Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, 11/27/14 11:36 am

Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, 11/27/14 11:36 am

The Wrimoer was torn over what she should choose to do that day. She wanted to get back to the Nano writing project just so she could get if finished. She had just over 6000 words left to writ4e to complete the project. But she had also been thinking of going down to the orphan’s thanksgiving that one of her students had offered her. It was held in a local Grange not that far from her. She had thought for weeks now that she would probably want to stay home just because she loved feeling the atmosphere of this kind of holiday. There was a stillness in the air, a peace in the air, that only seemed to exist on these holidays. Much as she liked being in the company of a large group of people who had such strong community bonds, or at least could come together in community. The window for it was very small though. These gatherings took place midday. She just was not prepared to leave the house at such a time. Especially if it meant she would not get to do the things she wanted to do at the moment.

She had cleared away her breakfast tray almost as soon as she was finished. That was a very positive step for her. She had done that the previous day as well but then run about the house doing a few quick tasks before actually sitting down to work. This time she was sitting herself right down to write. She could still decide to run off to the gathering. 

She had also written herself a little list of possible ideas to write about. And this time she did have the list at her side. That did not mean she could refer to it, as that would be too much interruption to the writing. She would have to rely on her memory.

The evening before, she had been pleased over her overall writing progress. She had updated the spreadsheet where she kept track of her writing progress. She had gotten to post a couple of the recent writing sessions to her Nanowrimo blog that she was keeping. But then there had been a strong feeling of letdown. It suddenly felt as if she was not doing anything towards the art or the creations that meant the most to her. She did not feel that this Nano writing was part of that, not yet at least. She had thought she was keeping up with her idea of trying to get done some small piece of soul and beauty based art or creativity right after her teaching days. She had realized that she would have to start doing that to ensure she did it, or risk feeling very letdown or depressed about the whole nature of things.

Perhaps the feeling had returned not because she was doing the writing instead of the other, but because the writing would be coming to an end very soon. She had heard that authors often felt blue after finishing the writing of a book. It was a very different time involvement than the ongoing completion of smaller pieces. She would contemplate more on what might be the root of her blueness. It had been a blueness that almost made her nauseous. 

The nor’easter snowstorm had made the area white again overnight. It was a wet heavy snow that started around midday the previous day. By afternoon there were reports of weather related road accidents. There had been plenty of power outages again. Thanksgiving day had turned into a sunny day for the morning at least. 

The cat had had to stay in overnight because the Wrimoer would not let him out into the storm. He was anxious to get out of the house when she let him out. His rival had apparently eaten all the food she had left for him in a bowl. It was a china bowl instead of the usual lightweight plastic container – so it would not blow away in the storm.

It had not appeared as if it had been as much snow as forecast. It was to be around 8 “. It looked more like 3-4”. The plow guy had already come and gone. That meant she would have to clear away the plow leavings behind her car. She had shoveled away more than that probably was. As long as she could get out there while it was still sunny out, she thought she could manage it.

The heater seemed to be running fine now. At one point during the night she had wondered if it was off. She could not hear the usual sound and it felt a bit cool where she was. But when she finally got up for the day, the light on the heater was still green. At one point she heard the heater come on – both the red flame light and the green power lights were on. The heat was running. And it had stayed running properly. This hardly answered the mystery though. She had her theory of what it might be.

As she sat writing just then, the radio had started airing a story, an interview with a mother of one of the Middle Eastern terrorist kidnapping victims. She got caught up in listening to the mother tell her story instead of writing. She should stop her writing so she could listen properly.

12:06 pm 910 words  30 minutes

12:41 pm resume

That morning she had heard a story about the poet Robert Burns. He had written and self published a small book of Scottish poems in hopes of selling enough of these little books to finance a trip to the Caribbean where he was to take a job, since he needed to earn money to feed his new family, or his newly arrived children. He never made it to the job. He had gone, perhaps even walked, to Scotland for something and by the time he arrived there he was famous because his book was such a success and he was famous as if by magic. The Wrimoer was taken with the story of Burns writing a book of poetry in hopes of financing a trip to a job. In one way it had been done to make money, but would it have been so popular if it had not also been a meaningful venture, a meaningful creative act? It could be argued that it was the apparent need to make money that prompted the artistic creation. She was a firm believer that it just did not work to do a thing ‘for the money’. One might be believing that was why one was doing it, but perhaps that was simply the justification one gave oneself to do the thing.

