In a strange sort of way things have been intense. I gathered all my eggs from a novel-laying chicken and out popped the first lines of a memoir, the memoir I’ve been working on for nearly three years and all but abandoned come last fall. There were no more tricks left to avoid the project; the owners of my childhood home had come back into the country and opened their doors to me. I spent two hours in August juxtaposed between past and present and came away cloudy. Then I started writing fiction.

Like a new love affair I fell passionately for fiction. I dreamed it backwards and forwards. I kicked the memoir out of the house. “Enough with you, you old, boring life,” I said. “I’m the one creating worlds now.”

The thing is, good lovers know how to be patient. They recognize phases and can tap at an inner core when you feel hollow. Then they come back and they bring gifts.

Today I don’t know the whole story that is being written, but I have found an organic structure underneath a series of events that is slowly reveling itself to me as it tap-tap-taps out its chords, leaving me to record its moody rhythm.

Maybe it just took this long to process events.