Musings, ROW80

RoW80 June arrives

Elizabeth Anne Mitchell
My father holding me, with my sister beside him

 

Yesterday was my father’s birthday, so the above picture of him holding an unhappy me early in my life is in his honor. The house in the background is one where I lived for only the first eight weeks of my life, so I know I am younger than that age.  My sister, who is peeking into the frame, is four years older than I, and a daddy’s girl, so it is not surprising to see her in the picture. She was never far from him. This year is the first that my sister will celebrate her birthday later this week without him, without the joint celebration my father and she enjoyed with birthdays only four days apart.

Since I have finished with the course I had to take for work, I may be able to fit some writing on the memoir into the month of June.  My World War II novella has a better framework, as do the scholarly articles calling out for attention, but the memoir may offer some salve to the losses of the past few years.

Yesterday was filled with words and stories, not all written down or tied to a certain piece, but I’m comfortable with that. I managed to make my word count for JuNoWriMo, but not easily or early. Sometimes the words need to fling themselves into the void, and perish in the effort, but they create paths for the next venture.  Words, even those tossed aside, are not wasted.

I also spent most of yesterday cleaning so that the property manager can take pictures of the house. I tend to scrub harder when I am perturbed, so everything is quite clean. 🙂

I’m off to write more words.  Have a lovely day, and please go encourage the other RoWers here.


smaller EM

 

 

 

 

Published by Elizabeth Anne Mitchell

I am the youngest of four children, raised in the old-fashioned Irish-American way. I suspect my mother encouraged me to write from an early age to keep me out of her hair, although she may have regretted the decision when my teachers began to call about the controversial stories I was writing. Thus I began my career of butting heads with the good sisters at my Catholic elementary school, and ended it by leaving high school for college with no diploma. I wear my high-school dropout badge rebelliously and proudly. In college, I became fascinated with the Middle Ages, which was described as a “starry night” by one of my professors. So began a trek through languages and legends that informs my narrative non-fiction and historical fiction, as well as my blogs. I love feedback and enjoy discussing ideas. I have an accountability blog for the Round of Words in Eighty Days entitled Leavekeeping; I write a blog on literary history, intellectual history, and the history of words entitled Lapidary Prose. I'm on Twitter and Facebook; my email is lapidaryprose@gmail.com.

3 thoughts on “RoW80 June arrives”

  3. A sweet picture, one of those things that reminds us of the world that we came from… It’s interesting how much we show even before we begin to walk.

    And I love these lines:

    Sometimes the words need to fling themselves into the void, and perish in the effort, but they create paths for the next venture. Words, even those tossed aside, are not wasted.

    So true

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