She did enjoy doing some things ‘for the money’, but only also for the game of it, or that it was a common ground between something one wanted to do for itself and because it was ‘for the money’.  She felt one needed to do a thing for the desire of doing it. Or because the thing was wanted by someone. There were lots of reasons.

Perhaps it had been a year ago when she had received a cyber order with a payment for a single set of cards. It had been a lovely surprise to find this payment announcement, but she was so perplexed because she did not understand where the order had come from, or how the customer had figured out how to pay her. The Wrimoer had to dig around quite a bit until she by chance came across a web page she had made a few years ago that was set up as an online shopping cart with clear products offerings and descriptions. The memory of making this had returned to her, but the mystery was that she thought she had never connected it with anything else, as she had not felt ready to handle any possible sales from it. She had perhaps also been unsure over whether it was secure enough to publish. It was published, but she had assumed that if it had nothing connecting to it, it would not be found. It was from this page though that the order had come. The customer had found it somehow. That led to the Wrimoer’s wanting to find a proper place that she could properly connect to it, or that she could insert the page into. It was another task that she still wanted to do, that connecting. To make another page like that shopping cart page was something she also very much wanted to do. That was also the kind of thing that she thought filled her soul need in a way. Why would such a mercenary venture feed a soul need? She felt there was a very soulful aspect to business, or that it could be done in a soulful way. One put out there one’s gifts where others could find what they liked, and one gave customers, by its being an act of business, the opportunity to make the action a whole or complete exchange, instead of the user walking away feeling an obligatory debt. 

In the art classes she did for free, a part of her liked that it gave her a kind of power to be doing it for free. She did not like when it seemed as if people took the class fore granted, and did not treat it as if it was just like any other class that was sponsored. Practically speaking it should be considered as having the same value as the class that received funding. Somehow at the library, it seemed as if her offering was seen as no different a value than a volunteer coming to shelve books. Believing that that was how the class was seen by the administration was a problem for the Wrimoer. She did not know how to address this.

1:14pm 1664 words 33 minutes

What were the things she wanted to do to counteract the effect of the sinking sun over the next few weeks? It had about 3 ½ weeks left before it started climbing back to more cheerful position. She had been determined she would not let it have that gripping effect on her this winter.

She thought she might have figured out why the winter seemed so much longer than summer. It could be that it simply was much longer than summer in this part of the country. In winter though there were so many occasions where the winter upset everything in one’s routine. It also made such a drastic change in the appearance of everything – it was such a contrast after a snowstorm. The upheavals in winter were more memorable; they stayed in one’s mind differently than the relative sameness of summer. Summer passed almost as one day or one week. Winter was a series of strong events. She had to keep reminding herself of these philosophical, if one could call it that, viewpoints of the seasons. She thought that such views could help her take the ups and downs of winter better in stride. There was nothing like the communal feeling in the world when everyone came out after a storm to clean up and deal with the aftermath. In the big city where she had lived before, it just did not happen often enough to be a regular part of life. She really liked that it was a regular part of life in this part of the country. If the winter was any shorter, everything else would be different, there would not be the same after a storm feeling, and the summers would be cloyingly hot. It had to all be taken as a whole. The only way to have one without the other was to go away for the part one did not like.

She had written about only a few of the things on her list. After her blue feelings the evening before, she had played digitally with her calligraphy turkey demonstration drawings by adding a Happy Thanksgiving greeting to it. This she had sent as a message to her family and had posted to the social media. All morning she had been aching to see if there were responses to it. Whenever she posted an image to her personal social media, it got a good response. She usually posted images to her artist business social media page. Very few people saw it and that could be very discouraging. Mostly she was posting the photos of the students’ work. If she had a photo of her own work she would post it there on another day, so it would not conflict. That she would then also post to her personal page.

