Here we are it's fall

Here we are it's fall and I've been reading Anne Lamott and wishing I was a real writer. You know, the kind that writes all the time and every single day and doesn't get caught doing mundane things like sorting darks from lights or negotiating sibling truces. Real writers wake up with the sun beaming through the window, or, better yet, the dismal gray of cloudy skies, rain flooding the gutter, and smells of cedar smoke and spongy redwood bark emanating through the walls. Whatever the weather, they wake up like it's their last chance to reach the summit, ready to ford the streams, to leap across crevasses. They wake up feeling. But for the rest of us, us non-writing types, those feelings are scary. So we drink a cup of coffee and avoid them for the first little bit. We might stretch our legs while reading the morning news online. We dink around on facebook for awhile, stalking old friends and flames, getting distracted by cowboy boot advertisements or scrabble games. We see what our parents are doing and find they have a life and aren't online much these days. Then, us non-writers, that is, make a delicious omelet of spinach and mushroom and flecks of blue cheese. We think about marbled mold and what it might be like to make something so stinky and beautiful. We are intrigued by the spelling of bleu and research the etymology of cheese until the coffee is cold in the mug and it's time to pour some more. Overall, our days are spent in the thick fog of avoiding feelings, avoiding the vulnerability of creativity because...who knows what might come out of us! We just might spew something grotesque and not nearly so fun and cool as what comes out of real writers. So, us non-writers, we unload the dishwasher. We think about the shape of the ice cream spill beneath the dining room chair, pondering its place in our lives, a mysterious rorschach test of motherhood. We look up ratios of vinegar to water for mopping the linoleum. We stop to watch the white waves of steam rising from the saturated ground as they meet the cedar smoke above the mossy rooftops. For a moment, everything around us seems on fire.