Category: On Writing

After two weeks I ease back into this rhythm. I hear the kids playing in another part of the house, their distant echoes comforting. I hear the traffic going by on James Street. I hear Leo begin to cry, and I hear Maile’s footsteps pass along the creaky floorboards in the hall, and then Leo stops crying. The tree in the back yard makes a shushing sound as autumn arrives.

There is always too much to write, and there is never enough. The words are easy to come by, and they elude me.

Today someone asked me what I do for a living. The answer comes quickly now, and without even thinking I say, “I’m a writer. I co-write and ghost-write books for people.” But what does that mean, actually? I know, I know, I’m over-thinking things.

Right?

But that still doesn’t seem like enough, even though it’s what I wanted for so many years. It still feels like I’m waiting for something else, something new.

* * * * *

We are, all of us, waiting for something. I’m waiting to hear back from various people regarding a book proposal I sent out. My kids are waiting for their school day to be over. My parents are waiting to sell their house. I have friends waiting for a baby to arrive, waiting for a relationship to work out, waiting to hear back regarding a job. In winter, the tree waits for spring.

In my experience, waiting can be harmless. It can be something that lies in the background of life, something I know is there but pay little attention to.

But it can also easily paralyze me. Life can become about the waiting, and if I’m not careful everything besides what I’m waiting for falls to the side. While waiting to hear back regarding this book proposal, my life can easily devolve into a series of meaningless activities, all of which feed the waiting: checking email, checking Facebook, re-reading the manuscript, etc etc etc. And even if I escape these activities that surround the waiting, my mind can still turn over and over on itself, wearing a rut difficult to escape from.

What are you waiting for?

* * * * *

I take a deep breath. I sit in silence for five minutes, just five minutes because that’s all it takes to jump the rut of waiting. That’s all it takes to find a new rhythm, slower breathing, a form of peace that doesn’t always make sense. Five minutes sitting on the floor with my back against the door frame, and in the silence I remember the things that are beautiful in my life: the sound of feet creaking floorboards, the sound of children’s voices, the sound of autumn arriving. These are things here and now, things I don’t have to wait for.

I searched the forest for the yellow strips of plastic we had tied around the maple trees. The cold wind slipped in and out of the oaks and the yellow buckeyes and the dead cedars blight had killed years before – they stood there, silver sentinels, spooky and branchless. When we cut them their insides were an orange-red, and they smelled like memories.

The spring was coming, or so everyone said, and I was trying to catch spring as it ran up the maple trees. I carried my drill to the first piece of yellow tape and pushed it in, forming a hole. I tapped the spile into the tree trunk with a rubber mallet and hung the silver pail on the hook, imagining the sound the sap would make when it ran.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

The sound of spring on the way. The sound of hope.

* * * * *

I sit in a hotel room in Maryland. My dad sleeps in the neighboring bed – my son is beside me. Every year we come here to Frederick, Maryland, and every year it goes more or less the same. Every year we see mostly the same people, do the same things, set up on the same day, tear down on the same day. But it’s never exactly the same – every year we are, all of us, one year older. It’s easy to forget that. It’s easy to forget that time has passed.

But time does pass, slow, methodical, like the dripping of sap into a stainless steel bucket. Time.

Friends convinced me to try to sell my novel to a publisher, so contacts were made. Emails sent. Proposals written. And now the waiting. The wandering through trees of a nearly-spring idea; the cold wind that rustles thought; the forgotten melancholy that only hope can cause.

Hope is a wonderful thing during the early phases, when everything is motion and planning. The movement, the concrete nature of expectation, gives a kind of certainty to hope, a sense that “but of course it will all happen the way I want it to.” But as time passes and hope slips out ahead of you, disappears among the trees and you have to wait for it to come back, that is when winter seems the longest.

That is when it seems like the sap will never run.

* * * * *

How can we keep hoping, those of us who have walked this road so many times? What will bring us back to the trees for the fifteenth time, the twentieith time, to check if the sap has run?

It’s the knowledge that once you’ve identified the trees, and tapped in the spiles, and hung the buckets, and walked back through the cold forest, at some point the sap will run.

The sap always runs, eventually.