Category: The Junk Drawer

My parents had a kitchen junk drawer, a catch all for gadgets that otherwise had no home. This is my writing junk drawer, a catch all for my writing.

NaNoWriMo: Here I Go!

On By Alicia McCauleyIn NaNoWriMo4 Comments

NaNoWriMo is a few sacred days away.  November 1st is fast becoming one of my favorite days of the year, excitement bubbling up in my stomach with such fervor that I inevitably wake from sleep in the wee hours of the morning and can’t resist typing the first few hundred words before falling back to sleep.

Not that 50,000 words in a month isn’t daunting.  It is.  It really is.  It’s lump of nerves in my throat kind of daunting.

For the past 2 Novembers I’ve set out to write 50k words while I play at being a novelist.  Both times I’ve succeeded, or in NaNo speak, I’ve won.  I loved both of my stories, but what I love more is who I am when I’m writing 1,667 words a day.  I love being in the practice of writing.  I love how quickly I’m able to drop back into my story each day because my writing muscles are strong and limber.

Creating characters makes me happy.  Seeing where these characters take me is thrilling and often times surprising.  The first year I’ll never forget when one of my characters opened a drawer and removed a baby onesie.  And a gun.  Trust me, I was as shocked as you are.  I mean, come on, I’m the biggest anti-gun person I know.  Having never touched a gun in my life, I had no idea how to write about guns.  To the delight of my lone gun-enthusiast friend, I made him take me shooting.  For better or for worse, I can now say I’ve fired a gun.  Exactly once.

Both years have led me to research a variety of things including:

    • the history of LEGO
    • rare children’s diseases
    • handguns and penetration abilities of different bullets
    • Biblical references to angels
    • POW camps
    • the history of high heels
    • hospital procedures and policies
    • famous libraries

The first year, I dreamed a strange snapshot of a scene and my novel sprang to life from there.  Last year, discovering an unknown safe deposit box that belonged to my deceased father was the thing that birthed my idea.  It was a story just begging to be written.

So, today on October 28th, I’m waiting for my idea to peek out.  Maybe in a dream.  Or a snippet of conversation.  Or a newspaper article.  Who knows where it might appear.  I wait with anticipation, with a pattering heart eager to know where NaNoWriMo will take me this year.

A teensy part of me hopes that on November 1st, my idea will not have shown her face yet.  There’s something exciting about sitting down at the computer and beginning to type, implicitly trusting that my writerly brain will follow my furious fingers as they tap out words becoming sentences becoming a story.

NaNoWriMo, here I go!

Lessons From Dragonflies

On By Alicia McCauleyIn The Junk Drawer6 Comments

It’s dragonfly season in my classroom.  Willow branches poke out of dank tanks atop our desks.  Tadpoles dart in the murky water to escape the voracious appetites of our dragonfly nymphs.

And us?  We wait, holding our collective breath until the day one of our nymphs makes the climb up a willow branch to molt a final time.

I’ve written about dragonflies before and I’ll surely write of them again because in their metamorphosis from nymph to dragonfly, I find pieces of myself.  Pieces of myself in times of grief.  Pieces of myself in times of triumph.

Dragonfly nymphs molt about 15 times.  The first molts take place in the water.  When a dragonfly nymph is ready, when it’s literally ready to burst out of its skin, in the cover of night the nymph climbs up a stick and using the hooks on its feet, the nymph holds on for dear life.  Then the nymph pushes from within and breaks out of its skin right between the wingpads, leaving a large hole in the old skin.  It’s an act so violently beautiful that when my students ask me if it hurts, I can only blink back tears and eek out the words, “I don’t know.”

I imagine it’s extremely painful.  Growth usually is.  This week as I watched a nymph transform into a dragonfly, I thought of my friend, Lynn.  She wrote about losing her mother, of being separated from someone who was entwined in every fiber of her life.  After such a loss, when you have a gaping hole, how’s it possible to return to life again when life as you know it doesn’t exist anymore?

Life as the nymph knows it ends as life as an adult dragonfly begins.  What you may not know about dragonflies is that after cracking open the back of their skin, they pull their head free and then their thorax, leaving their long flute of an abdomen still encased in the dead skin of the nymph.  At this point the dragonfly flops over backward and takes a rest, stuck halfway between its old life as a water creature and its new life in the skies.  The dragonfly rests like this for some time, like it simply cannot summon another ounce of strength to free itself from its old skin.  When my grandmother passed away, I was stuck in between my life with her and my life without her.  I couldn’t rewind time, but the thought of moving on without her was unfathomable.

