Over the last four days, our power has gone out three times. The first two times it was out for over twelve hours. My Beloved rushed to put our frozen food in a cooler on the front porch. Since the temperature never rose above 20 degrees, we were safe. Our second stove, unlike the ’36 Chambers that came with Casa Diva, has a safety feature that prevents even attentive pioneers like ourselves from lighting the oven for heat. I put simmering pots of water on the burners for moisture and some warmth.
On the first day the ice storm was still in full swing, and there was no way we could have even walked up the block. A small house, we managed to keep ourselves warm by bundling up, I in my fancy plush robe that is far too bulky with its faux fur collar and cuffs to wear in anything but a dire emergency, and my Beloved in the sturdy Land’s End plaid wrapper that he has deserved and finally acquired. I read the second of L. Frank Baum’s fourteen Oz books in the span of a few hours. My Beloved began a long-postponed handcrafted clock project. We cooked something on the stovetop and just as we began to converse face to face on the couch, I heard the furnace kick on, and we were saved from ourselves.
One imagines as a writer that all they need is long stretches of undisturbed time to complete their magnum opus. Just a few brief weeks is all it would take to put all those notions into some semblance of order and suddenly Random House would be sending a limo. Soon after that, the Pulitzer people would be texting nonstop. But I know my Muse is not so predictable, not so easily appeased by a few odd hours of available time to allow my creative ambitions come to fruition.
The more aware of mortal limitations and requirements I become, the more anxiety is produced by a storm such as this. This will be one for the record books—the massive outages, the consistent low temperatures that kept the ice from fully thawing until Day Two, the ice itself thick and heavy on branches, beautiful to some. Not to me. All I could see was terror, that temporary deadliness ice and snow manifest. Summer’s lease, short as it may be, is still long enough for us to forget the winter’s struggles, long for the coolness and pretty blankets of white.
Trees too old finally to bear the excessive weight on their bare branches broke, and broke in vast numbers across our county. Lines were torn from houses, old utility poles were split in two. Tho my time was technically free and available, writing or even editing was the last thing my mind was capable of. I cleaned, napped, sorted piles that had been sitting dormant for months. Everything but something creative. Crochet hooks laid still. Mod Podge tightly capped. Only yoga, my new commitment, remained, and even then I skipped one day, one bit of ease for a troubled mind.
When I write, it’s on the sly. This has been my habit since high school. Even advanced English courses bored me, but allowed me mostly quiet time at a desk where I could compose to my heart’s content. I have tried to train myself to hit the desk first thing in the morning, before my mind has been cluttered with the day’s detritus. Many days this desk time only adds to an extended day of sitting, since my work also involves sitting. Once in a while, I’ll be able to decipher some notes I’ve hastily scribbled on a scrap the night before, or find the original thread of inspiration that caused me to jot a word or two down weeks before.
However, poems will come when I least expect them, the best poems anyway. A word or phrase will stick in my ear, and my mind will begin to run with the lines even before I put pen to paper. And yes, I could have written something on that first outage day because mainly I compose on a legal pad with a basic Bic. But it was not there. I spend the weekend proving to myself how clever I could be in a crisis. How resourceful to wash dishes with plenty of soap, rinse them with water boiled in the kettle. How smart we were to convert a woolen quilt batting into the filling for a duvet cover that keeps us warm in any weather.
Reading that second Oz book tho will doubtless come in handy one of these days. I can’t say Baum was the best children’s author ever. Knowing how hard he worked to expand his stories to stage and film somewhat takes the sheen of charm off even the cleverest of plots. But step back further, and the scope of his creation, the world somewhere beyond but not quite ours, is impressive. I have all fourteen of Baum’s Oz books, the only ones I intend to bother with after the dozens that came after his death. I will finish them this year, in neat Barnes & Noble reissue volumes suitable for bedside consumption. And indeed, they were intended to be tales read at bedtime. My sleep has been consistent but a bit shallow lately. If the CBD gummies don’t help, perhaps an adventure with Dorothy and Tik-Tok just might.
(photo c. Tom Romeo, tomromeo.com)
