The thing is, my husband and I are the ultimate study in contrasts. If I’m attracted to a good dichotomy, I must want to make out something fierce with my marriage, run my tongue over his Red to my Blue, fondle his blow gun. (I’m not kidding, the man has a blow gun. It’s on the closet shelf next to his remote control tank.) Of course, a fine sense of humor doesn’t hurt either, like when we were discussing Halloween costumes this year and Dave suggested I go as a ticket booth. When I stared blankly back at him he shrugged, “You know. For the GUN SHOW.” And he flexed.

Yep.

On Saturday night I tweeted

and it’s true, that’s what we were doing. I was knitting because that’s what I do, soft, lazy things, all day long. I rise and I immediately make the bed, all down and plush and handmade quilts, because I like order and clean, I like comfort, I like stillness, I like peace. I see my family off and I drive to my writing studio where it’s cool and quiet, and I turn on every single lamp. I slide into fuzzy slippers and don my shawl and I think, and I write, and I sit very still. I go back home and I greet my children, shower them in mushy kisses and whisper over and over again I am so proud of you, I am so proud of you, I am so proud of you. Then I burrow into my corner of the couch with my knitting, or my book, or my cuddly iPhone, and I watch as the three remaining members of my family (and the dogs) attempt to decimate each other in an impromptu imaginary mud wrestling match on the floor. I smile and I hum, One of these things is not like the other as I knit and purl to their jagged beat.

My husband is a proud Republican; I briefly considered having Obama’s name tattooed across my thigh. I have at least one jam-packed bookcase in six of the seven rooms of our house; My husband has a book entitled “Backyard Ballistics.” I write; He pounds nails. I make lists; He crumples them up and uses them for the woodstove. I sit back and tell my daughters how much I love them; He rolls up his sleeves and wrestles them until they feel it. (I like to think that, between the two of us, they’re gonna be just fine. Pick and choose your poison, darlings. Pick and choose your love, however you feel it best, just so you know it’s there.)

The reason Dave was cleaning his guns Saturday night is because we’d spent that day, as a family, shooting. We got together with a few friends and used 20 different guns (and dozens of safety measures, mom) to shoot off thousands of rounds for over five hours. It’s not my usual thing but I like poking my head inside Dave’s world every once in a while and sniffing around; more than that, I like anything that teaches my kids a little something more about life, because I believe knowledge is its own special brand of ammunition, and I like my kids locked and loaded.

On my blog you see my softness, my heart, my pink, silky guts. I remember once I posted a picture with a Harley Davidson and you all about lost your minds, you were so surprised, crying, I had no idea! and This is not the you we know! Well here’s the thing, I like not being in a box, too. It’s why I like so many of you, you, who might not like each other. It’s why I believe we are all, each of us, interesting and unique and just right. It’s how I want my daughters to walk through this world–side by side with everyone they meet. Not behind, but not in front, either. If there was one thing I could change about this life it’s all the criticism and judgment I’m exposed to every single day. It’s just no way to live.

Dave, honey, my love, my baffling beast of a man, I don’t always understand you but I want you to know, for the record, that I value every single thing you are teaching our daughters, too. That just because I’m one of those liberal hippie types you make fun of regularly with relatively illegible mass email forwards, it doesn’t mean I don’t honor every single atom of your being and appreciate all you bring to this family. That even though I cringed and refused to look at the deer carcass you hefted home last night, I appreciate that we’ll be eating grass-fed, local meat without having to support some plastic packaged upscale supermarket chain to get it. I want you to know, that I know, there’s more than one way to skin this parenting beast.

I want our kids exposed to all the best parts of each of us, even if the rest of the world doesn’t think those parts fit together. Because I know they do, in the most stunning, crystallized, glitter-speckled kaleidoscope kind of way, 17 years strong now. So, yes. Guns, when used responsibly, can be pretty cool. (Though not quite as cool as your arms wrapped around our girls, gently guiding them through the motions of this world.)