After the nymph hangs upside down for a while, a marvelous thing happens.  In the ultimate display of mind over matter, the dragonfly flings its head up and grabs onto the stick again.  Sometimes it can only grab back onto its exoskeleton, taking hold of the old life one last time.  The dragonfly pulls its abdomen out of the cracked skin and waits.

It waits for its body to harden.  It waits for its wings to be ready.  This is when the dragonfly is in its most vulnerable state.  After all that work to emerge, dragonflies are powerless against hungry birds and frogs.  If the dragonfly crawls back into the water, it will drown because its abdomen now breathes air.  It cannot fly away because its wings are too crumpled to take to the sky.  In the sacred shield of night, the dragonfly is completely unguarded.

The dragonfly cannot move forward into this new life and cannot return to the old life either.  It begins to shiver, but not out of cold.  As the dragonfly shivers, blood pumps into the veins of the wings.  Slowly, life flows through the wings and they begin to take shape.  The dragonfly quivers and shakes until suddenly its wings snap open.

It’s a clumsy flier at first, unsure how to move on the wind.  Soon the dragonfly learns to slice through the air, taking in the beauty of the sky with its enormous eyes.  The dragonfly leaves the stick, leaves the shell of its old life and lifts into the air.  One of my students asked me if dragonflies remember what it’s like to be a nymph swimming in the water or climbing up a stick.  Again I could only offer a paltry,  “I don’t know.”

I’d like to think that dragonflies do remember.  I’d like to think they remember all the growth that had to take place in order to soar.  I’d like to think they recall the night when the old self died to make room for a new life.  And surely they recall the strength it took to heave their thorax up onto the stick and pull free from their old shell.

Night closes her eyes on me and in the warmth of my home, I wonder if any of our nymphs are making that brave climb tonight in our classroom.  I think of my friends who are summoning measures of bravery I can’t begin to fathom.  I think of Lynn, who is choosing to breathe in and out each day without her mother.  I think of my own mother and our loss.

I keep coming back to the vulnerability of the dragonflies as they’re moving from one phase in life to the next.  Sometimes that vulnerability, that willingness to be fragile, to grieve what is lost, is the very thing that births the strength to move on.

As Mother’s Day stands tiptoe on my doorstep, I think of all my friends who have lost their mothers.  My dear, dear friends, my Mother’s Day wish for you is that you find strength in your time of need, that your memories of your mothers will give you strength to continue and that when the long night finally gives way to brighter days that you will find yourself soaring in the sky.

Snoring

On By Alicia McCauleyIn The Junk Drawer4 Comments

You didn’t used to snore.  You used to sleep in silent stillness, so much so that I’d hold my hand in front of your mouth to make sure you were breathing.  You used to joke that you slept like you were dead.

And then came the time when you stopped sleeping, the year when you wrestled demons and wished you were dead.  You wrestled in the harsh light of day and every dark, lonely night.  Life was hard and there was no rest for you, no sleep to ease your mind.  My sleep was punctuated with nightmares, nightmares that continued into my waking hours.

Those were dark days when we clawed our way out of the pit, only to fall back in and try again the next day.  And the next day.  And the next.  We fought hard for our life together, fought hard to hang onto love.  And light.  And hope.  My prayers were fervent, urgent pleas for life over death.  We clung to God.  We clung to each other.  We clung for dear life.

After months of this exhausting struggle, my prayers were answered and you began to sleep again.  I remember the first night you finally slept.  You began to snore.  At first the snoring scared me, startling me from sleep, reminding me of all that had changed.  Even at night I couldn’t escape that fact that for better or worse, we were different.

Most days it feels like that was a long time ago and for that I’m grateful.  Our life is happy.  We are whole.  Changed, yes, but when we put together the pieces of our fractured life, you were still you and I was still me.

Now at night when I wake to your snoring, I press into you, safe in the knowledge that you are here in this life with me.  I remember the days when you couldn’t sleep.  I listen to your snoring and say a prayer of thanks that you have found rest, that we have found respite together.

I’ve come to love the sound of your snores.  In the quiet of night, your snoring is the sound I listen for.  In fact, it’s my favorite sound, the one I want to hear all the days of my life.

I heard you snoring last night and I felt safe.  I rolled over and slipped into a dream.  And when I woke, I woke to our life together.

It is the sweetest dream of all.

How to Be Sick

On By Alicia McCauleyIn The Junk Drawer10 Comments

I was sick this past weekend.  I’m talking raging fever, clogged head, hurts to move kind of sick.  And yet I had a good weekend.

Huh?

No, really, I had a good weekend because I know how to be sick.  I know getting sick is my body’s way of telling me to take a serious time out.  Here’s what I did this weekend, a how to of sorts on being sick.  (This only applies if you are childless or better yet if your children are old enough to wait on you hand and foot.)

