“Forgive me,” Scott Hoezee writes in a prayer, “for sometimes thinking that inspiration comes from only the great stories.”
Forgive me, for ignoring the swell of gratitude I feel standing in front of the strawberries at the grocery store—because they are on sale, and red and plump, and their seeds pop like accessories; their green leaves the perfect up-do for stepping out—because this is a last-minute errand on the way home from work and there is no time to linger. Forgive me for believing that noticing the strawberries couldn’t make a great story.
“Make me attentive….help me listen to the ordinary things people tell me,” Hoezee continues.
The tri-colored pasta Jesse mixed with sauteed peppers and broccoli and the first grape tomatoes from our garden. “It was all leftover and you can have it,” he said on the way outside to go golfing, and Hadley and Harper were out too, and I was left alone to eat a rainbow and I devoured it—both the pasta and the silence in my home, but it wasn’t enough so I ripped open a box of chocolate ice-cream bars, grabbed one, sliced its wrapper off and sat outside looking at the oak tree in my front yard while I ate it.
“If I need fresh language and new metaphors, let them emerge from the ordinary….”
But I want to write about dragons, I think as I watch a moth flit and flutter around the lamp next to the mailbox. That light isn’t even on—how does the moth know this is where she’ll end up in a few hours when the cicadas sing and the leaves are still? Or is it that she flies towards a memory—of touching what she thought was fire—towards what she thinks could be?
I want the language of dragons. I want their scaly, green, winged metaphors to emerge but I am looking at a moth pounce around my lamp. She isn’t even green. Just black and white.
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