Ode to Joy.

There were eight of us, all women, in the spacious vacation rental on St. George Island.

With the bold act of signing on for a writing retreat we had renounced our daily lives, and even the lure of the beach.

Desperate to write, we had gone from stealing minutes from the rush of daily life to seven straight days of staring at a page or a blinking cursor.

But although each writer had come with a project burning to be put down on paper, going from stolen minutes to seven uninterrupted days was overwhelming, like being told, “Oh, go ahead, eat the whole Whitman Sampler right now.”

Confidence waxed and waned. But no one wanted to let go of the thread of their writing. The time was too precious and too hard-won. This was the one chance all year any of us had to say what we had to say perfectly and fully and without interruption.

Visits to the refrigerator provided an easy excuse to walk away, until one of the writers discovered a pulpy thesaurus among the popular novels on the bookshelf in the living room.

Attitude.

I carry a mental picture for many words, including “attitude.” My image illustrates the word’s number one dictionary definition: A position of the body or manner of carrying oneself.

“Attitude” is a man hurtling toward earth. He’s fallen from a high place; not so high that death is certain, but it is definitely a possibility. What he does next is critical, how he arranges his body for impact will make all the difference.

The results of falling–or jumping–from a great height will always be bad, but how we choose to meet the moment of impact is up to us. Here are some attitudes that, while counterintuitive, often work.

Winter in full.

Once upon a time in New Jersey I inhabited winter and it inhabited me. I knew of no place beyond its reach.

It rang beneath my shoes as I walked with my sister to the barren corner of Penn Lyle and Canoe Brook.

Standing at the bus stop, thighs pressed together, the wind funneled up our skirts. It chapped our legs from bare knees to panties.

The winter of my childhood swallowed the sun early and spat it out late. It clutched the day so close the sun could barely lift itself above the horizon.

It froze our eyelashes, our ears, our breath.

It wrote on our windows with frost.

It stole our mittens one at a time.

Now that you’re sure you’re not Elvis.

My mother, husband, and I stood around the crib like Sleeping Beauty’s fairy godmothers, imagining the life that awaited our new daughter.

“Josie will be an opera singer at the Met, or a dancer with the ABT,” my mother proclaimed.  ”Or a gold medal figure skater.” She was gifting Josie with the possible futures she herself held most dear; she could wish for nothing less for her first grandchild.

I never got to express my hopes because fairy godmother, Ray, said “… or a Senior Clerk Typist.”

My mother whipped around and stared, as if her fellow fairy godmother had said, “I gift this child, the most precious ever born, with… a toaster oven.”

MEN, Inc.

Individual men I get.

Just like women, they can be friends, associates, competitors, neighbors.

What I wonder about is the brand, MEN: the hype, the front, the public face of the gender.

I’m not sure your PR person is doing you any favors, guys.

If you are a member of the supercategory, MEN, you may wonder about some of this yourself—I appreciate that living up to the manly hype is hard work and that you (the individual) may have opted out.

Still I have questions (I inquire on behalf of that other well-established brand WOMEN, Inc.). Please answer as honestly as the secret oath of Club MEN allows.

Terminal

Charred both retinas staring

at this lit screen.

Letters shimmering

like heat off asphalt.

Cursor ablink.

 

A building gutted by fire,

the site of the opening

of a letter bomb

is my head.

 

Acuity diminishing

foreground and background

become subtly woven,

hard to tease apart.

 

I must worry information

off the screen,

gather the tasteless, touchless,

silent syllables.

 

If a LEM module crawling

the dead-sea-floor of my skull

scooped a sample

would tests reveal that life

had once existed there?

 

Note: This poem was written when I was a gainfully employed cubicle dweller who shared the space with the great grey eye of a monitor with weak green neon letters and a cursor that pulsed as slowly as a medicated heart.

Some weeks–this week–life is so overwhelming that all I can do is run to the file of some past self and say, “Give me whatever ya got.” 

Mighty Mouse.

Courage.

You have it.

I have it.

Maybe not the step-in-front-of-a-stranger-and-take-the-bullet kind; courage can be modest and expended for causes much less worthy.

The first person we prove our courage to is ourselves–followed closely by our friends.

That show-off courage makes us jump off the high dive, a bravery that only has to last a nanosecond. Gravity does the rest.

Physical courage is almost always an exercise of youth testing the limits of that way-cool body they’ve been given.  ”Hey, let’s just see what this baby can do!” The reckless use of equipment that might be needed later (knee joints, spines) doesn’t much concern the young.

Turn the page.

Wearing my new first-day-of-school dress and stiff shoes, armed with a handful of yellow number two pencils, the possibilities of the new school year left me breathless.

This was the year I would be proven smart, become confident, figure out what the popular kids knew without even trying.

Just because it never happened before didn’t mean it wouldn’t. This time would be different…for sure.

Although short on courage, I faced the scary-unknown with hope and optimism. I still do.

Five anomalies.

We arrive at the Tallahassee Regional Airport nervous.

Packed in our carry-on bag is a tile grinder and a microscope.

What devices of mass destruction might they resemble when viewed on the ghostly black-and-white TSA screen?

We take off shoes, empty pockets. We enter the new futuristic scanning tube one at a time and stand, arms raised. It takes a good twenty minutes to move fifty feet, but our carry-on luggage makes it through; we must be entering the national transportation system at one of its soft spots–or else the screener is an out-of-work biologist who knows a microscope when he sees one.

Either way, we’re in.

Best wishes.

Another year is about to be folded into memory like a flower pressed between the pages of a book.

Except for a very painful hand surgery my husband had in September, 2011 has been a straight stretch of river that flowed smoothly, allowing us to go on about our usual business of growing vegetables, singing, building fires in our wood stove, writing stories, talking to our dog Moo, watching our grandson acquire language—and opinions.

And each week I have posted to this blog, often wondering what I would write about–until I noticed a spider or remembered some long-gone uncle and found a place to begin.

My husband, Ray, saw each of these essays first, sometimes questioning my premise, always holding me accountable for making sense. When a post passed that test I’d take a deep breath and click “Publish.”

And then it was your turn.