Here’s a little something I wrote back in High School. Now that I have my internet connection at home you can expect more of this to follow, however only a few of you will get to read everything :).

Enjoy!

I tiptoe the midline of Route 139 and feel the summer breeze of 1986
strawberries and cream on the back porch of grandma’s house
overalls and hay fields on an old john deere and
grandpa’s rough hands still holding a fragile love and
growing older riding on an old ceramic cow pretending to shoot down all the bad guys and never getting used to the smell of a farm but finding comfort there still and
eating supper at 4:00 in the afternoon and playing bingo for gum balls and
each day that passed was a new adventure for me to behold
daisies in fields for me to pick and vegetables in grandpa’s garden and
as years passed the visits grew shorter and the time passed more quickly and
school took the place of the grandpa’s life lessons and I bought my own gum balls and
I out grew the old ceramic cow and could no longer find the bad guys or
feel the rough hands that held our fragile love and
I still love the feel of the breeze on my face as I walk the midline of Route 139

As I was digging through our “room of shame” last night, looking for my empty Christmas tubs, to FINALLY put away the tree, I happened upon one filled with some of my old stuff. Laying on top were 3 notebooks, first a small green journal sized one, the second a teal standard smead notebook and the third one covered with random magazine clippings that had been set into a collage on the cover. The teal and collage notebooks were full of “notes” that my best friend and I had written back and forth to each other throughout my sophmore year in HS. The smaller notebook was my writing journal from my creative writing class. It’s chock full of a HS girl’s best writing, poems, streams of thought, everything. What a time warp that ended up to be.

As I thumbed through the notebook, I could feel what it was like sitting in that class, one of my favorites, actually. We had a young teacher, who was always dressed in a slightly hippy manner, perfect for creative writing. I could remember what each exercise she had us do was as I turned the pages. There was the day we brought in music and just wrote down everything that came to mind as we listened, our What is project, where we wrote poems based on government, music and other general subjects. My favorite though, was our stream of consciousness. Anything and everything that you though you wrote, mine was 3 pages full. I wish I could go back to that class, I truly miss writing…

Toward the back of the notebook, I also found a poem I had written to Brian, long before he and I ever were a couple. It amazed me that even 11 years ago I must have known we were destined for each other. I’ll post the poem up sometime later, but the feelings it brought back were amazing. I didn’t say anything to him about how it made me feel, though I did have him read it. He didn’t really react, but I don’t know what I was expecting him to say or do anyway. It probably means more to me because I know what I felt when I wrote it and to him, they’re just words.

I’m starting to be inspired to write again, I’m hoping I can take the time to do it. One of the assigments in the book had a note from my teacher that said “Jen, I expect great things from you. You have the desire to write, more than others…and I expect you to try and be published someday”. Throughout life we wait to know that someone thinks we’re good at what we’re doing, I had it handed to me 11 years ago and didn’t do anything with it. I was *going* to go to school for writing, I was just *going* to work for a year first and then go to college…somehow life got in the way of that. I can’t go back and fix it and I may have to do some serious searching to find what was alive in me back then.

I’m in the middle of putting my life in boxes. Part of me wants to hang on to things, part of me wants to purge and then there’s the part that wants someone else to come in and decide what I should keep and what I should let go of. I’m moving on to bigger (yay!) and better things in my life. I get to spend time in my own house, have all the privacy I’ve lived without for 27 years and know that my husband is coming home to me. These are happy things and I can’t wait, but I also can’t explain why part of me is still unsure…Maybe it’s the thought of failure, the idea of NOT making it on my own or maybe it’s just the change itself. I’m a creature of habit, it’s why I stayed in a bad relationship too long, why I didn’t quit my last job 3 years sooner, why I laugh at the same jokes over again, use the same catch phrases, love my family so much and still get warm fuzzies when I kiss my husband. It’s predictable (mostly), comfortable and safe…Those three things aren’t all bad, but when they make you uneasy of what the future holds, it’s a whole different ball game. I’ve got to get myself ready for adventure, the unknown and ready to grab life by whatever it’ll hand me. I’m going to enjoy this, whatever it is, wherever it leads. It’s my story to write and I’m armed with blank pages and an unending supply of ink.