Giving thanks in 2013
All week, I've been living in another world. The piece of young-adult fiction
I started in June fermented all summer, started and stopped in October,
and then swallowed five days of my life this week. I'd wake at 6,
a chapter already written in my head, type until my brain went foggy,
tend to the animals, type some more, pause for lunch, type, eat, type,
sleep, repeat.
Now, waking back into the
real world, I feel a bit like I do after spending days in bed due to
the flu. The snow crunches beneath my feet and I feel I'm obeying
Thich Nhat Hanh who admonished us to "Walk as if you are kissing the
Earth with your feet."
I haven't written fiction
in years, and what I wrote then was pretty bad. But this time I
don't just have a feeling I want to wallow in, I also have a world and
thought problem I want to explore and share. Now that the first
draft is done, I've promised to ignore the book for a week so I can edit
it with rested eyes, and hopefully I'll be able to share the result
with you before Christmas. Unless my rested eyes say the story is
terrible, of course.
Which is all a long way
of saying that what I'm most thankful for this year is the freedom to
let a project swallow me whole. I'm thankful for a warm fire to
type in front of, and for two cats who are sometimes actually willing to
sit somewhere other than on top of my arms so I can do that
typing. (Yes, it is possible to type with two cats on your
lap...barely.) I'm thankful for a husband who doesn't mind that I
haven't really been present for the last week, and for a mother who let
me mix up her history with my own and cook the result down until it
gelled without any added pectin.
Later today, I'll also be thankful for pie. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving wherever you are!
(By the way, the chickens in these photos are being thankful for a rare day of sun last week.)
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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