for the love of

For the love of the written word, I write.

I think of those who came before me…Wordsworth with his fields of daffodils, Shakespeare with his pen that brought bloody swords to stage, Dickinson in her cloistered attic with spiders and Death for literary company, Tolstoy and his tragic women with unpronounceable names, Homer and his ships lost at sea, the Brontes and their mysterious people populating mysterious moors, Byatt and her ice maidens entombed in frosty towers.

I am inadequate.

And yet I write.

I write because I’m compelled to write.  I write with a drive that only other writers understand.  The drive to capture a moment, a flower, a sound, an emotion, and make it real enough, crystalline enough, to poke, prod, measure, examine, absorb.  I write because I need to capture what scientists capture and explain it to the rest of us.

I write because I have a little girl who has taught herself to organize the scattered lids of canning jars into a single glass Pyrex container and place it back on the shelf.  I write because I arrive home late last night from a meeting to find this serendipitous gift in my cupboard and a husband shaking his head in disbelief (not his genes).  I write because this small act of personhood makes me anxious for the little girl to move from her morning snuffling wake up noises to full blown good morning mode so I can interrupt her repetition of “Happy Birthday EB,” which frequently heralds the morning air, to hug her winged shoulder blades, support her muscular thighs, tickle my nose with an errant flap of hair, and feel her thin arms wrap around my neck and one small hand pat my back.

For the love of the written word, I write.

And that’s my five minutes of writing for the day, folks.  Thank you to The Gypsy Mama for hosting Five Minute Fridays.  The rules are simple: “Got five minutes? Let’s write. Let’s write in shades of real and true and unscripted. Let’s just write and not worry if it’s just right or not.”  With these rules in mind, you’ll have to forgive me if I’ve misspelled, misquoted, or mistaken anything in my five minutes.  You’ll also have to forgive me for talking about organizing canning jar lids.  Not the most profound thing in my day, but it’s what came to mind.  I guess that makes it profound enough.

P.S.  If you’re visiting from The Gypsy Mama, you’ll know that I managed to completely miss the prompt “If you met me…”  If one of my students had missed such an important piece of the writing assignment, they would have earned an F.  I’ll flunk myself.  But my five minutes are up, so there you have it.  “If you met me” may be better answered by clicking on my About page.  Oh, and the dog ate my homework, too.