WEEKLY WRITER'S PATH #11
THURSDAY MORNING I WATCHED A TUMBLEWEED skitter over the driveway and race across my window as I sat at my desk working. When next I looked up, there were waves of snow tumbling across the field. No, winter is not returning, this is regular spring weather here in Santa Fe where we joke that the four seasons are summer, fall, winter and wind. Well, this year we subtracted winter . . .
The wind scares my son, Asher; he hears it howling through the heater vents. My sign-maker runs out of his shop to settle down someone’s large banner whipping free on one corner. I wear a hat that fits close to my head, flattening the ends of my hair into curls against my cheek.
Spring has come and I must confess that not one of the agents/publishers I sent DIZZY SUSHI — my Buddhist travel memoir/love story — to has accepted it. Spring has come and blown away some part of me that said this could happen easily. It’s clear I am going to have to fight for my dream, even a tiny bit of it. I will squint my eyes against the brown dust that rains down on my car windshield to see through this time of upheaval. I must take these crucial next steps, bend into the storm, because flower petals are not far away.
Saturday night I go to bed with a premonition of snow. I can feel it all around the house though it isn’t really there — a down quilt against my ears, like the phantom nerve endings in the tips of lost fingers.
We wake to whiteouts and blizzard conditions. Four inches of wind-whipped snow that barely touch the ground. I sit at my desk and open the spreadsheet that records the ins and outs of my manuscript. I am surprised to find that my list has twice as many opportunities as I had remembered being on it. I collect all the “nos” and drop them down to the bottom. Rising to the top are two people I can contact today, and two more I can prepare for. Then another four I can research.
The new snow won’t cure the drought – that would take several more snows like this one to even begin to fix — but Asher and I button up and head out once the sun appears, tying scarves around our faces, walking through the white velvet drifts, kicking ice chunks down the asphalt. As the sun descends into the west and breaks out from under a cloudbank, it colors the snow an intense blue, and the tree limbs red-gold. It has been so long since I have seen those colors that I drink them in.
I have a premonition about DIZZY SUSHI, too. I keep seeing the cover of the book: a gritty-textured paper in orange with a red pattern design around the spine. An intricate fantasy of swirls and pictures, torii gates and wasabi. Phantom nerves.