Just don’t forget knitting is cool, too.

*nerdy fist pump*

I know that I used to write about you without apology.  Little things you’d said, or funny things you’d done, like the time you held that funeral for your underwear. I remember writing about the ways I was worried you were just like me, posting pictures that came the closest to capturing your spirit, your subtle presence, the complexities of you. I remember writing about you coming out of your shell with tae kwon do, and who knows, maybe that’s when it started for me, the shutting down publicly, the protecting. I don’t know that I’ve changed all that much, but you most certainly have.

In fact, you’d be mortified if you knew I was posting this.

Normally, I’m not the kind of parent to press on in the face of my kids’ horror. I don’t force public kisses or wave from the parking lot in my festive sweater vest. I think carefully about how I look and what I say in front of your friends, not because I think I’m particularly embarrassing, but because I remember that at this age, everything is. Everything is raw and enormous and weighty. Everything is painfully larger than life, and it’s real—it won’t be as real later. You’ll go to great lengths to feel things again like you do now, seek extremes, work out too long, drink too much, pick fights, lose yourself in movies and books, just trying to find that real. But right now, today, everything is very real for you and I honor that.

I promise you’ll never walk into a room and catch me talking about you with my friends, however innocent. And though I have no way of knowing how it would have felt had my parents been bloggers, I can guess, and it makes me shudder… and I won’t do that to you. Consider this that official post, the last time I will mention you on this site. Consider it one last hurrah, though, because I do need it. Not for you. For me.

Because I have this burning, all-swallowing urge to write you a book, dozens of books, an entire library, a city of libraries, to tell the world all of the ways you blow me away every day. You are so brilliant, so funny, so kind, so different. Yes my not exposing you is mostly out of respect for your feelings, but there’s also this small part of me that wants to keep you close and hidden, for myself, for the others you choose. So that when you decide to give of yourself to people, they will be well aware what a gift it is. There’s no room for price tags on your strong body, they peel and curl and slide right off.

Because that’s the biggest thing, my girl. You are a gift, and you are no one’s for the taking. These years are about to get hard, about to get sketchy and twisted and wet rock slippery, but if you can always remember that you are a gift to be given, not taken, you’re gonna be okay. You are a privilege to know. You’re gonna go out into the world and I won’t have to write a single word about you because everyone else will be scrambling for their pens, trying to capture you in ink, trying to extol your every quality, trying to keep up with all the ways you’re changing everything around you.

(And I hope you’ll still come back to my lap. That you’ll curl yourself into that jigsaw fit between my jaw and breast and let me smell your hair, curl your bitten-raw fingers around my shoulder blades, sigh into me everything you can’t find words for. Just once in a while.)

I’m closing your book now because it’s up to you, my ten-today daughter, to write your own story, to claim your own words, from here on out. You don’t need to turn around to know that I’m right behind you, handing you sheet after sheet of paper, keeping you fresh and full in pens. Lean back when you need to.

(I love you, sweet girl, a hush, just for you.)

(Happy birthday.)

Within seconds of my supportive tweet I received several DM’s alerting me to the rest of the story–TSA has posted a rebuttal and a video that seems to indicate Nic made the whole thing up. The only response from Nic has been silence on Twitter, a deletion of the 300+ comments on her post, and now a blackening of her site. I tried to reach her and got no response. I don’t blame her.

Some people feel betrayed. Some people seem thrilled. I am neither.

What I am is concerned. As a journalist, I’ve been worried about my job for quite a while, about a business model that seems increasingly broken. As newspapers and magazines crumble across the country, social media as a primary news source soars. The balloon boy, false reports of celebrity death and, I think worst of all, impulsive, devastating mob mentality with incredible reach.

