coming, the harvest even farther off. People say, “Well, you planted seeds anyway.” Today, I don’t think so. Maybe in a tiny way we helped, along with others, in the very first step. Maybe we only tore rocks from the soil to prepare it.
Flicka says, “Maybe you’re looking for the wrong kind of fruit. Maybe you’re looking for plums when God planted a grapefruit.”
From where we’re standing in the field, it’s impossible to see what’s happening under the dirt. “What’s going on under there?” I say to my garden, and of course I don’t know.
Am I going to cooperate with the Gardener or not?
“It’s the process over the product,” I hear in my spirit. God’s ways aren’t my ways.
A man from MN Adult and Teen Challenge told his story in church one Sunday morning. He had
(and my scribbling ended there.)
From the purse pocket:
11/8/21: In my dream last night, Flicka said, “These days will take your faith.”
“Do you mean steal your faith or require your faith?” I said.
I didn’t get an answer, but now that I’m awake, I realize it could be either.
*Has My Blonde Life inspired or entertained you? If you wish to toss a tip into my writerly coffers, here's how you can do it: @Tamara-Schierkolk (Venmo) or $TamaraSchierkolk (Cash App)
*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.