~Words Matter~

One of my sons is in China as I write. Six of my children are going to Ireland in April. I have had the good fortune to make three trips to Germany and one each to England and Italy. By contrast, the only foreign travel my parents ever achieved was crossing into Canada and Mexico. It was in Mexico that my mother fell in love with gardenias, a taste she passed on to my eldest sister whose corsages in my growing-up years perfumed our refrigerator. We gagged on the butter and milk for days.

We, being a rather nomadic family ourselves, were always fascinated by movies and books that took us to "faraway places with strange sounding names." That hasn't changed.

It's becoming hard now to remember when going somewhere by plane meant getting dressed up, and cruises were for the very rich. Have you been through an airport terminal lately?

I can still recall my first magical  experience eating in the dining car of a moving train; the spotless white tablecloths, the bud vase with its pink blossom, the mirror-shiny heavy cutlery and dishes. Not only has transport lost its panache as a result of all this affordability, a certain mystique is missing from famous places. Crowds swarm the Spanish Steps, the Taj  Mahal, Machu Pichu. It's hard to romanticize a place where hawkers are selling cheap imitations. Perversely, tourists shun the too-touristy, and vacationers seek the ever more exotic escapes.

The plus side of today's travel, one hopes, is that exposure to other people, other cultures, will lead us to try to understand better and care more for all with whom we share our shrinking planet.

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What a difference the sun makes!

Even if it doesn't raise the temperature much, it elevates the soul. With sunshine we see more color. The sky is a brighter blue, a cardinal more vivid.

I've long known I am affected by the loss of green in the wintertime. One November I went by plane from home to the Midwest. It was a shock to my senses to leave a green world and arrive at a brown one.

When my Louisiana-born daughter-in-law lived a few years in Cincinnati and she couldn't stand the blank slate of winter any longer, she would bundle up the little ones and take them to the indoor botanical gardens. I really cannot imagine how people cope where there are endless days or nights. Their bodies adapt, I suppose. Something within me, though, needs the balance of light and darkness.

2014, for all its infirmities, taught me my blessings. I hope for more time now to observe and comment on  this writer's world.

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A while back some friends and I went to visit a neighbor who had moved to Arkansas. At her house I dug up some iris bulbs that I planted in my back yard on my return home. Despite faithful weeding and the application of bone meal, nothing much ever came of the effort. Every year the bulbs produced healthy-looking spikey green leaves, but never more than a flower or two.

This Spring, though, oh my! I walked out one morning to find nine yellow bearded irises blooming at once. In a visual 'Alleluia', new blossoms unfolded every day for a week.

The freezes in January must have made it happen.

Not surprisingly, I see a writing parallel. The cursed 'writer's block' may not be so bad after all. Maybe we need those fallow times when the ideas won't come and words seem limp, inadequate or meaningless. Maybe the muse needs to be nourished in hiding, seasoned by life till it is ready to burst again with the energy that is creativity.

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As must be apparent by now, I am a collector of wise , witty and/or provocative sayings. One of these is "Less is more." Another is Claudel's "The good is the enemy of the better."

Indeed.

My son and his wife have a new determiner for purchases. Unless they react to something- whether clothing, a different car or a new skillet - with a hearty "Hell, yeah!" they pass it up. They have made me realize how often we settle for things that don't quite fit, things that are all right but not quite ideal, possibly even things we don't really need.

In writing, too, the good is the enemy of the better. Especially as we near the end of a long project, we can be tempted to rush through and settle for good enough. It take energy, mental and physical, to push ourselves a little farther and get the best, but both the writer and the reader will know the difference.

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Just outside my neighborhood is an overgrown plot of ground. Once it held neat rows of tilled earth where in summer bean vines pole danced, sturdy sentinels of corn marched and wide-leafed melon plants sprawled. In winter it  boasted flower-like green cabbages. You could tell the seasons by Mr. Richter's garden. I never met and only rarely spotted him, dungaree clad and straw hatted, working the land, but when he died and his garden was left to return to nature, I felt the loss.

 Absence can be more powerful than presence.

Every writer discovers that. Hard as it is to remove a choice and cherished word or scene, we eventually have to concede the piece works better without them. The poet knows that white space can be as powerful as words.

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