I haven’t posted for a while. There’s a good reason–I’ve been overwhelmed. As a writer I should be able to take the swirl of thoughts, worries, prayers, and turn them into something that makes sense, but I didn’t have the clarity or the strength to force myself to do it. I know many of you have had similar times in your lives when it seemed easier to let all the “stuff” of life swirl around a bit longer before stepping in to impose some order.

So, here’s a bit of the swirl I’m dealing with right now. My mother, who is 89, fell two weeks ago and broke her hip. That sent us into the emergency room and hospital swirl: long hours of waiting, trying to answer questions repeated every minute or so with no answers in my own head. Then the sterile, but somehow beautiful environment of hospital trays, schedules, medications, routines I don’t understand, and the eternal hope of a doctor visit. Then on to the dismal world of rehab where broken bodies try to mend in the midst of dark hallways, nasty smells and harried-looking aides scurrying around. The days are full of questions, but answers are in short supply.

A few more concerns to round out the days: where to place my mother when she can leave rehab? What to do with her beloved cat? When to find time to pack up all of her life and distill it down to what can fit in an 8′ X 9′ room?

In the midst of family life, I have my writing. I churn out the assignments, but seem to run dry on my “real writing.” I’m a bit numb, I guess. But compelling writing comes out of struggles and the realities of daily life, doesn’t it? Of course it is sometimes grander than real life, but it’s grounded in the inner turmoils and demands of circumstances that are uncomfortable, even harrowing–that’s what real writing is made of. So there should be words in hard times. I know they’re out there and I just need to grasp for them, fight for them, subdue them.

This morning, after a really horrible night’s sleep, I sat here in my office drinking my lovely, dark coffee and out the window to my left I caught some movement. Well, a lot of little movements. There was a flock of the fluttery, busy, inch and a half-long bushtits who come for visits in the spring of the year. Is it spring? Nearly. You have to pay attention to bushtits, because their visits last only seconds. They peck and hop around and eat whatever it is they find on fir trees and then they’re gone before you can count how many.

And just like that I determined to reach up into the swirl and catch a few of my words and set them down because that’s what I do. I write.