  I haven’t written more than 15 pages in the last 3 weeks since I returned from a trip. I’ve had family visiting, including 2 small boys who love to create, hike, bike, build sand castles and lego spacecraft, play cards, build card cities, and even help wage the battle of the dandelions. You guessed right, I’m having a blast.
I’m also struggling as a lot of writers do with what could perhaps be best classified as performance anxiety. How can I consider myself a writer when I don’t write? This is when I remind myself that lack of pages written has been replaced with a wealth of new experiences, from deciding to build our own fairy homesite in my backyard, to looking up how to make air-dry-clay (click here to find the instructions on Pinterest). What does a fairy homesite need? Why mushrooms, of course, and guard snails and a snake, plus a garden bench, a hot tub, and dishes and plates, pitchers and cups for the fairy to use. Don’t forget, you need a fairy! (I apologize if I just scared you with my alien-looking fairy. In my defense, he is only 2 inches high so he could fit into his house! The eye dots give him a very menacing look, not to mention the green Spock ears.) It all must be painted with acrylic paints, spray painted with clear lacquer to seal it against the rain and installed in the best place possible in the yard. All these decisions are performed as a team, with ideas building on ideas. About the fairy home, a trip to the grocery store for supplies, gave us a foil bread pan and a bag of 100 wooden skewers for grilling. The skewers were cut to size and glued to the pan sides, a door and window cut, and “camouflage” paint added to the roof to make it blend into the site. Did you know fairies especially like beds made out of fresh young aspen leaves? Also, the vole, now named Vicious, who already lived in the yard, has been very entertaining to watch as he visited and inspected his new neighbors. In fact he inspected one of the guard snails so closely that a little glue surgery was required! Have I gone off-topic? No, all this is to demonstrate how the creative juices nurtured during my trip are still flowing steadily, especially in my back yard. Writing more pages had to go on the back burner while we created memories. Now that’s worth more than…everything in the world, combined, doubled. Did I mention the two boats we built from found branches and sticks? One was engineered with twine, the other with a power screwdriver and hand saw by the resident building and maintenance expert. They had to be raced of course. The twine one was lighter and therefore faster. Who’d a thunk? Hope you’ve had a very creative summer as well!
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