Scuppernong Afternoon

I have had plenty of time to write this week and guess what? I don’t have much more written now that I did at the beginning of the week.  I don’t have writer’s block so much as I have a bad case of labyrinth-brain. I start a story. Her name is Andrea and she’s coming home from a patronizing holiday get together. She stops at a gas station and sees a lot of magical things. But now, maybe she’s Miranda and I can retell The Tempest. But no, now she has a different name, a different conundrum, and I write three pages of really good stuff until I realize I don’t know what happens next. Then there was the teacher who met an ex-student leaning on the fence that encircles the local airport, just staring, like she did when she was a teenager.  But what next? It’s been quite a week. I’ve lived with five people who don’t exist.

Thursday afternoon I chucked it all and went to Scuppernong and hiked by myself; no potential fictional characters accompanied me. The natural world was very, very beautiful. Hues of green on a misty May day in the Midwest are more than just color. Green is the cool temperature, the velvety moisture in the air. Murmuring silence punctured by the clear singing of birds. And .. was that rattly noise frogs? May’s green is a tide of calmness rolling in.

Here are a few photos.

There's a bite out of the bottom of that tree and yet it stil stands!