Sites like Twitter have eliminated that life-saving space in time between the foot and the mouth and, because of that, we speak without thinking every single day. It’s become the worst kind of habit. We retweet without checking sources, we circulate other people’s arguments without formulating our own, and we believe things we never would have believed before because we read it online so it must be true! Because any old Joe can build an impressive looking website and call it the news. Because formerly legitimate news sites are falling over themselves to take the twitter like square folks once took the pot. Because now, if a man at the grocery store witnesses a “crime,” he become the reporter. He uploads it and calls it news and it is taken at face value–no fact-checkers, no due diligence, no citing of sources. He has no accountability.

Of course I can see the ways that viral social media is good–the power to the people, the level playing field, the seemingly infinite availability of instant, free news. But, my friends, you get what you pay for.

None of us knows what actually happened between Nic and TSA agents. Thousands of us have speculated, and speculated quickly. First we took her word for it without question and quickly made it viral. Then we took TSA’s word for it without question and quickly made it viral. I can hear the thunder of the lynch mob, the gnashing teeth and angry spittle, and it scares me; how quickly we turn. How fiercely we spout rhetoric without a single fact. Worse, I feel sick about the venom spewing in her direction. Why so intense? Why so personal? If you’ve got good reason, fine–but do you? Have you really thought about why you’re feeling the way you are?

I appreciate debate. I’m grateful each of us has the ability and the right to say whatever we want to say. I only wish we took the time we used to take, back in the day, to think before speaking. To actually pay for and digest and value the news.

For me, this story isn’t about Nic. It’s about us.

I know this place. This is that awful purgatory, one leg straddling each side, that space in time when I know where I have to go but these feet won’t listen. I stop stuck and there’s this tiny smidgen inside that still believes like a kid, a kick poof of dirt, that protests, that hopes that this season could be different, and why not? Why the hell not? We are the horsemen on our own paths. We steer the course. We decide. Six months out of the year I don’t have to tell myself this. Six months out of the year it’s so obvious to me. I stand, I stand solid and salty and invincible.

And then it’s like I sit down.

So I fill my heart with Norman Rockwell. With images of thick sweaters and an hour gained, the flesh of sickly pumpkin hearts dripping from my daughters’ fingers, of cinnamon vanilla ice cream sliding into a melted pool of sweet apple pie heat. I think about red leaves pressed between yellowed pages and the snap crackle of elm in our wood stove’s belly, the roar and the comfort, the capital D dream.

I play my music. I take my vitamins. I do these grinning exercises in the mirror because I read once that that works, that you can fool the brain into believing it is happy, that you can force that wretched cart before that old, broken horse.

And I try not to think about these pages, these blank pages, these weeks without hearing my true voice, forgetting what she sounds like, her accent, her lilt, her gravel. I shuffle through my deadlines, skate circles around my obligations, but avoid the ruts, the cigarette butts on the edges, the blue bony finger tapping on my tender shoulder, the icy breath on my neck.

I didn’t used to be like this. It never used to be this way. I can’t understand why it’s happening, why now, why me. The last two winters are a black and heavy snowfall on my belly, not the clean redemption kind, not the fairy tale film kind, but rather the messy sludge, the suffocating sort, the deep, ugly freeze that holds me powerless with a predictability that makes me feel murderous.

And I stand here, the frigid sweep of air curling around my legs, up my side, through my shirt. And I stand here, ignoring the tap tap tap, refusing to turn and face it, knowing I don’t have it in me, remembering how it’s been, solid in nothing but the past. And I stand here, and I close my eyes, and I close my coat. And I whisper, please.

I’ve let emails pile up and left all kinds of messages unanswered. I’ve only glanced at my feed reader on occasion from my phone, in between interviews here or on the way to a wedding there. Basically, I’m out of the loop–but normally, this would not be breaking news.

I’ve always told myself there’s nothing that can’t wait, that the world will not disappear if I look away from it for a while, but the truth is there are people doing amazing things out there every day–and I feel like this time I’ve dropped the ball.

