A Road Less Travelled

Hooray the blog’s back up! I have no idea why it goes down every now and then, but in this case it was something of a blessing. I had a seriously bad on Tuesday and wrote up a post all about it, but when I went to post my post the blog just looked at me funny. So you all were spared from the details of my badbad day. And now that the day is long gone (I mean, two whole days gone) the blog has come back to us. Hooray! Thank you Mr. BlogPeoria Administrator Man!

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 My grandmother asked  me to write up something about what I do with my hands. Naturally, upon recieving this request I immediately froze. What do you mean, what I do with my hands? How could I possibly make that interesting? Never mind that the children had already been working on project and started spawning ideas in my head. That was before I actually had to write something!

  So instead of actually writing something official I will write a blog post and draw on that for the real write-up. Writing a post on the internet where anyone in the world could read it is somehow much  more freeing than writing a snippet that might go into a book my grandparents are writing. Go figure.

 I use my hands for sweeping the floor, washing out the cast iron pots, and putting away all the clutter that mysteriously appears around the house. (Honestly, I’m pretty sure children have a temporal anomaly as well as a gratationaly/energy anomaly. How can they possibly have time to create all these messes?) I use my hands for cleaning toilets, removing the hairballs from the broom, and occasionally changing a diaper.  

 After housework, I tend to use my hands for writing a lot. I use my hands for typing blog posts, though not as often as I would like to (read ‘not as often as I think I should’). I write story segments that I will someday turn into something beautiful and worthwhile. (That’s the theory anyway.) I write e-mails to my friends, or I instant message them, and usually somehow manage to make them laugh along the way.

 I use my hands to knit and crochet and otherwise craft objects, often for someone’s birthday or Christmas. Sometimes I use my hands to sew, but more often this means using my hands to fight with the sewing machine, rethread the needle for the umpteenth time, and fiddle with the settings to try to get it to work right.

 I use my hands to turn pages. This may seem inconsequential, but books are such a huge part of my life–even now that I have a smaller increment of time to put into them–that not being able to turn pages would be a really big deal.

 I would like to be able to use my hands to make some kind of music, but that’s currently limited to pushing play on the CD player. While I can’t take any credit for it, it is pretty cool that a brigade of inventors, musicians, and technicians have made it possible for a musically unskilled person like me to fill a room with music by pushing a button.

  I use my hands to hold a warm tea cup on a cold day. I use my hands to put that last bit of shine on a gleaming mirror. I use my hands to test the softness of a yarn, or the sheen of a fabric. I use my hands to fasten my favorite necklace a friend gave me. By the grace of God, I use my hands to nudge the world toward being a little more beautiful and a little more orderly for His Kingdom.

 Not bad for pulling some hairballs off an old broom. 

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Some time back I recieved a letter from my grandmother. It really was a nice letter and I have yet to respond to it in any way. (Bad me!) In the letter she asked me a question about the stories I write. She asked why I write mostly fantasy. Why do I write what I do? I have been pondering this question and I think I actually like the answers. You see, at last count there are at least two serious answers, one borderline answer and a couple goofy ones.

One reason I write stories is to express what I’m thinking. I don’t mean to express what I’m thinking to you all. Sometimes I write a story to help tell myself what I’m thinking. I’ll be feeling something vague that drifts away from me when I try to put my finger on it. And the next time I sit down to write what I’m feeling comes out on the paper. And sometimes I write what I feel in a greatly exagerated way to help myself see what’s going on between my ears. See, I almost never know where the story is going when I start it. I just find a beginning and write until I come to the end. I’ll get to the end of some stories and be just as suprised as you all. I had no idea the tale was going to go that way. It just did. And usually it’s be because there’s been something banging around in my head that I’m chewing on without be very concious of it. So I put pen to paper and out it comes.

I’ve never thought that what I write counts as fantasy. I usually think of wizards, dragons, heroes, orcs and elves when I think of fantasy. I don’t think I’ve ever written a tale about those folks. I tend to write tales about fairly normal people who do fairly normal things in a world that is a little off. The worlds I ship my characters through are a facet of the way I see this world. I look at the clouds and imagine the wizard’s castle. I saw a statue of a pregnant tree woman and gave her a happy ending. I sat missing my beautiful lake and imagined the ladies dancing on the horizon. This is how I see the world. Faery peeks at me from under every flower and something speaks in the thunder. And so I write the world how I see it and know it isn’t. It’s the world I’m most familiar with.

A much lesser reason for writing what I do is that it’s just what comes naturally. Someone will hand me a thought or I’ll think of a phrase and it’ll sit in my mind for a time and then just spring out as a fully formed story. Actually, at least once I knew I would write something if I could just get it started so I wrote down the first sentence and let it sit about a week. That story came out meaning much more than I had ever intended.

So that’s a little tour through my mind and the way I think. I’m partly sorry you all had to go through that, but I’m mostly glad I finally figured it out. Thank you, Grandma, for making me think about it. So next time you see a face in the tree trunk or a park bench looking lonely just remember that’s how I usually think and maybe it will give you a clue to why I am the way I am.

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