Dear Kate

The sun is out this morning so that’s a plus. I love it. Gives me life. Makes me feel connected, hopeful and it gives me that feeling of possibility just like I wrote about in my newsletter. This is the sunny Okanagan so there’s plenty of sunshine in the summer but just the thought of winter approaching and there being less and less hours of sunshine like the last couple of days of clouds and rain have brought makes me squirm.

Although I’m not one to usually take out my feelings on others I get to the point where I feel like a real kvetch. I’m like Linus without his blanket. After too many days without sunshine Andree has to scrape me off the ceiling where I’m frantically trying to dig my way through to some mind manifested mirage of sunlight that I’m convinced has to exist somewhere on the other side of the ceiling that’s choking the life out of me.

Come to think of it, maybe I do exhibit a few signs of being rather antsy and I have been known to have the occasional outburst and that’s usually when Andree announces it’s time to go for a ride. We get on the road and climb out of the valley and there’s the sun! It’s instant revival for me like a cripple who’s been blessed with a miracle and can now get up and walk. The antsy, gnawing, depressed feeling that sucked the life out of me disappears. The sun burns away the fog which has held me captive and I feel like I’ve been set free. The blood starts circulating in my veins in a normal unobstructed way and a flow of energy returns.

Hmm…..I feel like I got derailed. What the heck brought me to this unobstructed flow of energy? Oh yes, this spot of sunshine I’ve curled up in at the very end of the kitchen table where I look out into my neighbor’s yard. Andree swears I must have been a lizard in my previous life because I always look for the brightest, warmest spot to plop myself in.

So I’m looking out my window this morning and thinking about you and how maybe you’re looking out your window while you’re doing your own writing or editing and how what you look out and see is so very different than what I see. I’ve never actually been to your place but I’ve lived on the prairies where one can see for miles and I’ve lived on the farm where for the most part there is peace and tranquility all around. No city noises to short circuit the system. I find myself longing for that more and more now – to look out my window and feel a sense of connection with nature, with myself, with life. Sometimes I ask myself if it’s just a case of the grass being greener on the other side of the fence but I don’t think so.

I look out my window now and I see other people’s homes, other people’s things, pieces of who they are too close to pieces of who I am. I feel stuck in-between their world and mine, unable to hold on to a definition of myself. I realize more and more that it’s not only the lack of sun that can get to me but also the close proximity to neighbors which seems to squeeze the life out of me. It’s no wonder that after a while I find myself become querulous and I get where I can’t even stand myself anymore.

There are days where I ache to get out of here. Days where I want to throw in the towel, put a “for sale” sign up on the front lawn, and get the hell out of Dodge. I want to run for the hills away from noise and people and the constant clenching and teeth grinding that I find myself doing and end up suffering from. Then the logical, responsible side of me pipes in and says, that’s a completely fatuous idea and my balloon bursts just like the very first time I baled a whole field of big round bales all by myself and when my, then husband’s, first words when he came to give me a ride home was, “There’s a bale by the driveway that’s not tied. How come you didn’t tie that one?”

I remember how I felt my balloon deflated and how my sense of pride and accomplishment drained out of me like a vampire had sucked me dry. I remember how a paroxysm of anger was exploding inside making me want to scream – “Did you not happen to see the frickin 213 other bales that I DID tie!” But instead, I went silent and I held it all inside. After all these years, here it is coming out on paper in a letter to you Kate. Isn’t it strange where writing will take you and what it will do?

Now, I find myself asking again, how did I get here? What led me down this path? Oh yes, the busted balloon feeling, that’s what it was. I get side-tracked easily as you can see. I always feel like there’s so much to say when I have a pen in hand and I’m addressing someone who I know, or at least I think I know, is interested in what I have to say. Face to face it can take me longer to find my words but with a pen in hand or a keyboard at my finger tips it feels more innocuous, or so I think, and thoughts just come spilling out like when I crack open a Pillsbury dough tube, (not that you ever do that since you always bake your own breads) and I feel like I could keep going on forever, there’s so much I want to say.

In fact I could sit here, at the end of the table where I can soak up the sun rays and keep writing about all the things I haven’t even touched on yet. My mind is like a bee jumping from one flower to another loading up on nectar to bring to the hive. I grab a little bit here, a little bit there, snippets of thoughts I want to deliver knowing there’s so much more I want to say, to touch on, to share. Like the concept of time you mentioned and how it seems to fly by like pages flipping in the wind and how I live with that each day.

I want to write about the deeper stuff like what I live around the concept of time and things like life, love, relationships, and mothers but I also want to write about dishes, ice cream, hands, fall, sunflowers, sex and a moment in a library. So it’s never a lack of things to say or to write about, it’s more a matter of taking the time to grasp all the moments of life that want to find expression on the page.

And now here I am at what I feel has to be the end of this letter because of a constriction of “time” and I haven’t even told you about what you asked me which is where I was dropping all my writing. I do my daily morning journal writing which has become like a religious ritual for me over the years. I make entries here and there in a couple of other journals I’m keeping on the side.

Along with that I’ve been working through a book called “Old Friends from Far Away” – The Practice of Writing Memoir by Natalie Goldberg. I’ve been doing this along with an “old friend” from far away. We’ve been sending each other our writings via the internet and we’re fast approaching the end of the book now. It’s been a long, but very delightful, and at times demanding, but satisfying experience. Who knows where it will all lead to some day.

And you?