  1. Get comfy.  Slip out of your work clothes and into your pajamas and slippers.  This was especially easy for me as Friday was Pajama Day so I was already properly attired before I even walked through the front door.
  2. Gather supplies.  For me this included a good book, the Bible study I’m in the middle of, the remote control, tissue, a garbage bag, a bottle of ibuprofen, my laptop and the biggest glass of water I could find.  I placed everything within arm’s reach and hunkered down so that in between bouts of sleep I wrote, read, and caught up on tv.
  3. Sleep.  I set up camp on the couch in the living room and I turned to page 1 of my book, noticed that the words were a little swimmy, and promptly fell asleep for several hours.  When I woke from bizarre fevered dreams about cat acrobats, cheese, and former students, I actually felt a smidge better.  In fact, when I reached for my book, the words were all back in the right place on the page.
  4. Say yes.  This is no time to be Independent Spice.  Say yes when your hubby, child, trained dog, or other loved one offers to:

a)get you food, including your favorite candy

b) do the laundry

c) empty the dishwasher

d) rent a movie

e) change the sheets

f) grocery shop

g) get you umpteen glasses of water

h) all of the above

My hubby is an ‘all of the above’ kind of guy, which brings me to point number five.

5.  Thank your hubby or other loved one profusely for taking such good care of your burning inferno, mucus-filled carcass.  Even thank him for renting that really bad movie, which was just as confusing and strange as your fever induced dreams.

6. Say no.  Say no to checking your work e-mail or worse yet, working on report cards.  Say no hanging out with friends, even if they are going to your favorite burger joint.  Say no to anything that requires you moving from your horizontal position for more than 10 minutes.  The exception to this rule is showering.

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7. Shower.  Shower long.  Shower often.  Stay in the shower until you fingers are pruny and the steam has loosened every aching muscle.  Later when your fever spikes and you start seeing acrocats performing a circus in your living room, hop back in the shower and crank the water on cold until your brain stops boiling inside your skull.

8. Drink water.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Repeat until this beastly illness has no choice but to be flushed out.  Literally.

9.  Ignore.  Ignore your hubby when he says romantic things like “You sound like death.”  Frankly, it’s probably true and there is no need to exact revenge by breathing your horrid germs all over his pillow.  Revisit steps #4 and #5.

10.  Repeat steps 1-9 as needed until your are finally able to join the land of the living again.

P.S. One of my favorite books comes out on paperback today.  So if you’re sick on the couch and in need of a good read or, better yet, completely healthy check it out.

More Than Love

On By Alicia McCauleyIn The Junk Drawer6 Comments

My blogger friend, Hippie, has this cool collaborative blogging exercise going on as part of her Algonquin Experiment.  It involves Hippie posing a question and people responding on their own blogs.

So this is the question she posed:  What do you love more than love?

I thought of a thousand answers.  God.  But that one’s sort of obvious.  Cycling.  Obvious squared.  Ice cream.  Sadly, also very apparent.  Writing.  Same.  My friends.  But everyone loves their friends.  My little ones.  But I’ve written about them ad nauseam as of late.  My husband.  (A fact I should probably mention to him more often.)  All of my answers were so generic.

Except one.

The thing I love more than love is being on the other side of it.

Huh?

Sure love is great when it’s new and shiny, when your beloved can do no wrong.  And after a few years when the sheen wears off a little bit and you settle into the day to day acts of love, mmmm, that comfortable love is good, too.

But sometimes love unravels, frays at the edges and begins to fall apart in the very hands that made it.

I’ve been in this stage of love, too.  When love was painful work, when it was all we could do to hang onto each other and pray.  A lot.  This isn’t the kind of glass slipper love that fairy tales are made of.  It’s not pretty.  It is devastatingly hard, so much so that for me, heartache was actually physically painful.

But we chose to press into God, to hold onto the frayed pieces.  We chose to love when it wasn’t the easy choice.  And that’s what I mean by the other side of love.

So the thing I love more than love is love that has been worn thin.  Love that has broken into shards.  Love that has taken on water fast and is listing badly.  You might be thinking that’s a bit of a metaphor overload.  If so, to you I say count your blessings.  Others know with painful precision what I’m talking about.  You, dear ones, know that it’s possible to be frayed, shattered, and sinking all at once.

I can only hope that you also know about the love that comes out on the other side of all that pain. This love is scarred.  And fierce.  And secure.  And more wonderful than anything I could have ever imagined.  This is the love I have in my life.  I thank God for it every single day.

You know, I wish fairy tales did talk about this kind of love because I can say with assurance that this is the kind of love that creates a happily ever after.