Moods & Clarity of Mind

Well, I haven't posted for a while, all wrapped up in the writing of my next book, along with helping my daughter and her family move. Apparently I am a whiz at organizing kitchens. At least that's the ruse she used to get me to unpack and organize the kitchen, pantry and closets. I raised such a smart child.

She must have been watching closely when I would purposely wash the car wrong, so my husband Chris would step in and 'do it right.' He used to get up and rinse his dinner dishes and put them in the dishwasher in exactly the right place, so I would walk up and stick an unrinsed dish (this drove him nuts) into the wrong spot, and voila! he'd say, "I'll do the dishes."

Doing that was kind of a weaselly trick, but heck, I did the dishes for a gazillion years, that he did them the last five or ten years was fair. And there was that time back in 1971, when he wrote 'dust me' on the dining room light fixture. Foolish young man....

I got off track. I wanted to talk about moods. Because I read my last post here and wanted to take it back. I had purposely made the conscious choice to write here about little segments of my life, things I find interesting, funny, reminiscent or that relate to an everyday moment.

But horoscope? What was I thinking? Just an off mood, I guess, which got me thinking (that 's already a problem, since I discovered recently that I think best in bed on my back--a opening for a million bad jokes.)

My publisher asked me to do the amazon blog, and through it I found I actually like writing these little pieces of a life, even about my moods. I don't ask questions of you, the Great Unknown, like I'm supposed to according to blog rules. That seems too intrusive to me. Our time is golden. But anyone can post. At some point I'll even answer.

Here's my latest Jillism: As a woman of a certain age, I have learned to forgive my moods. I believe I've earned every last one of them.

When I left California and moved north, here to a place that felt like home the first time I ever stood on a Washington State ferry, I was slowly embraced by the Pacific Northwest writing community. A journalist called one day for an article and he asked me if I knew why there were so many writers in the Pacific Northwest.

I told him I thought the weather was moody here, and conducive to writing, especially about emotion because here we live in a land of darks and lights, of days so rainy and gray you have to build a fire because it manufactures light and warmth. But when the sun shines here--more often than we let on--it is brighter than anywhere else. We might not have seen the sun for a few days, a view that can be like watching black and white TV, so the skies look bluer, the clouds whiter, the water glassier and everything is green. When the sun shines here, it is the most clear and beautiful place I have ever lived.

I do believe this is a good place to write, to dig down into those elusive places we must to create stories and characters who often do things we never have, who must face things we have never faced. Here, I can physically feel my imagination.

This is on my mind lately because I have been writing so much, which is pretty much a constant and difficult search of what ifs. I think this book is coming in a way a book has never come to me. Not easily, but steadily and with a clarity I usually must search deeply to grasp.

It is not my story. She is not me. But she is us, I think. I am writing about a woman with four kids, a long-ago dream of mine, but I only had one child, apparently, a very smart one. At a certain point in the book my character's kids are grown, some married, some not. I love the meat of this story, the life moments, the expanse and depth and scope of the family it portrays, not through generations, really, but for a few years in their lives, those moments when everything changes inside of a second.

I've learned in my own life to embrace change, even when it hurts at first, even when you think it's going to break you. I've manage to rid myself of too many moods.

Sometimes we women are cursed into moods by our chemical make-up. Why do they define male menopause in terms of Ferraris and twenty-two year olds and then define female menopause as crabby and irrational women? Why can't my menopause be in a low convertible with a thirty eight year old? Maybe on a road in Sienna, Italy? And I can look like Diane Lane. Maybe that is irrational.

At least my imagination is working well today, a good thing for a writer like me, and probably because it is sunny and gorgeous and clear here on my island. To every woman out there, today, I wish for you a day as clear as mine, the ability to own your moods, and a lively imagination.

Jill Barnett