My Friends

I lost my three half-days a week, and though I mourn the absence of our dear friend who is now student teaching, the cut in hours has been good for me. Now my nurturing friend (Bea thinks of her as another of her mommies) takes the non-school girls for two mornings a week, and those two mornings are so precious to me that I do not squander a single minute. If I have three hours, I sit down and I write the whole time. I am glued to my chair, no getting up or lollygagging unless I am DESPERATE to urinate or my three-baby bottom falls asleep. I write two new chapters a morning. Having limited time (say, over the past seven years) has produced one very important characteristic in me: Gratitude. I don't take even ten minutes of writing time for granted. I imagine that's a key: not having too much. Generally speaking, having just enough and making the most of it seems to be one of my keys to contentment. And what do those keys look like? Do they gleam like ice or are they dull from burial? I suppose it depends which day you catch me.

My dear Maple Mullihan and her oddball family feel, like my friend LJI in Missoula reflects about her novel's characters, like good friends by now. I hear Martin playing a song ("Dancing in the Moonlight") and I think, "That's a song the Mullihans would LOVE. I bet they're singing it." For a while there I felt all caught in the morass of publication (I had missed my by-the-time-I'm-thirty-I'll-have-a-book deadline) and then I turned a corner, and like Arnold Lobel's Frog, I spied spring! Why do I write? I asked myself. And I answered: Because I must to be happy; because I enjoy it! And so I jumped into the rather brisk waters of the new book and splashed around like a happy idiot. I must admit there are fairly muddy eddies here and there where I'm not sure what's on the bottom and I'm afraid to put down my toes. But why do something if I can't find a shred, or a hunk, or a whole lot of joy in it?

My girls are always spinning such delightful tales, and they have no use for time lines or inner pressures to produce. Elspeth turned her face to me at nap time the other day and reported in all seriousness: "Mommy, when I was born someone threw a pie in my face."

That's good stuff.

So is the warthog story from my dear friend Rachel that you must view. It's not every day warthogs eat your hand cream.