Scratch 'em

The humidity has abated and the pale blue sky is tinged fiery orange and peach.  A lone cicada shrilly sings its singular song, yearning for a return.  The tomatoes are mostly green on the vine and the watermelon plant is fringed with yellow blossoms.  It is summer in Virginia.

With the heat, summer showers and the cloak of mosquitoes, has settled a veil of ennui.  The children chirp in the living room and my husband sails through the study signing some ridiculous song.  I am thwarted.  Writing in a happy household is anything but.

It is not the heat or the swelter that deters me from what I want to write.  Could it be happiness?  Is it really a joyful noise which interrupts, disturbs me?  My own dissatisfaction, my inability to love, live in abandon?

"Scratch him means they took him out of the lineup", I hear my husband explain to my eight year old about Stephen Strasbourg.  Ah.  Of course.  The pressure.  I get it.

Late at night, as the moon silvers our bedroom and the cats settle into the folds of our covers, I lie looking at the ceiling.  I count not only blessings, but accidents and curses, mistakes and misfortunes.  I take a tally. It is not always favorable but more times than not it is.

I am a lucky woman.  I have known pain and joy and love and loss and the am old enough to know that I need to experience all of these to really experience any of them.

So tonight I am taciturn.  Tonight I yearn for a solitary space where I can write without wondering how people will react to what they are reading.  Instead, I write labored with concern.  Is it lyric, does it flow, does it make any sense?

They happily buzz in the room adjacent to mine.  A mindless hive alight with chatter.  I sit surly in the study.  Yet without their bright banter, would there be anything to say?

The sun has not yet dropped beyond the horizon; it hangs, suspended in its golden glory, casting a honey glow to the late July evening.  What was it I meant to write about?