Ginger Snapped

Her head pounds. Her body aches. Her nose runs and her eyes water. The day is long. She reads a book. She finishes the book. She emails. She Facebooks. She reads blogs. She blows her nose. A lot. The next day is the same, so is the one after that. As she lies there, she thinks about all the images and words she's consumed over the past 72 hours: a starlet off to prison, a dishonest businessman, a dozen trapped miners deep underground, a challenged book. This is news. This is entertainment. They are one and the same. An acorn hits her roof. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk. It rolls down, picking up speed before it hurtles over the edge. Why is it, she wonders, that the media feeds us darkness, when there is light yet to be had? Why do they glorify the hopeless, the hellbound, the dark, the demon, the despair? Why has the world been populated entirely with vampires and zombies and werewolves? Why is pop culture stuck on murders and mayhem, or the sexually scintillating? Wh...

By Charles Reznikoff Not because of victories I sing, having none, but for the common sunshine, the breeze, the largess of the spring. Not for victory but for the day’s work done as well as I was able; not for a seat upon the dais but at the common room.

The Gingerbread boy walks into the kitchen. "I really want to go upstairs to brush my teeth, but I'm too scared," he says. Gingerbread Boy #2 leaves his bowl of unnaturally colored cereal without a word and accompanies his older brother up the stairs. She watches them go, astounded at their brief truce. Here in a simple moment, compassion triumphs over cold cereal. Fear seeks out friend, and the fighting ends for a brief time, all for the want of clean teeth. The power of two. She watches them pad up the steps, and with each step, she sees them turning into gangly boys, then teenagers, then young men; by the time they reach the second floor, they're tax-paying adults. Before long, she thinks, her two will seek out two of their own: two new families, and her family of four will be down to two again. She remembers the night when she and he became we. When a welcome hug gave away a hidden ring box in a pocket, and she couldn't stop smiling. The day she joined ranks...

Sometimes nothing brings joy the way a blank piece of paper does, its creamy whiteness stretching out for what seems eternity, waiting for colors from markers to rain down upon it in lines and dots, swirls and scribbles. What is to be created? Does it matter? They take the colored sharpies in hand and draw at the kitchen table. Markers and a big piece of paper. Magic. She draws girls and boys--girls with triangle dresses, boys with inverted triangle bodies. She draws a playground with swings and teeter-totter, children going down slides, children jumping ropes. She even draws camels at the request of the Gingerbread Man to go along with the stories he tells the gingerbread boys of Ahmad and his whistling camel. The gingerbread boys color in her line drawings, turning pigtails red and green. One draws a piano. The other draws a great pool of blue. She thinks she should do this more often. Big blank sheet of paper. Fresh markers. No expectations. No judgment.

She went home this month. Not to the home she grew up in--that home had the crab-apple tree she swung from like a veritable monkey, pheasants in the back yard, and the smell of pot roast and bread baking rising from the kitchen. The home she would stampede up the stairs, and stampede back down. The home where her glasses would steam up when she walked in the door after making snow angels in the yard. That home exists only in her mind now. Nor did she go to the home she lived in during high school, where she would unlock the milk delivery door before school because she always lost her keys, and if she unlocked the delivery door, she could stretch her hand into the hallway and unlock the regular door. That home was where she and her sister would sleep outside on lounge chairs on the porch upstairs during hot summer nights, hidden from view by the huge maple tree, and be unhappily serenaded by the birds at 4 am. The home where the dining room was permanently speckled with glitter and sequ...

Wednesdays are CSA days. She drives to the farm with her bags, picks up the week's produce from a structure that has yet to be roofed, while the gingerbread boys feed the goats grass they pluck from the edge of the fencing. This week: swiss chard, scallions, garlic scapes, beets, mesclun, red lettuce, green lettuce. Driving down the pitted dirt road back home, she realizes how similar farming is to writing. The work is never done. There's always something to do. The soil preparation. The plowing. The seeding. The composting. The praying for rain and sunshine. The weeding, the pruning. It's all the same. The outlining. The research. The character building. The world building. The praying for inspiration. The revision. Does the farmer get discouraged like she does? Does it rain when he wants sun? Does the sun shine down in harsh rays when he hopes for rain? Do his seeds rot in the ground? Are his plants overrun with slugs the way her brain feels overrun with slugs? Hm. She tu...

Irritation flows through her veins. She reads something peaceful in hopes that she can blow the stink off, as Great-Aunt Julia used to say. It doesn't work. She takes a walk. She takes a shower afterward. She's still irritated. No, she's no longer irritated, she's downright mad. She wants to drop-kick something. She doesn't though. She makes lunch, she washes the dishes, she takes the gingerbread boy to the doctor's, she reads books to him. After dinner, the gingerbread boys beg to play baseball. She takes the whiffle ball in hand and steps up to the pitcher's mound--an uneven spot in the driveway, formerly marked by a chalk circle. She tosses the ball, again and again, as little arms discover the joy of bat connecting with ball. And, then, only then, does the stink blow away, thrown with the whiffle ball, and hit far into the outfield.