On October 2, Kevin’s wife’s birthday, the post below ran on 120 different blogs. Like I told Kevin, I love when people harness the collective spirit of the blogosphere for good work. It’s my favorite, favorite thing.

Kevin, I know I’m late on this, but if this post brings awareness for even one more person, then timing doesn’t matter, right? Please say right.

***

Kevin of Always Home and Uncool has asked me to post this as part of his effort to raise awareness in the blogosphere of juvenile myositis, a rare autoimmune disease his daughter was diagnosed with on this day seven years ago. The day also happens to be his wife’s birthday.

Here is Kevin’s Story:
Written by Kevin of Always Home and Uncool

Our pediatrician admitted it early on.

The rash on our 2-year-old daughter’s cheeks, joints and legs was something he’d never seen before.

The next doctor wouldn’t admit to not knowing.

He rattled off the names of several skins conditions — none of them seemingly worth his time or bedside manner — then quickly prescribed antibiotics and showed us the door.

The third doctor admitted she didn’t know much.

The biopsy of the chunk of skin she had removed from our daughter’s knee showed signs of an “allergic reaction” even though we had ruled out every allergy source — obvious and otherwise — that we could.

The fourth doctor had barely closed the door behind her when, looking at the limp blonde cherub in my lap, she admitted she had seen this before. At least one too many times before.

She brought in a gaggle of med students. She pointed out each of the physical symptoms in our daughter:

The rash across her face and temples resembling the silhouette of a butterfly.

The purple-brown spots and smears, called heliotrope, on her eyelids.

The reddish alligator-like skin, known as Gottron papules, covering the knuckles of her hands.

The onset of crippling muscle weakness in her legs and upper body.

She then had an assistant bring in a handful of pages photocopied from an old medical textbook. She handed them to my wife, whose birthday it happened to be that day.

This was her gift — a diagnosis for her little girl.

That was seven years ago — Oct. 2, 2002 — the day our daughter was found to have juvenile dermatomyositis, part of a family of rare autoimmune diseases that can have debilitating and even fatal consequences when not treated quickly and effectively.

Our daughter’s first year with the disease consisted of surgical procedures, intravenous infusions, staph infections, pulmonary treatments and worry. Her muscles were too weak for her to walk or swallow solid food for several months. When not in the hospital, she sat on our living room couch, propped up by pillows so she wouldn’t tip over, as medicine or nourishment dripped from a bag into her body.

Our daughter, Thing 1, Megan, now age 9, remembers little of that today when she dances or sings or plays soccer. All that remain with her are scars, six to be exact, and the array of pills she takes twice a day to help keep the disease at bay.

What would have happened if it took us more than two months and four doctors before we lucked into someone who could piece all the symptoms together? I don’t know.

I do know that the fourth doctor, the one who brought in others to see our daughter’s condition so they could easily recognize it if they ever had the misfortune to be presented with it again, was a step toward making sure other parents also never have to find out.

That, too, is my purpose today.

It is also my birthday gift to my wife, My Love, Rhonda, for all you have done these past seven years to make others aware of juvenile myositis diseases and help find a cure for them once and for all.

To read more about children and families affected by juvenile myositis diseases, visit Cure JM Foundation at www.curejm.org.

To make a tax-deductible donation toward JM research, go to

www.firstgiving.com/rhondaandkevinmckeever

or

www.curejm.com/team/donations.html.

Thanks to all those participating in Cure JM Awareness Day today:
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I walk in cold with sweat. I introduce my husband over and over, even though he’s met them all a hundred times. He was there, after all, in the beginning, whether they remember this or not. He was that faithful payphone ring in the commons, that daily lunch call, that lifeline thrown to this drowning girl whose waters were always choppier than anyone else’s, or so it always seemed to her, me. Some days I close my eyes and I can still smell the sharks.

These people, however, were not the sharks. These people, my former classmates, still make me smile, this small town menagerie of Midwestern kindness. There are a few I wish I’d spent more time with. There are a few I wonder if I really knew at all. There are several I want to snatch and drag out back right now, ask them everything I never realized I wanted, needed, to know. Finally take that smoke.

