Mostly freewrite

It's a cool evening. It's been raining for the last three days, and the skies are a heavy gray, and the clouds are dipping low enough you could almost touch them. Everything is wet and mud, and there is a crisp, clean feeling in the air that stirs up all this melancholy in me, unbidden, an effect that brings me right back to 13-years-old, sitting on my bed with the windows open, the rusty-wet smell of the window screen filling the room, the soft quiet of the tucked-in neighborhood, porchlights glowing, TVs flickering in windows.

At that age, I was shy and quiet, and I filled up all my time with notebooks and a much-loved copy of a Sara Teasdale book I checked and re-checked from the library on a regular basis. This is when I started to really explore words, to understand their power, and to feel how comforting they could be.

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And I am feeling sad, now, I think because there was this sweet little marriage of possibility and discovery happening then, the stuff where dreams can grow if you let them, and I never gave those dreams a name, never any words, but I kept writing, and I kept writing, and I kept writing, and then one day I all but stopped. It was magic one day and then it wasn't. And I had no words.

And frogs in the pool singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;

Tonight Violet wanted to be a frog. "Ribbet ribbet," she said, that crazy-joy blooming in her smile, and she crouched down to jump but she can't figure out the mechanics yet, and so she crawled. I reached down to grab her and toss her up into the air. "Jump frog," I said and she squealed with joy, but when I sat her down she scurried down the hall, away from me, ribbeting all the way. A frog on her own terms.

Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

How tiring to wrestle with yourself all the time, to feel so discontent because you feel you aren't doing enough, you aren't being enough, because you feel stuck. To feel sad that you didn't name your dreams when you were a 13-year-old girl. How exhausting. When will I learn that there is value in sitting still, to recognize that sometimes "stuck" is really a sign that you need to be still, if only for a minute. There is value in reflection, and you must lock yourself in a moment to reflect. You must be content where you are sitting.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

There is comfort here. To recognize that this little life is so much smaller than I know. And bigger, too. I can fill myself up with the world, let myself fill it, it will not matter. Except what I make of it.