It’s a perfect fall morning. I’m in socks, jeans and three layers of tops yet my toes and fingers are still cold. I search for slippers and boil water for my fourth cup of tea, which I drink until the brown liquid inside my porcelain mug grows cold, heat stolen by my finger tips, and then I refill with more boiling hot water.
It’s a perfect fall morning, as we walk into this last week of October, when the weeks before seemed to never really let go of summer. I have pumpkin candles and ghost candles, pine cones nesting around a lantern and a scarecrow smiling from his perch inside my husband’s lemon tree, which somehow still holds on to its bright yellow fruit.
It’s a perfect fall morning. It’s time to write, but I can’t. I’ve been away for a month. Vacation kept me occupied and I found little time or interest in the projects that I’d been working on. It was all too connected to my home in Switzerland and I was in the United States. And I needed everything in me, my heart, my head, my blank pages, to be there with me.
I’ve been back for two weeks now, though. Jet lag is no longer an excuse. Getting the girls back in their school routine is no longer an excuse. It’s just me and my procrastination, my mound of possibilities — two essays started and a third niggling at my brain, my novel, job searches, client searches.
Yet somehow these things, these attempts to reclaim my time, my self, as a writer, feel frivolous in the face of what is true this moment. That there are other things I should be doing — compiling photographs of my children I promised my father I’d do for him last Christmas. Scrubbing loose every clinging bit of calcium from the bathroom tile and culling the toy collection gathering dust. Yoga. Running. Menu planning.
There are so many ways to divide time that I spend more of it imagining than doing. But it’s a perfect fall morning. So I boil more water for tea, read a couple of chapters from a book, feel the motivation rise up to put my own words on the page. I open my laptop. I smile at the Connect 4 and Jenga, gifts from my sister, laying on the floor, the tennis ball and the toy fishing poles. I smile back at the scarecrow and warm my fingers around my tea cup. Then I write. And pieces of myself slip gently into place.
