It was 2010. Fourteen years. I remember parts of it so clearly. My brown butcher block counters, the ones we installed on our shoestring budget from the salvage store. The small island from Ikea that Corey bought for us on a trip to Atlanta, the one with the slatted shelf on the bottom that the kids would climb onto as they learned to walk. The same windows we open now to let the breeze blow in, full of yellow wonder and pollen.
The week the wisteria blooms. The words came to me the same way they do now, the way they always have. The cadence, the alliteration, the mystery that feels like urgency, like a buzzing that demands to be set free. But in 2010 that was as far as I got. I found the Google Doc where I had taken the time to write it down. It turns out that in 2010 the week the wisteria bloomed was the week that I found out that the baby growing inside of me was a boy, our Keilor. I wrote thoughts about the complexity of loss and expectation, of hope and grief. I saved it in a document, in the cloud. Now, 14 years later, another spring. It is the week that the wisteria blooms.
“But that’s how my best writing comes. That’s the secret. The pigeons. The yowling cat. The feeling that if I don’t write in this precise instant—while the world is still young and urgent—I won’t write at all. That’s the best trick I’ve got, I guess. You have to love your life enough to write it down.You have to write at inopportune times, in sometimes unsexy, unstructured ways. You have to stop waiting and instead, write desperately—like your life depends on it. Like you’ve been shot through the heart and you're running through the woods. And soon it won’t matter if what you write is always great or even good. It just matters that it’s yours.” -Joy Sullivan
There is one other phrase I have kept in a document. “Thoughts on cluttered countertops.” I wanted desperately to write this essay during the years my boys were small. I never did though the potential of it haunted me, taunted me. I simply did not have what I needed at the time to get the words out of my body and onto a page. A writer I read regularly, Sara Peterson, has titled her blog a similar thing: In Pursuit of Clean Countertops. You should read it. She’s brilliant and funny and writes about things that I’d never think to write about. And still I feel like the phrase was taken from me. Like I should have put it out into the universe first. The envy and fear are always there; is there space for me? Is there anything new under the sun?
What I do know is this: I love my life enough to write it down. I have always loved my life enough to write it down. But that didn’t mean I always could. I have to make peace with that fact. I think any artist will tell you that there are seasons for the gathering and seasons for the harvesting. Yes, I write because it feels like I’ve been running through the woods as if my life depended on it. But the last 25 years of my life have felt much more like running, hoping that the checkpoint signaling me to stop and rest was around the bend. It is only now that I realize that the permission to get off the treadmill was never going to come from any other voice except my own.
I could get stuck if I spend a long time thinking about what would have happened if I had started writing in 2010.
There was a spring day, maybe it was even the week the wisteria bloomed, in 2002 when I sat at a booth in a crappy Mexican restaurant and tried to explain to Corey what it felt like to have all of these words inside of me. I can see the orange table top, hear my own voice saying that I needed to get them out, to do something but I had no idea what to do or how to express the thoughts that raced through my body.
I could get stuck if I spend a long time thinking about what would have happened if I had started writing in 2002.
And here I am on a spring morning in late March of 2024, my heart aching every time I see the wisteria on the trees, the periwinkle vines invading without even thinking of asking for permission. The color is starting to fade, like it always does. I don’t know how to hold it all. The expectation that it will bloom again, beholding it the week that it does, the sadness as the vibrance begins to pale. The world will break your heart with its beauty, its ephemeral lavender blooms that come and go and remind you of who you’ve been and who you are and who you might be one day.
I love this! Keep writing! You encourage me to do the same ❤️