Soup's On

I'm trying to write this story in the living room, and it's difficult.

I've made my demands for the television to be off. I've let people know that I intend to sit here and get some substantial creativity flowing onto these virtual pages. I've got the lap top atop the lap, yet...nobody's taking me seriously.

Nobody's allowing me to have the peace and quiet I need to focus on the character development. Nobody's skedaddling into other areas so I can concentrate. Nobody's shutting up.

It's like...they think I need to be part of their "intellectual" argument simply because I am within proximity of the ongoing conversation. They're so lively about the things they're saying to each other, and every once in a while, they expect me to chime in with my take on the story, which has nothing to do with the story going on in my head. Nothing to do with me at all.

We oughtta just bust out a deck of cards and a six-pack.

Because I am not getting anything accomplished in this environment

And its been going on for a few weeks.

And it needs to stop.

Because I need to write this story.

That's Her.

Whoa! It's been nine days since I posted here!
That seems impossible, since I have been reading and writing like crazy.
I've been saving all my fiction for my creative writing class this semester.  I feel as if I'm depriving my Blogger friends of  the terrifically horrific "October Specials" I've scrawled in my notebooks, but it is for a good cause, I assure you. ("Good Cause" amounts to me getting an 'A' in writing class, and that's all there is to that.)

You may or may not know that October is the month of my mom. Today is her birthday, and twenty short days from now will be her "deathday." Most of the shorts I've written lately have centered around motherhood, but none of them have been about my mother. I wrote a little bit of a shocking impromptu story in class the other night, and now my entire class probably thinks my mom was some horrible bitch who didn't love me, but that's not true. (She loved me.)

You want to know a little secret about our family? We like purple spiders. They mean love.

When my mom was alive, she would watch that TV show "Crossing Over, with John Edwards." In the intro, he explained that his dead mother would communicate her love for him with white birds. My mom decided our talisman would be purple spiders. (This decision had something to do with her sister and thrift store shopping, but that is another story.) So now, every time I see a purple spider, I think of my mom. (Did she know ahead of time that she would die on Halloween--a time of the year when purple spiders seem to be everywhere?)

I remember when she was in the hospital. Toward the end I was spending all my spare time camped out in her room. She tried to stay awake, but she slept most of the time. For some reason, I felt like I needed to be there for every waking moment. I guess I was trying to hold on to her as much as possible. I knew I'd have to let her go eventually, but I was going to soak up every tidbit of time I could get with her. She was dying, there was no denying that, but I'd be damned if I was going to sit back and wait for a phone call from some disembodied voice of some indifferent doctor. I needed to be there with her.

One day, I went down to the gift shop for a little while to stretch my legs and take in some different scenery. They had a string of the large, scary-looking purple spiders on the clearance rack. I snatched them and took them up to her room. Carefully, while she was sleeping, I arranged them so it seemed the spiders were crawling across her feet.

The nurse accused me of wanting to kill her with a heart attack, but my mom smiled when she opened her eyes and saw them.

"So you like spiders?" the nurse asked, dryly.

"I like purple ones," my mom said with a smile and then slipped back into sleep.

In the months after her passing, we would actively search for the purple spiders. We'd see them, and one of us would shout it out, as if we'd come across some rare artifact never seen before by human eyes. The fact is, there are more of them around than I realized. They're on greeting cards and in cartoons and on posters. For a while, it seemed we couldn't get away from them. Even our friends started bringing them to us in the form of jewelry and hair clips and decorative knick-knacks and what-nots. There was a huge, fuzzy, bendable spider perched in the back dash of my car for about a year. (His name was Hector, and I have no idea where he went. I only know that he's gone.)

Nowadays, we're not so quick to scoop up the spiders when we see them. We just smile to ourselves and move on with life, knowing that my mom is out there, somewhere, still loving us. I like to think it's the completely unexpected sightings that are truly messages from her. The ones that throw me off a little, you know? Like that purple car I saw on Georgia Street, the one called a Spyder.