For a tiny moment between laughs and shifting feet I remember how much I cared. I remember how often I wept, how tightly I clenched, how much I thought I lost. I don’t remember the details, the hard facts, as much as I remember the grief, the angst, the flashes of self-hatred and hurt, the bewilderment. The regret.

The truth is I barely survived high school. I don’t know how many of my classmates realize that, I honestly don’t. I don’t know if their memories are better than mine, if they look at me and see only that hot mess of a kid, that girl who sort of lost it halfway through… or if time has softened their perceptions. They are certainly friendly now, more than fair in their faith, more than I think I deserve. I am grateful.

My freshman year was an awful shock, my sophomore year a blur of rebellion, my junior year a singularly focused mission of escape. My senior year never happened, I’d already gone off to college. (Mission accomplished.) One boy defined that second year for me, in the most awful, awful way. A different boy bolstered that third year. Thank God for that boy in my third year, that boy who stands beside me now, at my reunion. Every five minutes or so I steal a glance and he’s always looking my way. All these years later.

I can’t figure out if I’m a fool or not. I look at each of these faces and there’s not a single one I dislike, not a one I thought ill of then or now—but did they feel the same? Or did they whisper themselves hoarse behind my back? It’s a thought that used to disturb me far more often than it does these days, these days where I just don’t care the way I once did. In fact, the only thing that truly shakes me now is this quiet sense of loss, this active noticing of the places people should be standing, people who no longer are, much the way my watercolor artist mom paints the negative spaces into a glorious whole. The rest is easy, light, all pastel cream tubes of color and liquid and sun. The beer is smooth and cheap, the meats miniature and saucy, the laughs thick and abundant. I rock my best friend’s baby. I inhale his newness. I grin at my lot, my blessed, blessed lot.

Later, much later, our truck in my parents’ driveway, the flex of Dave’s jeans as he climbs the stairs, a sudden smack of dizzy, of disorientation. He disappears inside the house and I stare at that front porch, framed by his windshield, an old movie flickering, and I see him there, I see us, there, the first time his hand dared creep inside my shirt, right there on that swing, I watch it play out. I don’t want to look away. He steps out now, interrupts the film, a sweet solid dad behind his old feverish ghost, our daughters draped across his shoulders. Our girls. When did this happen?

Our oldest is now a fourth grader. She blinks, all heavy sleep and confusion in the backseat. I remember my classmates as fourth graders, me and Joel colliding into concussion at recess, Eliza dumping her retainer in the hot lunch bin, Dusty and his box cars, Miss Suzy and her Steamboat and her glorious curses on the bus. Most of all I remember that I was me, that we were us, and I look at my daughter and I wonder what’s to come. I wonder what will plague her, what she’ll be thankful for, whose salty forearm she’ll study in the midnight glow as it steers her family home, everything she ever cared about, everything that ever really meant something, safe, as long as he’s at the wheel.

The thing about my birthday, though (or, at least, my last nine birthdays) is the ruined aftermath. As a kid, September 10 was the most glorious day to have ever graced a calendar; now it’s the day before September 11. Even into adulthood I used to revel in stretching my birthday out as far as my ever-patient friends and family would allow (it’s my birthday week! It’s my birthday month!) and now it’s understood that my birthday ends on September 10 at 11:59pm. September 11 is no longer mine, not in any way. I watch the faces all around me fall like clockwork. We hush our voices, we avert our eyes, we steep in the liquid reverence all around us.

September, for me, is often about taking stock anyway. The calendar’s lines, so loose of late, now snap cleanly back into a sturdy grid. It’s the weather’s shifty slide, the return to school and work routine, it’s my birthday and, now, it’s this new awful gift of September 11. Even those of us not directly affected (that’s not to say we weren’t all impacted, but I mean those of us who did not experience ash on our cheeks or endure the burial ritual) were left with this slap-in-the-face reminder to appreciate, my God, to drop to your knees on this one day at least and give thanks for what you have. It’s inescapable today.

