Maybe this summer

I was reading Let Me Tell You What I Mean the other morning while I was rocking my six month old to sleep, and there’s a chapter where Joan Didion talks about being in a writer’s workshop at Berkeley. She recalled being nineteen and not feeling as though she had anything to write about when so many others in the class had years of lived experience — the wisdom of age. I’ve felt that same desire to write warring with the fact that I haven’t done anything worthy of writing about yet myself. When I was much younger, and full of something unlike whatever I’m full of now. Full of it, I guess. I’ve always observed the observable, but I’ve never been great at follow-through, so I don’t write that often. I think of things, but they will often wither and die in my brain, or I say them out loud to whomever’s around. The act of capturing my thoughts is often an afterthought. Weird, for someone who’s job title literally contains the word “writer.”

Later, after I put Joan Didion’s essays aside, I went outside to walk the dog. I walked past one of those inflatable water slides erected on the lawn of a church, probably meant for vacation bible school kids. I inhaled, and some olfactory nerve must have jolted some neurons in my brain, because I sent myself an email that said: That damp smell that only the combination of kiddie pool plastic and wet southeast Texas heat can evoke. That book, and that walk with the dog tugged at something in me, and I’ve found myself at odd times scribbling notes to no one and leaving voice memos for myself. I don’t know why. I just started. So I guess here I am again.

Writing.

I turn 37 tomorrow. I don’t know if it’ll be any good, but it’s a start.