What else could she write about for the last few moments of her writing session?

The afternoon before, when she had gone out to set out food for the rival cat, the son of the downstairs neighbor was coming home. They had greeted each other. He was a young man just out of his teens. He had spent the summer working on the waterfront of an isolated offshore island fishing community. He had told her last winter that he lived for winter and snowboarding. Anytime he could get work that allowed him to do that it was very good for him. Last summer he had been in between his winter jobs and the new one on the island. It was 4^th of July weekend that he had been hanging out around home. The Wrimoer had just gotten t her new old car. The kid had acted shocked when he learned that this car in their parking lot was hers. He had remarked about that, and then made very odd observations about another neighbor’s car having out of state plates and its sticker being out of date. He had gone into his car, actually his mother’s, to get his smokes. His hands were shaking as he lit up. He and the other neighbor teased her, because they were also hanging around the building having beers, did she want to go get them some more beer. She was on her way to the supermarket.

At the supermarket she had parked next to a very large pickup truck that was in its spot at a bit of an angle. When she returned from her shopping, she happened to come around the passenger side of her car, and noticed there was a dent in the fender. She did not think that had been there before. Would she not have noticed it when she bought the car? She knew she had not made the dent. The truck could have made it. But she thought it was the kid from her building who had done it because she had found his behavior so odd. There was nothing to be proven about anything. She had never addressed the question. Her student had noticed the dent immediately when she came for class two days later.

Every time she saw the kid they greeted each other amiably and sometimes chatted a bit. This time she decided to at least mention the question. She did not necessarily expect to get a straight answer, but at least she was making it known that she thought this. She asked him, ‘did you….?’ He was flummoxed in how he answered. He could not understand what she was asking and kept saying he had been on the island all this time. She tried to clarify that this was way back when, and to describe how he had acted and that that had made her think it could have been him. She still found his reaction strange – he garbled up anything she said. Perhaps she should not have asked but simply told him she believed he had done it. She had let him off the hook, if he had done it. She was glad she had at least put it out in the open that she believed that. But by accepting his answer, if he had done it, he would believe he had fooled her. That was too bad. He seemed to be a kid who got away with denying things because he was so pretty or handsome. One never knew with him.

2:00 pm 2726 words break 46 minutes

8:02 pm resume

The Wrimoer had gone out to take care of shoveling her car out from the snow. It had not been as bad as she had expected. She wanted to take care of it while it was still light enough outside. 

There had been no concessions to Thanksgiving. She had not prepared any special food for the holiday, had not eaten any turkey, stuffing, or sweet potato. Had not visited anyone. She did have the commercial pumpkin pie she had bought at the supermarket, but that was something she did every year during this season. That was not something just to be eaten on the holiday. Because she had quite a bit of it during the season, she rarely ate it on the holiday if she was out somewhere for the holiday meal. She much prefer to try any tempting dessert she could not normally have access to. It had been a lovely day for her, other than the pressure to take care of the shoveling during a certain time frame. She always found it hard to cope with time strictures – when there was more than one thing asking to be done at the same time. She had had to let go of the idea she might be able to go out to one of the Thanksgiving gatherings. Later she had found out that a community meal quite close to her went on for a much longer time than she had thought. She could have gone to that one. It was not to be. Perhaps she would remember about that for the next year. 

She was ready to prepare her evening ritual and do some reading. Mystery writers were on her mind. A well known one had just died at the age of 95. The Wrimoer had never read that author’s mysteries, but had seen them on TV and enjoyed them greatly. She had heard or seen at least one interview with the author as well. It was a mystery to the Wrimoer how these writers came up with their stories. How did they figure out the solutions to them? How did they even come up with the ideas for them? What magic it was to write a story that a reader could get lost in. 

8:20 pm 3107 words 18 minutes

30+33+46+18= 127        24.46 wpm