I haven’t had a lot of words lately, or a lot of time to pepper them here, but I have a mind full of color and joy and moments already melting. Last year on my birthday I carried a camera around with me all day. I didn’t do that yesterday, but I’ve got thousands of neglected images from this year just sitting on my computer, waiting to be sifted and sorted, cataloged and appreciated. Today seems like a good day to get started on that. I can’t post 99% of them but to my friends and family, thank you. Thank you for the memories this summer and every summer before. Thank you for moment after moment after moment stacked like stones, some of them hard, some of them gorgeous, all of them solid.

I am grateful, so grateful, for my life. And for yours.

I used to do that here, just free write and surprise myself sometimes with the rare bits of insight. I can’t do that anymore. I can’t present here a “product” that is not slickly packaged, with a beginning, middle, and end. With a point. My inner critic won’t let me.

It didn’t start out that way. We bloggers burst forth blindly from the blogspot.com gates and start panting around the track, uncertain where we’re going and utterly unaware of ourselves. We spend hours fiddling with our templates, trying out new looks and fonts, cluttering up our sidebars with unforgivable amounts of flair and music ala MySpace. We give our URLs to our mothers.

We fill up our feed readers with blog after blog after blog; those that inspire us, those that are popular and we hope will raise us up with them, those by people that comment on our own blogs, those that are trainwrecks, those we secretly despise. We write a post about other bloggers and we link to them and when they show up to comment we cannot figure out how they found us because we do not yet get that incoming links show up in other people’s stats, and OMG The Bloggess totally reads my blog! We comment diligently around the blogosphere and we can’t miss a single post or we will lose our tenuous connections, we will miss something huge in someone else’s life, we will mess up the reciprocation and those people won’t be back and the sky will explode into little blue pieces. We obsess over our stats, match IP addresses to commenters, analyze and predict and begin a subtle slide into writing for audience. This is about the time we move to wordpress.com. Maybe buy a custom header.

We slap our URLs into countless search engines, ning groups, forums, review sites. We fawn over blog awards, and keep ourselves up late nights figuring out how to distribute them. We spend hours, literally hours, thinking about our blogs, talking about our blogs, strategizing over our blogs. Inevitably, we get sucked into drama. We weigh in passionately on breast versus bottle feeding, on work-from-home moms versus work-outside-the-home ones, on selling out and advertising and SEO and TMI. We write private things about our loved ones and we suffer tremendous real-life fallout and we can’t, for the life of us, figure out why. We scour Cafepress for t-shirts and mugs with pithy sayings about the act of blogging, and then consider having our own made. We judge ourselves by our traffic, by our comment numbers. Our self-esteems rise and fall on stats. We try desperately to get the attention of those we admire. We notice when readers who used to comment regularly no longer do, and we obsess over why they suddenly hate us, what we did, what we could write to bring them back to us. We wail and gnash in private, work up the guts to send beseeching emails, dramatically unfollow on Twitter, look really stupid, be reassured, have our feathers smoothed back down, kiss our screens, make up, move on. A year later we get these same emails from others wondering why we don’t love them anymore.

We reel from the blows of bully stick wielding trolls. We defend our friends en masse. We cower in fear. It all becomes too much for us. We write the predictable post about quitting, about shutting down the blog, and we do. Then we come back.

We buy our own domains. We pay designers. We get serious about advertising. We get serious about ourselves. We make a few enemies. More so, we make friends. Some really, really good friends. We start to cultivate a real community, we witness its power in action, and our belief in the validity of blogging is deeply solidified.

