Budget version of a writer’s retreat! I’m housesitting for my parents this weekend and am getting lots of work done in the relative quiet of their home. Abbie, my terrier mix, and Bentley, my parents’ sort-of-schnoodle, are my companions. If not for their snoring and late-night whole-body compulsive licking, they’d be perfect little retreat buddies. But who needs sleep when there are four pounds of coffee in the house?
The temperature finally dropped here, maybe really starting the fall season this time, which means it’s November 5 and should only hit 81 degrees today instead of 88. The last of the hummingbirds is still hanging around, but for the most part the world looks ready for cooler weather.
The room that is now my dad’s office was once my bedroom (formerly with drum set, purple accent wall, and glow-in-the-dark stars on the fan). It seems like not that long ago when I sat in that room and peeked out the window toward the neighbors’ house with a pair of binoculars while writing a story about them being spies for a vague, nefarious foreign outfit. I was an agent for good, a hero in soccer shorts and a Simpsons t-shirt, spying on the evildoers and documenting my findings about their suspicious lives. “Mrs. N. left at 11:18,” I wrote in wobbly cursive. “Don’t know where she’s going but she has a body in the trunk.”
My writing isn’t as exciting as it was in those days, but there’s still something about my parents’ house that makes the work come easily. Maybe it’s because I spent so much time here when my imagination could make anything seem real, whether a trunk concealed a corpse or my mom’s Clinique soap container was really a tiny coffin. I was never an artist and was always frustrated by inability to even draw a decent stick figure, but most of my stories were in rudimentary book format. I tore the wide-rule pages out of school notebooks, then stapled them together with a hand-drawn cover that mimicked enticing art I’d seen on bestsellers at the local B. Dalton store. I still do that today— hand-write stories and draw bad covers— but the art is beyond frustrating and well into embarrassment now. My handwriting hasn’t really progressed from those days, either, and the cover I’ll draw this afternoon will look a lot like the crap I produced in fourth grade. I hold out hope for a pill that will one day allow me to access 100% of my brain. The first thing I’ll do with my newfound power is draw a decent book cover.