Fiction & Restriction

I wish I could remember the common names of those flowers!

Tempermental bursts of warm weather are beckoning me back into the cool wooded hideaways back home....

At the gated ending of an unnamed county road there lives a little old man and a not-so-little old woman. They are the best of friends, the oldest of lovers, and the easiest companions. Each summer, I find myself on their crooked wood plank porch, rapping on their screen door seeking permission to swim in the ice cold spring-fed swimming hole on their property. As I've grown older and less interested in tramping through the woods (or perhaps more fearful of lyme disease), I've begun looking forward to my visit with the ancient land holders even more than my dip in the gorge. Simply being around them as they go through their comfortable petterns of survival captures my imagination, giving birth to buds of story and song characters that threaten to bloom into a complete project....eventually.

Right now, I'm molding the not-so-little old woman into the wilderness "sage" character so essential to quest-related tales; her home, though aging and deteriorating at the same speed as her physical state, is a living, breathing character in and of itself. The chaotic prolificacy of her garden is a manifestation of her lively personality, cultivated and refined through decades of hardscrabble survival. I write her because she is all that I aspire to be -- skilled in ways of trial and observation, practiced in tragically forgotten ways, harded by the elements while somehow remaining boldy feminine.

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And now, I look at my work. My hands. Messy pen and ink would testify I've earned my keep. Even a typewriter requiring a pint of elbow grease to operate might convince me that my current profession provides bread honestly earned. But what am I still doing here, in a chair, before a window, typing on a soft-touch keyboard, awaiting some DeSoto to arrive and declare my secret worlds sacred?

It is not my heart to abandon my life as I know it. What's missing is vocational purpose. Occupational passion. I know that against all guidance counselor conditioning, I will never be a rat-to-cheese, 40-hour-a-week commuter at the core of my being. I crave self-definition in channeled, sweat-bourne expression. The mere thought of having to turn over decades of uninspiring work energy in exchange for the safety net provided by online bill payment and low health care deductibles send me spiraling into a professional depression.....

There is work, then there are responsibilities. The question is, Quigley, how does one persue one without abandoning the other??? There must be a way. Musty must must.