Lately, it seems that almost every minute of my week is booked and when I have minutes that aren't booked I have no idea where to begin. This morning I was so happy to wake up to a blank canvas of a day. Given the grey coldish weather, it seemed like a perfect day to settle in and get back on the "page a week writing pact" I made with Susan a year ago. I'd been very good about writing weekly until baseball took over my spare time and writing energies. So, today, I realized I had no excuses. I'd met my page quota last week so was on a roll. Writing two weeks in a row is a very good sign. I thought I'd write for an hour or two and then do some other things. At 10 I sat down to write my page and at 3 I
was summoned out of my writerly trance by an adamantly squawking blue jay on my back deck. When I turned around to look at him, I realized the first snow of the season was falling and a whole field guide's worth of birds were congregating in my overgrown cedar hedge. The branches are all swaying and the noise is deafening. My little Lily cat is also excited and a bit bewildered by the snow. There seems to be a communal shock between humans, birds and cats that snow is indeed falling, even though it is the third week in November. Yesterday I rode my bike around on some errands and, heading out to the garage to get my bike, I was
saddened to see all my lovely plants grey and twiggy. But, I was also cheered by the small signs of life on my rose bushes: flowers are still coming out and there are even a few small shoots popping out. I admire their determination to grow in spite of the cold and the decreasing number of hours of sunlight; they're not yet going gentle into that good night of winter dormancy. As my own way of rage rage raging against the dying of the daylight, I bought 20 short stemmed red roses at the market yesterday (for a mere $5!). Apart from my laptop, they're the only things glowing in my living room and dining room on such a grey day. Staring out to the snow I noticed a bright red cardinal who is so lovely against the grey and fading green. Red is such a remedy for grey. If one can be grateful for a colour, I am grateful for red.
It's well past 4 now and I realize I've spent over 6 hours writing which is a bit alarming but a lovely way to spend a day. Like buying red roses for one's self, spending the day writing fiction seems incredibly luxurious and indulgent. Perhaps because I've not only had a room but a house "of one's own" for the past few days, I've been thinking about
Virginia Woolf and, just now, I
turned to her perhaps as a way of appeasing my sense of indulgence for writing all day. And, as she has done so many times before, Virginia's got the right words at the right time for me: "Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream. . .So that when I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not."
