Words

      "Writing is the axe that breaks the frozen sea within." ~Kafta

     Why do I write this blog? I don't care for the computer and I don't read blogs. In fact, the very name annoys me- it sounds like the noise I make when I taste something terrible. There isn't a soul I have told about this blog, not even my Dearest Friend. It almost seems an embarrassment to have it read, an invasion of a diary, a glimpse at a person unclothed. So, why?
     I love words. Especially words on paper. I never fail to be astounded that words can incite people to war, encourage them to peace, that they can make a declaration of love so eloquent that it stands for centuries, that simple words on paper can cause a man to see his God.
     I have always loved words. Some of my earliest memories are of being read to. But I did not understand the power each of us has to wield them until I was 6 years old. It was Thanksgiving and we were at my Grandma Tommy's for the feast. All the extended family were there. We have an old family with our history in Arkansas alone going back to before it was a state, and before that to the beginning of our nation. But we were also an old family in that most everyone was old. My cousin and I were the only children. The preparation of all the food was staggering and the waiting too much for small people, so my Great-granny took us in hand. She gave my cousin and I each typing paper and told us to draw her a picture. 
    The whole family was gifted. If they didn't paint or draw they created marvels with their hands. I assumed that such gifts were in the blood and knew that I, too, would be an artist. My cousin and I finished our artwork. I was sorely disappointed in mine, and then I saw my cousin's. Though he was only 5, his picture far surpassed mine. I began to complain bitterly to Granny about how my picture was nothing like what was in my mind's eye. Granny simply said,  "Then write me a story. That's a picture out of words." I was shocked silent, electrified by the possibility. I even remember the story all these years later. It was about a rabbit whose tail was longer than everyone else and all the things he did to try and shorten it. At last he realized he liked his long tail. I used every word I knew how to spell and all that I didn't. (I still write that way to this day.) I thought it was fantastic, and of course Granny agreed with me. And then she said, "So, you just keep on drawing pictures with words."

"Writing is the painting of the voice." Voltaire

     I did not know until I was older that Granny painted with both brush and words. My hearing has been damaged since I was small and I have always heard words changed in  people's mouths. When family called my granny "Al", I thought they said, "Owl". This makes perfect sense if you knew her and her house with its macrame owls, owls with feathers made from pinecone scales, the multitude of owl pins that decorated her sweaters. Later I learned that she was a member of the Penwomen of America and their symbol was the owl. I cherish old clippings of a newspaper column she wrote when I was tiny.
     So I did as Granny admonished me and I brushed words onto my paper canvases ever after. Poems, stories, ruminations. My attic is full of boxes of notebooks from all the years back. Words no one has ever read. When I write stories they are too near my heart to trust them to another soul.

"...It's nicer to think dear, pretty thoughts and keep them in one's heart, like treasures. I don't like to have them laughed at or wondered over." ~ Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

     Then I got married and had babies- one, two, three, in just five years. I was blessed to get to stay home with them, to raise and homeschool them. Did I stop writing? A notebook went with us to the sandbox where, feet in the sand, I wrote between calls of, "Moma, look at this!" Scrap paper was pulled from cookbooks to scribe a sentence as I cooked. I wrote some of the stories for them and they loved them. No one else heard. And so almost twenty years have passed. The notebooks overwhelm. I write on sometimes seven different stories at once, so inside the covers you can see the titles of all the different snippets contained within. Notebooks hidden here, there, and under...A trail like the line of shells the ocean washes up. Each time you look the contents are different, sifted by the waves, offered and withdrawn.
     This last year I turned 40. The people in my mind still live out their tales. I hear whole conversations as I fix dinner. I know the working of their minds as I sleep. But I have stopped writing. To what purpose do I write? I ask myself. The world has enough full notebooks languishing about, if only from me. The stories still go on, the people still live in me. So, I asked myself, What is the sense in writing it down? And so I didn't. I don't. Yet words still spin in me like cream into butter, but the spinning doesn't stop and so eventually it melts like the tigers in Brave Little Sambo and becomes liquid, only to start all over again.
     One day I turned on the computer and surprised my own self when I decided- I must write something. And so I began. I figured recipes were harmless and lots of people had asked me  about the wild fruits that I harvested. But I found I couldn't write a recipe and a simple set of instructions. Oh no. I can't just do that. Every page has a story hidden in it- most in plain view. Maybe it's because I am a Southerner. To us everything, even a recipe, is a story, convoluted by  twists into the past and filled with faces long faded to memories. 
    But even as writing is a release, it is also a frustration. I put the words down just as they spring from my mind, but the Gift doesn't flow out my fingertips, straw isn't spun into gold as I write.

"He writes so well he makes me feel like putting the quill back in the goose." ~Fred Allen

     I read voraciously, all kinds of things. Before children it was common to read a book every two days. What keeps me going back, even to snatch at a single paragraph on a busy morning, is that words still hold the same wonder for me as when I was a child. To paint a picture in another person's mind, to wring emotion from their flesh... So many writers have excelled at this. Edgar Allen Poe had the power to chill with foreboding. I remember one night when Moma went out and Pop read The Fall of the House of Usher to me. Moma couldn't understand why I was afraid to sleep for nights on end.
     Dickens was a master at wringing emotion even from the most unlikely souls. One of my favorite stories about his writing is from when he was working on The Curiosity Shop. This story isn't as widely known today, but when he wrote it people everywhere were stilled by the desire to read it. Dickens wrote the story for a magazine, so the public had to wait for a new installment each month. Little Nell and her grandfather had such hardships and tragedies and finally, Little Nell's life hung in the balance. People were wild to know what would happen. It was recorded that American dock workers, men accustomed to hard labor and hard lives, many unable to read themselves, hung off the ends of the docks as English ships approached with the last installment of the story. They cried out, over and over, "Does Little Nell yet live?!" That is true power- to make the soul feel.
      Some of my favorite writers had the power to Suspend Disbelief. Kenneth Grahame wrote Wind in the Willows and not for an instant do you discount the possibility of moles wearing waistcoats and human judges clapping hapless toads in irons. One of my favorite contemporary authors is Sarah Addison Allen. She weaves the breathlessly unbelievable so seamlessly into her work that you know in your heart that certain apples can tell you your future and cakes specially baked can call a lost child from hundreds of miles away. Oh, the magic of mere words.

"Thoughts that breathe, words that burn. " ~Thomas Gray 1767

     Think on it. Words are nothing but marks, symbols formed on paper, stone, screen. When we look at an unknown language it becomes all too clear that words are unintelligible scratches, and yet.... To be able to read, to decipher the markings is a kind of miracle, one that staggers me. And then to be able to arrange the marks with such skill, such alchemy, that you can write something like Wuthering Heights, or The Hound of the Baskervilles. Then you are someone Gifted, a magician of sorts, casting a spell.

"The difference between the almost-right word and the right word is...the difference between the lightening bug and the lightening." ~Mark Twain

     So why do I write when my words fall so short? I string my rough pebbles together, pretending they are pearls, using only the finest silken cord and double-knotting between each. When I hold it up it is still a string of pebbles, but each is one that I have found, each uniquely my own. And so I send my words out, to no one in particular, perhaps to no one at all. I imagine as I write- the words whirling out through the ether like the light of stars millions of miles away, sparking through darkness. And that's enough. Even that is a kind of magic-

"I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions." ~James Michener

(Note- this was originally posted in 2014. I am no longer 40, but will be 46 in mere days. But my passion for words is undimmed.)