i used to think being a writer made me weird.

my college roommate would find me, a glass of red and jazz, lying flat on the floor, writing bad poetry with dull crayons.  my very first short story was about a secret land wherein all the lost pencils and earring backs lived.  i've wasted entire afternoons planning out the first thing i'll say to Saint Flannery O' Connor, when we meet in the great beyond.

then i sat in a hotel bathroom on the eve of my wedding day

trying to figure out  what to vow 

to the closest thing to George-Bailey-for-real that i'd ever known.

then i  birthed a baby -- a tiny, mewling thing -- and found 

every cliche  i'd ever heard about motherhood 

to be at once true and completely insufficient.

then my soul-friend lost a babe long-awaited to a vile disease,

and i woke that next morning with grief, bitter and metallic, in my mouth.

and words.

in each of these situations -- i reached for pen, for paper, for keyboard, the way a drowning man clings to life raft.  as if  words and oxygen just might be one and the same.

dramatic?  a tad.  but true.  oh, true.

i started this blog not having a clue what a blog was supposed to be.  i read blogs where moms chronicled all of the important "firsts" and growth chart advances of their children.

i tried it ... and failed. 

i read other bloggers who were in-the-know on fashion and current events and wrote stirring pieces on skinny jeans or social justice.

i tried it ... and failed at that, too.

then, two things happened:

1.  my cousin died, instantly, in a car crash.  at 32.  she'd been the one ahead of me, by just a few months.  the girl i'd shared a pillow with so many nights of childhood, her mama shush-ing us from the hall, while  we whispered our one-day-i'm-gonna's.  i flinched at the thought that her journal stories stopped -- lights out -- all at once.

she and i, we had daydreamed out loud, the type of young girl things that always start with prepositions -- out of town, in love, with child -- and they all seemed as faraway as next birthday.  this is not the case anymore.  i, alone, am now living past our daydream deadlines -- in the full knowledge that no tomorrow is promised.

2.  i re-read the Thoreau quote i'd slapped on this About page, first draft:

"Do what you love.

Know your own bone;

gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it,

and gnaw it still."

... and i realized that for me, the writing is the digging -- and this life is the bone.  and because i don't know how much longer i'll get to dig and to chew, i'd better get to scratching down  some of the pudding parts -- for posterity's sake.

so -- wierdo or no -- i'm a writer. 
and that doesn't mean that i always write well, 

but i do hope it means that  i'll always write.

i invite you here, to this space where i scratch things down, and i hope amidst my flailings you see both His grace and the need to tell your own story, somewhere, to someone.


don't believe me?  listen to dear annie:

the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive.   anything that you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. you open your safe and find ashes.

--annie dillard

welcome, friends.