Knots and Stitches

Feeding my bagel addiction this morning has resulted in several seeds wedged into this keyboard, although so far it's only affecting the ancillary keys: direction arrows, alt, etc. Yesterday, I left this device at home to prevent just this kind of food sloppiness. As smart as that might have been for the keys, it meant that any little story threads would need to be tied tightly and kept in memory until I returned home.

Then...freeway closures, traffic, and an unexpected dinner break. By the time I returned home, I was doing well to keep my eyes open while taking care of the dogs and watching the single show that James wanted to watch while doing a delayed batch of laundry. It had been a gorgeous day, cool and bright, and it had lured us to remain out and keep wandering around the Texas Renaissance Festival even after we were both too tired to do more than glance at the sights and avoid other festival goers.

Which means that this morning, I'm supposed to be untangling any story threads and working them into the pieces they seemed to be yesterday. What I seem to have is a series of knots: we forget how to dance with trees, posing keeps the strangeness intentional, he knows he can't move while people wander by, we all try out the throne, careless of it's signage that contributes to a tangle that neither helps my frozen NaNo brain nor seems to do more than mark the ends of their threads.

Is there a time limit on holding an idea in your head, beyond which, tug as you will, the rest of the story won't be drawn?

I tend to write according to the seasons: stories that occur to me in the spring are stale by the summer, those begun in the fall won't speak as clearly after the holidays. These little snarls of story seem to have been conceived in an aseasonal period. Halloween was rained out and Christmas seems to have been suppressed by the weather and my own delay in packing up the Halloween decorations. Some seasonal cheer is sparked by the trees and Santas in the mall--it's been a long time since I visited Santa and I had to grin when the not-yet-visited Deerbrook Santa waved and called out a greeting. Silly, but another in-between moment. Brief Christmas followed by summer heat in the parking lot.

Perhaps that's where these stories are lurking, behind the season, under the couch, on the benches just off the path, to the side of the crowds and drifting down the green ditches. Water around here seldom seems blue or clear, it carries as much sediment as it can and hangs still in the chill or in the heat.


I think the throne and the dancing trees, the odd weather and the green water are all part of the same story. And the boy sitting on the bench? Perhaps he's watching, waiting for the story that he's endlessly reading, waiting for the people around him to find their places on the page and flow through the river of words. He's danced with the winds and seen the trees fall, twisted too harshly in the dance. Can he keep this stillness, wait as he's been commanded to do?

Perhaps it's still an in-between time. As the clouds gather and the weather promises to be unsettled throughout the week, cold fronts are forcing themselves to the coast, bringing our wet, green winter closer, I have a few days of sun and shadow to tug at the knots and see whether or not they pull loose.