Coming Around

Two things that happened to me this week:

1. I lost a notebook I'd been writing in for a good five years out at the Edgefield on the last Saturday in September. It was handmade and spiral bound with Roxie's little pink baby hand prints on the front cover. The two hands that left those marks couldn't have been more than about 18 months old. Inside the pages were three quarters full with lists and thoughts and hand scribbled notes for the slowest first draft of a novel ever penned. Weird stuff, but I like to run it all together like that. Shows how life was on all those days between.

Weird night, too.Full moon and all.  But that's a story for another time. Let's keep this here on point.

I walked into the show with the notebook, a sweater, my wallet and a ticket shoved down into my big old purple show going purse and I walked out with the sweater on my back, wind rippling up the leaves,  never noticing how light my bag was. Just a wallet and my keys left in there. I don't when I first knew the notebook was gone. Long past any place I could go back looking for it. Probably 4500 people on that lawn. One little notebook, no name inside, probably bagged up with trash and rotting. Why bother calling on lost an found.

Four days later, 5:20 a.m., leaving for my morning ride down the empty pavement into town for work and there's a little brown package on my doorstep. Tied up neat with a blue twine bow. My little notebook inside with a new entry on the first blank page:

A cartoon. Two fairies handing off I don't know what to a bunny rabbit with a little Thoreau beneath the frame:

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."


I do believe in fairies, I do believe in fairies. I do. I do. I do.

Now, I have my suspicions about how this book found its way home. All of them wrapped up in love. 

But I'm not asking. Let's just call it magic and let it be so.


2. I asked the cat from my "ask the cat" deck what I most need to know about my writing right now.

That cat just said: "Wake up!"