I discovered treasure last New Year’s morning while lazing long in bed and scrolling through Facebook.
The day had begun differently. No getting up in the dark, scrambling for office clothes, downing bran with raisins, vitamins and lemon water. No packing lunch. No parrot making tender tentative, “I’m awake now, please lift the blanket” tweets – just before barking out a crow caw loud enough to blast the thing off without human help.
No caution while opening the door to the garage, lest GraceCat darts out. (Yes, he knows paper-thin ears freeze quickly in sub-zero exposure. Does he care? Not a whisker.)
No hauling my frozen self (we keep the house cold overnight) out to a frozen car, plunking myself onto a frozen seat and driving frozen Highway 9 to reach the back office door. Also frozen.
None of that. Nothing usual, except (thank God) the Preacher next to me. We woke in a hotel bed, a hilly snowscape outside the window. Calm as a painting except for the black squirrel playing “hide and find the spruce cones” in the nearest trees.
The circumstances must have set me up. The welcome sense of different that opens us all to the thrill of untrodden ways and untried words.
I clicked on a link. I fell in love. Not with someone – but with what someone had created: an exceptionally fine body of work. A work of words that read as though they’d floated onto the page. My synapses do somersaults when I read words like that. Only beautifully-crafted writing seems to have floated onto a page.
She wrote, “… I’d always thought blogging was a waste of time. … but that was the day I’d seen Stan building a mini-kayak in our garage and I knew I wanted to write about it….”
“I wanted to write about the bright yellow kayak but also about the garlic curing overhead, the tattered lawn chairs piled in the corner, the small greenhouse with the shattered glass, and the debris on the cement floor. I wanted to write about our experiments, ideas, and relationships, without ignoring the messy details….”
She scribbled, “I’d love to offer you a cup of chamomile tea from my garden, but all I’ve got here are words. Hopefully some are sharp enough that you start to hear the water boil, see the delicate white petals tumble into the steaming pot, and smell their apple fragrance…”
I read nearly every blog entry she’d written. I loved everything I read. So now I follow that young writer and mother online. She reminds me of me a few decades ago, only better. One day I’ll meet her – she lives nearby. A young woman with a transparent heart. A passion for faith and life, family and friends. Someone to whom God has given the desire (translate: burden) to craft words strong enough to carry all that, intact and true, to others. I don’t think she’ll mind me sharing. Blogs are public, after all.
You can find Tricia Reed at: www.experimentingaswegrow.wordpress.com