She felt like she was strangling, suffocating in the drab, gray house. She imagined how it must feel in a mausoleum. It was emotional death to be trapped in this house. Someone from the outside would eventually find her, wouldn’t they?
He had made it palatable from the outside with the beautiful mural and bright floral colors at the entrance. Couldn’t they see the rudimentary wire gate?
She was locked in a small, sound-proof room, but she had almost pried open the lock. The lock clicked and she was free. When she reached the wire gate, he stood there laughing.
Reading and studying whatever topic is of interest to me at the time.
Interacting with my two dogs.
Spending a little quality time with my husband.
Looking out the windows of my house at the countryside. We live in the country.
Spending a couple of hours writing on my work in progress.
Blogging and interacting with blogging friends.
Seeing or talking to any member of my rapidly dwindling family.
Talking to or spending time with close friends.
Listening to music. My tastes in music are wide-ranging.
Learning to play keyboards. I have been a pianist most of my life, but have never played electronic keyboards. But, I’m learning!
What brings me the most joy is just the sameness of the days. It makes me comfortable and secure in my world although I also like periods of adventure.
She ran along the water’s edge on the private island, her tanned legs pumping hard. Suddenly tired, she sat on the beach near the water to rest.
When she looked up, she saw him wading in the shallow water. She looked twice because he was a dim, gray image of himself. “Everything will be all right,” he said as he smiled at her.
He started walking away through the shallow water. As he got farther away, he became increasing dim and gradually disappeared. She didn’t understand. Her father had been dead for 20 years. Then, she realized she was smiling.
Blogging has been an important part of my life since 2016. I’ve been blogging off and on, for eight years. I’ve actually had a career in writing in the fields of finance and business since 1998, but at that time, I was also a college professor of finance. Finance and business are a far cry from creative writing! I juggled the two careers, teaching and writing, until 2008 when I retired from teaching. I became a full-time writer, but I only wrote non-fiction in my field of finance.
For a while, I freelanced for a number of companies and websites. After 2008, I landed several contract jobs and writing actually started to be an encore career for me. I was still freelancing as a finance and business writer. I also wrote a bit on education.
Since I was a child, I had dreamed of writing fiction and engaging in creative writing. I had no training or experience, but I did have a wonderful mentor who helped and encouraged me. When I finally discovered blogging, I thought I could hone my limited creative writing skills by blogging. That was eight years ago.
I’ve had to take some breaks from blogging over the years when I was working a particularly hard contract job that required long hours. I’ve always come back to my WordPress blog and this wonderful group of bloggers.
Blogging and reading other people’s blogs never bores me. We have some wonderful professional writers here in our community whose work I thoroughly enjoy, along with other writers who write more for fun. Some have made a successful career from their blogging. I have a wide variety of interests so reading and writing on varied topics is suitable for me.
Blogging has also given me an emotional outlet. I’m an introvert, so talking to people is occasionally difficult. I can say everything I want to say through writing and blogging.
”Gran, we should plant the flowers sitting on the deck. It’s such a beautiful spring day.”
”We will, Thelma,” replied Gran. “That will give us time to spend with Max.” Max was their dog who lived in a kennel behind the house.
Thelma looked out back at Max’s kennel.
”Oh no, Gran,” Thelma exclaimed. “Max is gone! He isn’t in his kennel.”
When they walked onto the deck, there was Max. He had turned over his bowl and the watering can. The flowers were out of their containers and chewed into pieces. Max looked at them with a satisfied grin.
Jane remembers the night they got to that island. They were just looking for a place to stay and they happened upon the bridge where signs told them of vacancies. They crossed the bridge, not really knowing where they were. Not really knowing they were going out into the Gulf of Mexico.
It was winter and even in the southern part of America, dark came early. Even so, someone was in the office of the first place they came to. After they secured a reservation, they went to their spot and crashed. Never really thinking about where they were. They had driven a long way. They knew it was warm and they could smell salt water. Sleep came instantly.
It had been a hard year for them before that winter. They were young. They didn’t know that the things that had happened, decisions they had made, would come back to haunt them many years later. They had the freedom of youth without the wisdom of age. Like most young people of ther generation, they worked hard and played just as hard. Too hard. It was the 1970s and their kind of fun seemed innocent then. They didn’t realize that it wasn’t. That the transgressions of youth would color their whole lives. They didn’t know that too much fun then would make the responsibilities of age hard and getting old so much more unbearable.
When Jane’s eyes came open, just a crack, the next morning, she looked around and saw the entire place enveloped in a warm glow. Bare tree branches were on one side of the place with palm trees towering over the other side. They had been lost the night before. She couldn’t imagine where they were.
Jane got up and dressed and walked out on the porch and down the road. The sky astonished her, layered in gold clouds. She had never seen anything like it. As she walked and nodded to the locals, she felt a weight lift off her shoulders, a sense of renewal wash over her. A decision she had been trying to make became clear to her as the tropical birds swooped in front of her. When she came to a general store, she found out the name of the island although in her mind, she’d already dubbed it her magical island. She’d been struggling with that decision for weeks.
After that winter, Jane knew they would spend many winters on that magical island. Looking back, she knows they will go back someday. It might be they should do it soon. Could it renew her once again?
She doesn’t walk much anymore, but today, her dog needed to walk so off they went. He’s excited to be out and she hopes the walk will be good for her too. It’s hard for her to get outside her own head, but she looks around at the scenery and notices the beautiful, but darkening clouds ahead of her. She doesn’t think they look threatening, so she and her dog walk on. She tries to be in the moment mentally and he helps with that, smelling every smell along the way. It helps her to focus. As always, she’s thinking about many things while trying just to think about him and his joyous communion with nature.
