Two weeks and more than 30,000 words—100-plus pages—have poured from my mind into my computer. I still don’t know what it will all amount too, but it’s coming out. Doing deep dives into memory, talking to friends who were there to verify times, places and happening, and then spilling all the emotion onto the page. It’s catharsis.

I hold hope for the seeds planted these winter days.

It’s 6 am the second day of the year and I am up alone, in my office. The sky is grey and dim out the window, the barest hint of the day on the horizon, silhouetting the bones of the dormant deciduous trees in the yard. If it were a Bob Ross painting, it would be a cool little winter scene using pthalo blue, liquid white, and van dyke brown. But there would a little golden light on in the tiny cabin.

My heater is at my feet, warming my space while the rest of the house still sleeps. I can feel the deep, rhythmic rumbling from Tiberius, snoring on the floor in the boys’ room.

My mind is overflowing. I’ve been writing. Seriously writing, more than I have in years, and while I am just beginning, it’s as though the tiny chink I chipped from the dam unleashed a flood. I go to sleep with words swirling around in my head, and I wake up with paragraphs and memories and sentences that require me to rise, and get them out.

There’s no telling  what’s good seed and what’s chaff, I suppose that’s to be sorted out later, but I’m more than a little surprised at the deluge of words cascading over me. I wasn’t prepared.