Using My Natural Resources

I always wanted to be a writer. Oh, I’ve done lots of writerly things…edited newsletters for big and small organizations, written grant proposals, filled a bookcase with journals going back to 1982. I’ve even written essays and memoirs, but those have been stored on aging floppy drives and outdated computers where there’s no hope or fear that anyone would ever read them.

So getting laid off this year was a gift, the kind of gift where you think, Now I’ll finally read all the classics! I’ll finally learn conversational Spanish! I’ll be an actress! I’ll be a writer! In other words, the life chores that you always meant to get around to, like the basket full of ironing that’s followed you through three moves over the last ten years.

But I meant it this time. The first day of school, the day when I was supposed to be standing in front of a newly assembled class, I set myself a goal…I will write 2,000 words a day by lunchtime.

I did. That day.

The next day, not so much. I made doctor’s appointments, I checked in with all my friends on Facebook, I wrote long e-mails and chats to my friends trying to get work done in offices until they pleaded with me to understand that they loved me, but stop. I cooked dinner ahead of time so it would be conveniently ready at 6:00. I made ten sandwiches and froze them. I didn’t watch a movie and eat chocolate, that would be wasting time. I walked for two hours. Maybe I’ll train for the marathon.

Who knows what else I did for the next two weeks to avoid the writing thing, but anybody who’s ever tried to settle their wills and brains on a lifelong dream when they’re home all day will recognize the sorts of activities I drifted into. E.B. White used to wander around his salt-water farm in Maine carrying a paper napkin, while avoiding writing his treasures for the New Yorker. Oh, Andy, I’m not laughing at you now!

Avoidance was the last thing on my mind last Thursday. The truth is, the garden really did reach into the house and yank me by the back of my pajama top and get me first into a stranglehold and then a half-Nelson. All I could do was gather half a dozen Hubbard squash to my chest, green beans dripping through my fingers as I stepped around squashed and bee-blown pears. Now there’s water boiling in the big pot, the oven heating, no beans in the pot, no tomatoes in the oven, because I’m still washing and slicing. I hate this. Natural resources going to waste because I’m too slow. And all unwanted, distracting phrases keep floating through my head. Words that describe exactly what I’m doing in ways that would speak to others. Phrases that would fit into a kick-ass essay on gardening. I don’t have time for this.

Finally I get out my netbook and put it on the counter. Fine. If something occurs to me, I’ll type it in so I can forget about it. That way I’m not wasting my cooking time. But there’s water on the counter. Put the netbook in the breakfast nook, just out of the way. I sit down in the nook and write a paragraph, just to get it out of my head. The water is still boiling in the pot. The oven is still burning up electricity. The fruit flies are laying eggs on the tomatoes! Aaugh! I capture the first line of the next paragraph. Write it down!

The phone rings.

It’s my homeowner’s insurance company, telling me that they will pay 15% of the $30,000 bill it took to restore my smoke-damaged house. I argue with them, outwardly calm, inwardly panicked, but with a curiously detached half-wittedness because my eyes are staring at the screen and thinking with the other half of my brain about how the next paragraph should go. I hang up and call the smoke restoration people to tell them about my problem with the insurance company. I’m proud that I can make sense while talking to them, because of the pot, the oven, the half-diced tomatoes and the half-kneaded paragraph. I hang up the phone. Write the next paragraph, and the next, and the next. The pot, the oven, the tomatoes, the beans, they wait. When the essay is finished, I get up and brush away the fruit flies and continue my cooking.

When the cooking-induced fog clears out of my brain, which it does as soon as I’ve carried bags of prepared vegetables downstairs to the freezer, I sit down and read the essay. I laughed all the way through it and end up with a lump in my throat. I realize I have written something good. I didn’t have to schedule it in my Day-Timer, I didn’t have to tell people I was going to be a writer. I wrote it in spite of the garden and the kitchen and the insurance. It’s good. I send it to my writer husband and my appreciative brother and they too, say it’s good. I read it some more and it’s still good.

So what do I do now? A well-written essay is like a zucchini…it sits there on the counter and asks, “What are you going to do with me NOW?” Maybe for today it’s enough that I grew the zucchini, I wrote the essay. Tomorrow is soon enough to put the pot back on the stove.