A Golden Moment

It's finally quiet here at my desk. It's the moment I've been waiting for. Everyone in the house is asleep or gone. I can write! My head is swarming and spinning with images and snippets and phrases. But I am so rusty. So easily the ability to pull a golden thread from the tornado stalls out. I want to write a nursing collection! A group of dog stories! So many ideas. I get as far as some notes about clinic in my speckled composition book that I still use. I actually get a page or two down on the first dog story, the inspiration for the collection. But I need to be alone- alone for longer than this. Alone, and away from the filthy kitchen I can see from where I'm sitting and the 3 piles of clean laundry waiting to be folded. I am afraid of losing what ability I have to do this.

In the midst of this, I have agreed to a poetry reading this month. This is to commemorate the publication of my little chapbook and the fact that I'm turning forty. This is something I am forcing myself to do. If they hadn't already put my picture up on the website, I might have already found a way to weasel out of it. I feel uncomfortable and inadequate. But I am going to do it anyway.

I am realizing that I cannot do everything in life that I want to do. There simply isn't enough time. To raise a family and hold a full time job, to keep a busy household, takes most of my time. I can be jealous of a childless writer who read 13 books last month and travels the country writing about it all, but she has made her choices and I have made mine. I am choosing to do what I can in the time that I have, knowing that a few years from now, I will long for the sound of rowdy laughter around the dining room table in the evenings. I will also (hopefully) have more time to write.

I'll work on that dog story right after I clean off my desk...