Snowflake by Snowflake*

I have read several times now that writers will do just about anything to get out of writing.  Maybe they’re overwhelmed by the beginning stages of a project, or what they wrote the night before was trash and they don’t want to sit down and get at it again.  Maybe they realized that they have a terrible habit of not staying consistent with verb tenses and re-reading a piece of work is similar to a bad case of whiplash.  Perhaps some writers don’t believe they are any good in the first place and that voice is just too loud to get any work done.

Personally, I have no idea what those writers are talking about.

Here’s a picture of the first cheesecake I made.  I baked it on Monday.  It is chocolate with an Oreo cookie crust. I don’t even like cheesecake.  Or chocolate.  Oreos, though?  I love ’em.  So when I saw that the recipe called for Oreos, it just seemed like the right thing to bake at the moment.

I am working on a project that is due February 1.  I started working on it one morning last January before I even knew what it was I was working on.  I think it’s done.  On second thought, maybe it’s not.   Quite honestly, I’m afraid to look at it because if I read it and decide it’s no good what will I do then?  There’s no time to start over.  I want so badly for what I wrote to be good.

On Monday it started to snow.  It wasn’t supposed to, so Hadley and I were running around the condo looking from window to window while the flakes fell and Harper took her nap.  We couldn’t wait to get out in it.  The problem was, though, that the snow wasn’t collecting.  The minute it fell to the ground it melted.  When Hadley figured this out, she was not interested in going outside anymore.  What’s the point if you can’t make a snowman or a snowball?

But at 5 o’clock, just as the flakes were turning a bluish white from the dusk sky, Hadley had an idea.  She suggested we go outside with Tupperware and try to catch the snowflakes as they fell.

“Is that a good idea, Mama?”

I was starting to get dinner ready and wondered how Hadley would feel when her attempt to catch snowflakes would fail.  But she really wanted to try this so I said, “OK, let’s go outside and catch snowflakes.”

This vest Harper is wearing?  We’ve been trying to get her to wear it for the better part of 13 months.  She would have nothing to do with it until last Sunday when Jesse told her it’s a Diego vest.  Now she won’t take it off.  Note that it’s on OVER her other jacket.

Hadley found out quickly that snow was difficult to catch in a jar.  However, always the experimenter, she used the lid to scrape flakes that collected on the wood wall outside our building.  Harper followed suit.

I asked Hadley what she was going to do with the snow when she collected it.  She said she was going to put it in the freezer, never breaking her rhythm of scraping and plunking the snow into the container.  I asked her why she was going to put it in the freezer.  She told me that the freezer would keep her snow cold until she needed it.

“What do you need it for?”

“I don’t know,” scrape, plunk, scrape, plunk.

“How much snow are you going to collect?”

“Enough to fill this Tupperware,” scrape, plunk, scrape, plunk.

“How long will that take?”

“‘Til I’m done,” scrape, plunk, scrape, plunk.

The snow is in our freezer.  The girls put blue and yellow food coloring on it for good measure.

I don’t know when Hadley will bring up the snow in the freezer.  I suspect she will remember it when it starts to fall outside again.  I wonder if she’ll ask to add to her collection, or perhaps she’ll bring what she has outside and see how it mixes with the fresh batch that’s fallen.  Maybe she’ll wait until a summer afternoon to take a look at it.  I know she would get a kick out of having snow in August.

Whatever happens, I’ll keep the snow for her.  And I’ll remember the image of her – patiently determined – as she scraped it into a pile to save for herself, not knowing what the outcome would be, not worrying about failure, just lost in the collecting of snow.

Flake by flake.

 

*The title was inspired by Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird, especially the anecdote from which the book gets its name.  The entire post was inspired by the book Rumors of Water by L.L. Barket, probably the best book I read in 2011.