We learn. We grow. We change. We start writing condescending posts like this one, secure in our places, certain about the way our bloggy backyard should behave. But a couple of years go by and we feel our bloggy veins hardening, our bones growing brittle, our blood pressure rising. We can’t keep up with the young folks anymore. We can’t keep up to speed on everyone else’s lives, can’t clear our feed readers, can’t find time to comment, and we wonder why it was so much easier before. We watch others move out, move on up, purchase their own domain homes, leave the nest, excited about bright futures and big, pixelated dreams. We are courted for coffee dates, sent sweet love letters praising our blog genius, asked constantly for advice and rendered speechless by the request more often than not. We don’t know what we think about blogging anymore. It changes by the day.

We look around our own comment sections and we only recognize half the names there, maybe a quarter, and we wonder if we have been good citizens to these readers, or if they see us as unapproachable, cold, think we’ll never reciprocate. We look for our familiar friends but many of them have shuttered their blogs. We stick our heads back in and poke around the blogosphere to find it is not as we left it, that it has gone on quite happily without us, and that the same arguments are being passionately rehashed by fresh voices. That there are no new ideas. And we wonder if we will ever have anything to publicly say again. Because it feels like there should be a point. Not just a beginning, middle, and end to a post, but a point. That voice in your head screams, What’s the point?! If you don’t have a point, why would anyone bother to read you when there are so many others out there? And so you don’t post for a week, maybe two, the words slipping silently from the room to avoid your ire. Finally, you have something to say and you come to these keys and you sit down.

And then you wonder if this exact post has been written before.

I’m tired and it is September. These are days of stock taking, of cobweb clearing, of harvesting and downward hunkering. I’ve been gone a lot, away from my anchor, and I’ve felt the need to quantify it: I have been away from home 34 of the last 52 days. I have scribbled in that aforementioned journal and I have practiced my free writing but more than that I have listed things, weighed things, sifted and separated my soul’s contents for the scale. I have come back to myself and sat quietly inside and I am still there, still doing that. I am being gentle with myself, and writing without a point, in the only place I feel I can.

The most common phrase doled out in the blogosphere is “Write for you.” The thing is, it isn’t quite true. Yes, we should write for ourselves, but blogging? Blogging is for public consumption. Blogging is a product, for better or for worse, however sincere or packaged, review-driven or craft-conscious yours may be. “Blog for you” is a fallacy. You are out here to be read.

I’ve said it a hundred times myself, this “Write for you,” typed it casually and confidently into tiny neat square comment boxes. I’ve said it and I believed it. I believed it so strongly that I have faith I still do, that it’s in me somewhere and if I am patient enough it will reemerge when it’s ready. That this feeling is nothing new, just like nothing else out there is new under this white hot sun, that this is all part of the evolution of blogging and I will wake up from this shade feeling rested soon and walk on.

Until then.

I never cried in front of other kids. I refused to show that weakness, to present as anything less than perfect. From the ages of six to about nine I had a group of friends who were a bit cruel, and since I was more than a bit sensitive I had plenty of emotion to quash. It became a full time job. Absorb the blows with a full-on grin intact. Blink rapidly or fake a cough or sneeze to keep the tears at bay. Hang tight until it’s finally time to run home, fall up those stairs on hands and knees, dive into my bedroom and emotionally vomit. Watch through bleary eyes the pink gauze of a curtain as it takes a sudden breath, then shudders still again in the vacuum of the slamming door.

Children grow into adults and imaginary friends shrink to nothingness. Maybe Margaret stomped off in a huff those years I discovered diary writing. Maybe she was absorbed in the contents of my stomach, obliterated by its acid. Perhaps she was drown with years of drink, or wasted away with her keeper during the time of starvation. Maybe she was crushed beneath the weight of her burden. All I know is she is no longer there, and I am a 33-year-old woman with a vacancy.