That's my mom. That's love.

Lover's Revenge

Over these last two weeks my poor body has been bruised and beaten during the move from one house to the other. There are big purple blotches in places I don't remember bumping. It's wonderful that the weather has gotten cool enough to wear long sleeves. Strangers will not be leering at me in the grocery store, wondering what violent man has laid his hands on me.

I was estranged from regular internet access for four entire days. My phone is great, but sitting down with the laptop is really the way to go when I'm trying to read blogs, or write them. Not that I had that kind of free time. Moving is an exhausting experience. If I sat, I slept. The dreams were violent and confusing.

I can feel the daily discipline slipping away from me. I can feel the habit of typing out fifteen hundred words a night fading from my fingertips. This is not the sort of thing I'd like to lose. Writing is too relaxing for me.

Did you know I have only had two migraines this past year? When we moved into this new place, I didn't even bother to hang the black-out curtains in my bedroom. That's how confident I am now, about the migraines, that is. I think it's the writing that's doing it. It's strange, really, to think that something that requires so much cognitive thought and decision making can reduce my stress levels so much.

I'm back online now, and my house is slowly being put back together. I moved from a four-bedroom into a two bedroom with no dining room, so naturally, there were a few things to get rid of. Extra beds, the dining room table, the old toy box my dad built in 1977, the refrigerator. Most of those things are gone, but there are a few still sitting in my garage, waiting for some needy soul to come along and claim them.

Matthew and I are going to be quite comfortable here, though I have found a few freeloaders hanging around, taking up my space rent-free. There's the ghost in the fence. I posted a picture earlier in the week. He jumps from picket to picket, watching my every move. On windy nights, he whistles.

There are the puppies and the mama dog. They've been banned to the garage as well, but it'll be a couple of weeks before we let them go.

There was a nice big wolf spider in my living room a few minutes ago. I smashed it. It's juicy corpse still lies there, awaiting Matthew's return, because even dead spiders scare the shit out of me. Even more frightening is the fact that wolf spiders usually skulk about in pairs. My mother told me once that they mate for life, like penguins. That first one was about the size of my palm. Every time I see something move out of the corner of my eye, I seize up, certain that the forlorn lover of my eight-legged friend has come to exact revenge for his death.

 I've got a "smashing" book right at my fingertips. I eagerly await the battle.

Still Bonkers After All These Years

I've always had a tendency to write "straight from the hip" when it comes to posting on my blog. I feel this is somewhat evident. I like to type directly into the "New Post" page and push the "publish" button without editing. I may or possibly may not go back later and fix things up a bit, rearrange things, make it pretty. This method may make my writing more honest, but it is certainly not thorough- not by a long shot.

My blog doesn't reflect the perfectionist that I am when it comes to writing my novels. I know I will never need an editor. I tediously read and re-read and re-think and revise.  Every flaw you find there is completely intentional. This will probably keep me from ever being published.

Lately, I've been re-reading my posts, and I realize there are quite a few holes where there could be adjectives and adverbs. I've thought to myself more than once that I could have described this with more umph, or that with more clarity. I could have said something else in a completely different way.

I post too many dream blogs. (Of course, I am obligated to write those down. My sanity is dependent on it.) But I have decided to post my dreams in the other blog- to segregate them from my "real blog".

My Twenty Years High School Reunion is coming up, and a handful of those folks already read my blog through Facebook. It makes me smile when somebody tells me they enjoy it. Secretly, I wonder if they think to themselves, "I always knew she was crazy, and this just proves it."

A couple of weeks from now, I'll be seeing some of those old familiar faces, and I hope they'll be happy to see me, rather than whispering about me as I pass by. "Did you read her blog about the blackbirds? That woman is a menace to society!"

I guess I'll know when I get to the gala. If I walk in and everybody in the room takes a collective step backward, I'll have to assume they've been reading.
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