Primal

Lit Up — April’s Prompt: Distraction

She had stared at the blank page for days. She had clicked refresh on Gmail one hundred times. Then Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. She had even downloaded SnapChat although she didn’t know how to use it. Her daughter told her she wasn’t allowed to write a response, that she was supposed to send a photo back. But she hated selfies and wasn’t a photographer. She was a writer, damn it, even if it was old-fashioned and out-of-style.

She had stared at the blank page for days. Was she still a writer?

Opening a window, she caught sight of a bird foraging in the overgrown grass. I need to mow the lawn. She had been inside for a week.

Panic seized her by the throat and squeezed. “I’ve got to get out of here!” she said, pushing back her chair with such force she knocked a sun-starved cactus off her desk.

Out the door she went, the blank page, Gmail, Twitter, and SnapChat left behind. She walked hard and far, like two positive poles of a magnet had come together and were propelling her away from her desk-bound life. When at last the magnetic force subsided, her chest open and she inhaled — a lung-filling, organic breath. Of sunshine on fresh dirt. Of plants growing and dying and the two mingling to sustain the earth.

It was primal. It was ancient. And yet, it smelled like change.

She turned back towards home and her desk, reluctantly at first. But her pace quickened as she thought of how she would fill the blank page. She could see it already: the design for her garden that would host flowers and food alike. And she wouldn’t mow the lawn; she would transform it into a sanctuary for the foraging bird.

And who knew? Maybe one day she would capture it all on another blank page — she was a writer, after all.

Thanks for reading! It’s been a long time and my writing skills are a bit rusty. I have been heeding the primal call of the earth or, as some might call it, “gardening” :-)

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