Don't be blindsided by someone else's "perfection"

🌿🍁🌿🍁🌿

A friend invited me to visit while she was house-sitting. I drove to a hamlet about an hour away and parked in a paved driveway. A winding sidewalk showed me the way to the front door. Taking baby steps, I admired the meticulous lawn with fresh mulch nestled around lush green bushes. Dead leaves and weeds had taken the high road, and the front porch was spotless; no trace of a spider web or wasp nest.

    I rang the doorbell, and my friend let me in. When we had finished eating lemon icebox pie, she led me on a tour of the house -- three floors of more meticulousness. Every room had been decorated in House Beautiful fashion, with such things as white coverlets and matching dust ruffles, accent pillows in soft aqua, and flowing curtains framing all the windows. Pictures, in the perfect shape and scene for the space, hung in every spot where a picture should be, and if I swore, I would swear that not one speck of dust rested on any surface. I hinted to my friend that the team of housekeepers and interior decorators should be awarded a trophy. She assured me that the owner vacuumed and dusted, as well as decorated every wall, every nook and space herself.

    After an enjoyable visit with my friend, I drove away from the rows of stately homes back to my neck of the woods, passing by hay fields in need of baling and barns in need of painting. I turned into my gravel driveway and into the garage. Getting out of the car, I stepped over a wayward leaf, and on the way to put my things away, I tripped over a dust bunny. Compared to where I had just been, I had work to do.

    So, I started cleaning, but not with a mop or a broom.

Throw away and start over? Not so fast.

 

🍁🍃🍁🍃🍁

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 tried 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

 

🍁🍂🍁🍂🍁

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: