Yeah

So there's a picture of me in a place you haven't seen lately.
My office.
When I take the time to go out into my office (my Room Of My Own) you know that I am "writing."
Not that what I do here on the back porch every day is not writing. It is.
But when I get serious, when I want to feel like "a writer" I go there.

I finished reading How Clarissa Burden Learned To Fly today. And it was an enjoyable reading experience. It truly was. As my friend Juancho once said about someone else, Connie May Fowler sure knows how to bump some nouns and verbs together. Uh-huh. She writes lines that you want to get lost in. She does. And the fact that she was writing about MY house, MY stomping grounds (and hers too, lets face it) was highly entertaining. And yes, disconcerting.

But she is the writer she is and I am not that writer.

And when one of her characters says that Clarissa Burden is the only one who could tell the story of this house, well, you know my back hair rose.

Okay. I don't have back hair. But if I did, it would have risen and growled.

So here I am tonight after one of the most perfect days I can remember. My walk included both a sunning turtle with a surly face and a sky full of martins flitting and darting in an air full of tiny white moths with dragon flies in the middle of it all. Right now I can hear quite clearly the chuck-widow's-will as it calls from the pastures beyond the swamp which lies on the border of this property. I have eaten a good supper I made from the greens that my husband and I grew in our garden

in lines as straight as Madeline's.

And I am drinking sweet water from the aquifer that was filtered through the limestone made of of the bones of so many animals that no writer (hey! James Michener is dead!) could tell their story.

And maybe I will rework the book I started two years ago when Connie May wrote me an e-mail asking what I thought about the spirits in this house, and maybe I won't. Maybe I don't have the noun-verb bumping ability that Connie May has but maybe I have an ear that hears other stories and maybe I do not need to be saved as Clarissa Burden did and maybe I can go from there.

Who knows?
I don't.
But there is no one stopping me but me. And after a day like today, I am more aware of that than ever.

If you get a chance, I would say to definitely read that book. You'll get a picture of yet more stories of the house I write about so often. Of the yard I take pictures of and share to the point where I am certain you are all bored with them. Of the place that I do truly live which is so magical that a Famous Author had to write about it, years after leaving it.

Which is where I am about to go lay my body down in and go to sleep with the man I love, the man who offered me the safety and protection and love I needed to save my own damn life, and sometimes, to fly. And sometimes we have flown together. And for the last six years, whenever we have done that, have taken wing together and flown off, we have always come back to this place which is where we live. Which is so heavenly sometimes that the thought of an afterlife holds no real lure for me.

And today I went into my office which would more accurately be called my play-room and I wrote about this place and it made me happy.

And I feel like the luckiest woman on earth and a woman who has no need to fly for escape, but only to travel away and to come back.

But I tell you something funny- right before I got to a place in the book where Clarissa Burden thought that she would plant yellow roses on her white picket fence, I had the same thought. Queen Anne roses would decorate that fence like nobody's business.
Same-same.
Different-different.

And this house has given us both stories, both havens, both pleasures.

But whereas she called the place she used to live in "a malarial crossroads named Hope, Florida," I call it home, Lloyd, Florida, which is where I live and where more of my dreams have come true than I ever could have imagined and which I write about almost every day of my life.

I wish her great luck with this book. I truly do because there is a lot of goodness and great writing in it.

And I hope that for myself, I get to spend many more years here with my husband and that our family comes to visit and stay and eat and laugh for years to come. That a whole passel of grandkids and friends increases our ranks. That the owls continue to hoot, the chuck-widow's-will continues to court and that the stories continue to give themselves to whomever lives here to tell them.