I’m sitting at my kitchen table, the slider open to the summer night sounds. It’s warm and the air is heavy with expected rain, and the sky is slowly overcome with thunderheads climbing and tumbling forward.
The coming storm is a beautiful and dreadful thing. Pulsing electric and alive. Capable of bringing life . . . and destruction in equal measure.
Two hundred and forty years ago, a group of men signed a document declaring their independence from a separate nation. In doing so they launched a grand experiment. One where there are self-evident truths: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
My husband’s across the country for work, and my kids were both home sick yesterday. Now I’m playing catch-up. I have a million things to do. I can’t see my kitchen counter or my table. There’s Kleenex decorating the couch and deadlines looming for all my jobs. My heart is racing and tears are hovering just under the surface.
I’m nearing the point where I’m willing to let other people read my current work in progress and I’m stalling a little. I need to cut a serious number of words and I seem only capable of adding. So I’m taking a break and attending to details like making sure there’s only one chapter marked “10” and that it follows chapter 9. Seriously. It needed to be done.
A quick trip through the medical research in cyberspace will have you convinced that your brain is an amazing creation. Extremely powerful.
The other day I was washing dishes, trying to find SOMETHING good in the pile of stuck on food. I looked up and outside my kitchen window was a mourning dove watching me. It sat there, with its black eye staring me down, calmly observing.
Life is full of irony. Things that look one way, but are, in fact, something else entirely.
Awhile back, I spent the weekend with a good friend who had moved away and some other women who I didn’t know well, but I still consider friends.