grace grits and gardening

ramblings from an arkansas farm girl

Hairy Words

By

I have crazy psycho dreams. This, I’ve already confessed in prior posts.  Lately, my dreams have involved writing. Because.I’m.Obsessed. Possessed?

In my dreams, thoughts gush from the tip of my favorite pen, flowing and filling blank pages. In my dreams, I type fluently with fingertips on home keys, tap-tap-tap, as automatic as blinking. In my dreams, I edit, slash, replace, rack my brain for precise words that combine to form a magical sentence. Prose that flows likes a favorite melody. Words that sing.

In my most recent dream, I gazed into my mother’s magical magnifying mirror, the mirror she drags on every road trip. (The mirror that weighs fifteen pounds.) I discovered my eyebrows were unruly, in desperate need of plucking. A few wild stray hairs grew here and there, undetected by blurred fifty-year-old vision. Undetected without help from the hulking amplifier.

As I studied these shapeless brows, I noticed each hair was not a hair at all. Each hair was a word. A teeny-weeny minuscule group of letters. Why had I never noticed?

As I carefully tugged microscopic words from between my eyebrows, I wondered, did other people realized these hairs were adjectives and adverbs?
With my tweezers, I plucked…
very
          suddenly
      the
 small
                  important
           was
 just
               seem
   awesome…

Growing off to the side, I removed…
          interesting. 
Stray hairs. Stray words. 
When I finished, I admired my clean, evenly shaped eyebrows.
I’ve been writing word by word, bird by bird, bean by bean, hair by hair… I’ve been editing word by word, bird by bird, you get the picture.
Today, I shall take a break and go outside to play.
talya

Musical Pairing:

I Can See Clearly Now, Johnny Nash

“So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.” 
― Dr. Seuss

Wanna receive posts via email? Sign up here!

Comments

  1. Yes, I think you need a day off. Go play. Sounds like you are about to lose it. Your Mom, B

  3. yeah, what Colene said! And speaking of 50-yar-old vision, I hope you read Luann in yesterday’s DMN comics! It speaks to the same …

  5. haha…Very cool…The part of your dream where you find words in your eyebrows would make a great Surrealist painting, entitled something like, I don’t know, “The Browzing Writer,” maybe?=) I have to admit that you do remind me of me in how I get obsessed with projects and how these obsessions tend to invade my dreams!=) And I’m no interpreter of dreams, but maybe you are obsessing over the pursuit of hirsute words when you should relax and just be your own wonderful self.=) With that said, I think this is an incredible piece of creative writing.

  10. PLAY!!!!!!! SO SO CONCUR..do this EVERY day on my day off..and around the last hour of my 12 hr shift…its difficult to do in a trauma center, nevertheless..if its in your heart…it leaks out..like on this page..LOVE this BLOG! 🙂

  14. The mind does baffle, if you’re a writer, at least! When all seems quiet and calm, suddenly characters erupt in my head and a story or a paragraph for the book, simply must be written!

    The random words, between the eyebrows, hmmmm, maybe just needed to written before your busy mind could let them rest.

    ❤

  17. Loved it. 🙂 Just like eyebrow maintenance, editing hurts but must be done. I recently posted a picture on my facebook that said “Don’t let anyone with bad eyebrows tell you sh*t about life”. Lol! Clean eyebrows, good editing…essential. 😉

Food. Farm. Garden. Life.

THANKS FOR READING!