Throw away and start over? Not so fast.

 

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My decades-old washer died, and I needed to buy a new one. I began searching for a no-frills model like the old one; wash, rinse, spin, delicate, etc.; no screens; no high-tech frivolities. It was a challenge. Few washers, if any, in the home improvement store aligned with my simplistic views, but I did the best I could to stay true to my washer wishes.

    A week or so later, two guys in an oversized truck arrived at our house. They blew through the back door and into the laundry room like a cyclone. By someone's definition, they deposited and swiftly installed a new washing machine, then dashed out the door faster than Looney Tunes' Road Runner. Barry noticed the washer was not level and called them back to fix it, which they did, lickety-split. Then they skedaddled out the door again.

After all these years, a way of writing is still a way of writing

 

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A Way of Writing is an essay written by American poet William Stafford (1914 - 1992) and published in nineteen seventy. In the short essay, he details his writing philosophy, beginning with this sentence:

"A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is        someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he    would not have thought of if he had not started to say them."

     In the summer of nineteen eighty-six, an English professor at UNC-Greensboro used Stafford's essay as a writer's prompt for her students. I sat at a desk in her class and wrote the following response: 

Books, like people, leave you with a feeling

 

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I remembered a book I read when I was around ten years old, but I could not remember its title. It was about an animal, a fox, I thought, and I loved the story. The author, as well as any other identifying characteristics, were buried deep in my subconscious, underneath an accumulation of years and other books. I tried to dredge up those particulars, but they were buried too deep, and I finally gave up on having the pleasure of reading it again.

    Fast forward a few years.