.
Spark: sit quietly somewhere you won’t be disturbed for a few minutes.
Pay attention to all your senses. (Close your eyes if you would like –
to experience one of the non-visual senses more effectively.)
Choose one sense and one sensory detail that you are experiencing and
begin writing about it.
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My years-old sweatshirt is surprisingly soft against my skin. Although the outside is pilling and the cuffs have lost their stretch, from the inside it feels like a puffy cloud.
I never noticed this before – probably because I usually wear it over something.
This afternoon I came home, threw off my “out-in-public” clothes and grabbed something long-sleeved off the floor. No one could miss the change of season this week. We still need rain, but the air is clearer, crisper, even less humid than before. When the sun went down, it would get colder, clearer, chilly. I needed long-sleeved.
The usual kaleidoscope of projects nattered in the back of my head: the well, the gutters, the lawn, the leaves, the ladder, the dead trees, the dead leaves. In other words, the same plan as every other afternoon. “Today I am going to start one thing. I won’t worry about completing anything. Starting, that’s the key.”
Where was I going yesterday when I stopped to pull up the new forsythia that had leap-frogged onto the lawn? Wherever it was, those newly-rooted colonizers were in the way. It would be quick enough to trash those interlopers. Throw them in the ravine. In the compost. But, no. I can’t just throw plants out. Books, either. Pulled up, dirt shaken from their roots, with a little water, they wait in a bucket until the Forsythia Relocation Fish swims through my head. There is the occasional sin of omission… maybe they stay too long in the bucket when the temperature is too high or too low. Yippee! They’re dead! Remorse-free, I throw them in the ditch.
Maybe this sweatshirt is so soft inside because I just up and quit using the dryer sheets one day. They had made me happy for years. Every load of my laundry went from the washer to the dryer. Even the loads destined for outside drying in the sunshine and the fresh air had a few minutes with a sheet of “Bounce” or “Cuddle-something.” Hard water may be good for your teeth, but it’s bad for the fluffiness. No matter how soft and new the towels or the T-shirts of my childhood were, they came off the clothesline like styrofoam — stacked up stiffly in the laundry basket and crunchy like dried leaves.
I would like to think that change comes about in an orderly manner — like a staircase. The picture in my head looks like this: I realize that some area in my life needs improvement. I research the options and make a timeline with evenly-spaced increments. I start with a four-square foundation, then implement the elements day by day until that one cost-effective, efficient change comes about, with, of course, a carbon footprint smaller than the original.
You know I love clean, straight-line theory, but I know I live in rumpled reality.
One day I said, “Dammit, I went through two winters with the windows open because that muffler keeps dumping exhaust into the back seat. I’m not doing that again. ” The next day I emailed information to my mother outlining how “gifting” her children with cash might reduce her taxes. A week later, I arbitrarily earmarked 85% of her check for a car. Two days after that, I saw a craigslist used car for that exact amount. The car was, and still is, the wrong color, but I can drive around in the winter with the windows up and the heater on.
There was no evenly-spaced to do list. No stair steps to the next car. No nights of online research, no anecdote collecting from friends, no opinion gathering from acquaintances. Just an arbitrary 85%.
Back to the sweatshirt. For years, I was aware that dryer sheets had a downside, and was suspicious of fabric softeners as well, but never started to look into it. Because — I really like having the towels come out soft every time, whether they are dried inside or outside.
About change. I quite loved smoking. Cigarettes were such an integral part of me in 1990 that my friend Arlen, who had always wanted me to quit, was boggled by the idea.
“I just can’t imagine you without a cigarette in your hand,” he said. “It’s what I want to see, and I keep trying, but I just can’t envision you like that.”
I didn’t decide to quit for my health. The building I worked in was scheduled to be non-smoking in two years. Not a problem, I expected to be promoted out before that. I quit because one day smoking was banned in open areas. Everybody who reported to me worked in those open areas. Suddenly they could no longer smoke on the job. But I could. Because I was a manager, and managers had offices.
That wasn’t fair, so I signed up for the company smoking cessation class. Once in the class, it wasn’t the health facts that pushed me over the edge. Pictures of smokers’ lungs didn’t deter me. The list of poisons in the smoke didn’t deter me. What did it for me was when the lecturer pointed out that cigarettes were making me sit in the back of the airplane. Well. I’d be damned if anything will tell me where I can sit on a plane. Cigarettes weren’t pushing me around, no way. (That’s all well and good. However, I have to point out that 14 seasons of “Air Crash Investigation” imply that your chances of surviving a crash are slightly better when you’re sitting in the last few rows. But I digress…)
So, one day I read about waxy buildup and dryer sheets for the umpteenth time. But there was something different: vinegar. A claim that vinegar in the rinse cycle softens hard water. (Isn’t that so odd? “hard” water… “soft” water… but I digress…)
Intrigued, I tried putting vinegar where the Downy should go. Towels are fluffier, T-shirts feel more substantial, sweatshirts have bulked up. On days of low humidity, yes, there is more static electricity, but if you pretend it’s magic, it can be pretty entertaining.
Lately, though, it’s occurred to me — the washer is set to rinse everything twice. If the vinegar is released for the first rinse cycle, is it all gone by the time the second rinse is over?
Is it the vinegar that makes everything so soft? Or is it simply not using the dryer sheets? Soooooooo many questions.
But here’s the one that really matters to me: is there any way to make this writing sound even a little bit deeper, more pithy — maybe even… more Cosmic?
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cayugaview 