Loss for words met with gaggle of thought

Here’s the thing.

I could tell you that the fact that I don’t write a column every week is because I’ve been so busy with other things that I have no time for plunking out my chronicles on a keyboard.

But if I took that stance, my nose would grow like Pinocchio’s.

Truth be told, I have loads of time to write and more ideas and dreams and aspirations to write about than anyone can imagine.

Yet, I admit that on a daily basis I readily find countless other things to fill my time so that there is none left in which to write.

I’m a chronic procrastinator who blatantly denies and fights against a clear-cut opportunity.

Why is that?

How can I expect anyone to rely on that kind of hiccupped continuity?

And yet I tout my belief and confidence in the Universal plan, which is patient and nudges me with small reminders to put in face time with my laptop.

I can’t tell you how thick as thieves the its plan is around here, waving its green flag and leaving the days wide open for me the writer, even as I continue to put up roadblocks at nearly every turn.

Why is that?

Heaven knows there remains enough comedy and drama in my neck of the woods to fill the word count, including a very bold skunk, a demented squirrel, and a ghost deer that keeps eating the tops off all my budding flowers. 

Yet I feel like my writing is stooped in a vat of literary molasses.

No matter how I look at it, I am my own worst enemy, second-guessing my ability and believing the dream-stealing ego that resides in me, while everyone else around me knows better.

Neil Young, Bruce Cockburn, and Tom Russell wouldn’t be the writers and singers they are if they thought like that. Any good author in the entire world wouldn’t be one if they thought like that all the time. 

Perhaps my mind muddle is a product of the infinite slump born of a stunted summer that’s had me under a grip of relentless wind and rain.

It is my hope that the weeks will get warmer, the fall and winter catalogue will be delayed at the printers, and many more weekends will come my way out on Rainy Lake in a sailboat with my captain.

If nothing else, I once again can write about the 18 winged creatures who move about daily in long waddling lines in my yard, leaving behind their trademark green poo and enough goose down to start a pillow factory—all the while shaking their long necks in scold of me when I try to get to “my” barn or to “my” garden.

Maybe I’ll get lucky and the rabid skunk, demented squirrel, the flower bud eater, and the geese will pass through the yard at the same time and I’ll get a photograph. 

“Beth’s Wild Kingdom.” 

Yep, that’s my neck of the woods all right.