The clouds are so beautiful that they cause an old song to pop into her head. She smiles as she remember Joni Mitchell’s original recording of “Both Sides Now.” The ultimate “cloud” song as far as she is concerned. She remembers lying in her parent’s backyard in the grass, looking up at the clouds as a teenager. She remembers the line “ice cream castles in the air.” As a young girl, she looked at the cloud formations and dreamed of such innocent and foolish things..
She and her dog stopped to rest. She gave him a drink out of his water bottle and he laid down to rest for a few minutes, looking around, drinking in the scenery. She watched the clouds as they moved overhead. As an older teenager, reaching adulthood, she still watched the clouds in the backyard, but the images became different. She remembers the words to the song. One stanza described her feelings at that time in her life, when she met a boy she thought she would marry.
“Moons and Junes and ferries wheels The dizzy dancing way you feel As every fairy tale comes real I’ve looked at love that way”
She had fallen in love and she thought he was in love. Something terrible happened. He was not the boy, she had found out very painfully, that she would marry. She reached down and touched her dog’s head. He was her touchstone now if her thoughts drifted to a bad place.
They got up and walked on. The dog was anxious to see what was over the next rise on their walk.
2018 had turned into a year of reflection for her. She hated that and thought it was brought on by her health issues which seem to have blown up this past year. She had spent the year frightened and it had made her look back at her life. She liked to look forward, but she was facing serious life-threatening issues. Looking forward had become difficult.
She had looked at the relationships in her life. Not just romantic relationships, but all of them. Family, friends. She saw the folly in so many of them. She and her husband seemed to finally be at peace. She had amazing friends. Something wonderful had happened with her family. She had found family members she hardly knew existed and some she had not known existed and she was getting to know them. That had made her year. There were other family relationships that were gone. Gone forever. That had hurt her terribly.
Love. Romance. Did it even exist or like in the song, was it just another illusion? She had come to the conclusion that love was very rare, that it seldom existed if at all. As for the rest of her life, however long that was, she found the song to be very relevant:
“But now it’s just another show You leave ’em laughing when you go And if you care, don’t let them know Don’t give yourself away
I’ve looked at love from both sides now From give and take and still somehow It’s love’s illusions I recall I really don’t know love at all…”
They walked on home, leaving the cloud formations behind, to do whatever they had to do.
It was a beautiful day on the beach by the village. The children could run out the door of their homes and reach the sand and sea in moments. Tourists who rented homes here and there could be spotted lazing in the warm sun. The setting was an idyllic as one can imagine.
The small boy and his dog walked along the streets of the village that day. He was doing errands for his mother. The dog, normally so well-behaved, kept running circles around him with a low growl in his throat. The boy couldn’t imagine what was wrong.
It seemed that the growl from the dog got louder. The boy felt the earth shaking. He’d felt this before. He knew it was an earthquake. The shake was a big one, but the damage to the village didn’t look severe. The growling didn’t stop.
Someone shouted that there was a tsunami warning. The boy climbed up onto the roof of a shed and hoisted his dog up with him. They were hit by a wall of water. When it subsided, they were mostly alone, saved by the growling. Only a few others remained.
Thanks to Susan at Sunday Photo Fiction and to Anurag Bakhshi for the photo prompt.
When he happened upon the village, he had been traveling for a long time. Wandering from place to place. He stopped in the small restaurant for some dinner and that’s when he saw it. There was a sign advertising a position for a lighthouse keeper. His breath caught in his throat. He had worked as a lighthouse keeper many times in his life. Those were the only times he had been a good person. When he had a connection to the sea.
He called the number on the sign. There was a small room he could live in at the bottom of the lighthouse. It had been standing empty for a while now. Workmen came to set its light. He moved in the few things that he had.
That night, he went about the business of calibrating the light. An image came into the path of the light and he realized it was a large ship sailing too close to the coast. When the light began to work, he watched as the ship steered away from the coastline.
He sighed with relief. This Christmas he had done a good deed. Unlike so many Christmas’s in the past.
I wish I could have spent the last ten days hidden among the wild things along the bank of the stream behind my home. Having been confronted by a terrible tragedy that can happen to any of us as we make our way out in the world, it’s made me wish for the greenery of summer to hide me away and the babble of the brook to keep my ears from hearing.
A severely impaired child and a grown-up young man lost their mother ten days ago. A man lost his wife and almost lost his own life. That little girl almost lost her father as well. A family lost a daughter and a sister. The world lost a beautiful woman. A community lost a friend and a participant. My street lost a neighbor and I lost one of my next-door neighbors.
We lost her to a traffic accident. A severe one and something that could happen to any of us. It was violent and her death was instant. In the blink of an eye, so many lives were affected and her life was snuffed out forever. We don’t realize how our lives affect so many others.
It’s made me do some real thinking about the fragility of life and how we take our lives for granted. We waste time, days, even hours and minutes, that we shouldn’t waste. My neighbor walked out her door never dreaming she would never be back. I’m sure much was left undone. Things she wished she’d said and done. She didn’t know time was coming to an end for her. Most of us don’t. Many of us procrastinate doing the important things. Telling people we love them. Making arrangements for people we care for. Spending more time with our friends and family.
There are things in life which you wish you could unsee and unhear. I wish I could unhear the news about my neighbor. I wish I could unsee the look in her husband’s eyes when I saw him today. Still in shock but with pain deep inside. So many people’s lives will never be the same.
As for me, these are the first words I’ve written since I heard the news. My fingers and my mind have been frozen. I think of the poem called “The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry and wish I could be at that babbling brook behind my house and that I could unhear the terrible news about my neighbor.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief… For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
The Write Scribe 