That doesn’t mean I ever stopped retreating inside myself, and I have never before seen it as a bad thing. I’ve nurtured it, maybe even fed it Little Shop of Horrors-style, a longing for solitude that came alive, grew larger than me; one that was rarely sated. But there are enough years under my belt now to warrant a loosening, my bloated belly of experience too swollen to ignore. I’m beginning to believe that I keep too much inside, and I’m starting to wonder if it will turn on me, consume me back, these words. All of this time I’ve seen my solitude as a coping mechanism, but now I see I haven’t been dealing at all. I’ve been procrastinating.

This is heavy on my mind now because I am sorting a few things out, and in the process it has been gently suggested to me by a friend that I have no outlet, that I never have. I thought it was writing, it should be writing, but between this blog and my deadlines I never just write, like my professional gardening friends who won’t touch dirt after hours. I see now that I must. I need to revisit those junior high and high school days when I wrote in my notebooks with abandon. I need to write volumes that no one but me will ever see, and that needs to be enough. It doesn’t have to take away from anything else I’m doing, it just needs to be a priority. A daily ritual.

I didn’t know. How could I have not known? The only thing I’ve known, and I’ve known it for a very long time, is that I am a secret keeper. I am wrapped as tightly as an onion and it would take years to peel my reluctant layers. I have to let things out. I have to put them on paper without fear, without a smidgen of self-consciousness. I don’t necessarily have to trust other human beings with the contents, but I have to trust the Universe. I have to trust that she will hold my gifts as gently as my own tired skeleton has all of these years, and I have to do it soon, now, before my ribs crack.

I suck the air greedy because I have missed this, this. Wisconsin’s air is so different from Montana’s, wetter and sweeter, the sky close like a hug. The flattened garden snake, the weight of a gnat on my eyelid, the distinct curve of each farm’s driveway – these things are as familiar to me as my own name. I could walk this trek blindfolded and in fact I sometimes do, my eyes closed tight against the beauty and lulled stupid by the rhythm of my feet.

My heart rate picks up and I answer it by walking faster. My oldest thoughts fall in step beside me. You are the only writer in the world without a manuscript in the bottom left-hand drawer – how many times have I said that? I’ve got the bottle, I’ve got the ink-stained fingers, but I’ve got no book. This is not hyperbole; I don’t have a single sentence, not even a whisper of an idea. I never have. There are no starts and stops, no pathetic high school stabs at melodrama, no dead end creative writing classes. This ghost book burbles to the surface every time I walk. Every time.

My right arm smolders under this morning’s angry glare. My belly cowers in the face of her most familiar critic. I am a writer, I have deadlines. I am a writer, I have cover stories. I am a writer I am a writer I am a writer but I’m not, I’m not, I’m not because I have this secret belief, this crunched up mixed around way of seeing things, and it’s that I will never be A Writer until I have a published novel. And I will never write a novel because I have nothing to say. Because I don’t understand how authors invent these glorious worlds in their heads.

I can hear the dog panting now, stiffening up, still matching my pace. This last week or two in Great Falls, Montana, I remembered these books I’d read a few years back. The author is from Great Falls, lives there still, and my favorite of his books is based there. I re-read As Cool as I Am on that long camper ride home and it was as good as I remembered, the town itself as alive on those pages as it was for me the whole trip. That town, that ordinary, ordinary town, so glorious in my own head.

There’s a shredded tire to my left, partially hidden but new and I see it, I catch it, because it’s completely out of place in my mind’s memory, it doesn’t belong here, it’s new, and it’s a slow dawning then, like a tickle of dominoes down my spine, This is my place. I take it for granted, this precise shade of Wisconsin grass. My town, this tired old place I’ve known my whole life, is somebody else’s Great Falls. Why have I never seen it like this before?

The dog, assured now that I know where I am going, has taken to walking on the other side of the street. We are both marching in the same direction, side by side, up this hill marked by a blind curve I’ve always seen. Normally this makes me go out of my mind with anxiety, worried that some car is going to hit one of us, smile apologetically at drivers as they stick to the middle, unsure which of us to give a wider berth. But not today. Today I forge on and so does she, because this is our road and we are owning it. Nobody knows it like we do.