Free-Write Friday & the Sunflower Kiss Sample

Last week, at a free-writing session at the library, we worked from images rather than words. We used visual prompts, picking one from a pile on the table that we were either drawn to or repulsed by, something provoking strong emotion of some sort.

We wrote for 12 minutes using the same rules as always: write, without self-censorship or editing, no worries about ego or what others think and without stopping to think. We wrote for the joy and the process and processing it allows.

Here is mine.

The sunflower plants a kiss on this girl as much as she sticks her face in it.

I thought, this morning, of the tiny moments that go unspoken, the kindnesses…the events not blog worthy or thank-you cardable that grease the day.

Nana Connie, a neighbor, knowing I’m having a party who says, “Cis, I’m going to the store. Do you need anything?” and how, after 15 years in this neighborhood I could say, “Why yes. Sugar. And Keurig coffee for company.”I like instant and iced. I am not in the majority. Company gets Keurig.

Or how a friend called to leave a message, “Deadlines… ugh. If you need a break, or if you don’t, I’m here.”

Just sweet. Kind. Easy. Nice. Wind in the sail that is a moment of rainbow, of sweet, warm like butter cinnamon toasted bites.

The laugh of my nieces.

The friend noticing Katie is so sweet, intermingling of history when I’ve reached an age where my friends have seen a decade of my daughter’s birthdays, where I know the cause of death of my friend’s husband’s cousin, when I have a copy of four eulogies from a neighbor who is asked often to speak. She lends me tools and gas and love and I type and print and learn of lives on pages, these people I meet in words but not in breath, who I will never see or meet.

The ways we take care of each other.

“Here,” my friend Heidi says, as we go into Taco Bell..

My daughter’s hair, pre-recital, down to her waist and I can’t get it into a bun so she gives me the long-haired girls guide to bobby pins. She tells my daughter it’s gonna hurt, “If it doesn’t hurt,” she says, looking at me, “It isn’t going to stay.”

“You might even bleed, in your scalp” and my daughter’s eyes get wide. “Just kidding. But you might really hate me a little.”

The next day, I’ve got it down in ten minutes.

Simple. Nothing. Everythings. The time someone takes…

We look around, doing hair in Taco Bell, guilty, shady, wrong, like we’re snorting in the bathroom, shooting up in the alley. Nope. Just doing hair in a restaurant where people will eat. We are those mothers without moms on speed dial, moms we don’t talk to if we don’t want to be sidelined.

“Is it bad,” she says, sending me a new clip of a 60-something woman who dies of an overdose, “if I wonder if this is my mother?”

“No, I say, “Just blog or write. It’s just your life.”

We, without moms and extended family close by are each other’s bobby pins, sugar buyers, late phone callers and everything-ers.

The flower, in this photo, in my yard, is blooming. A gift.

End.

I had to stop writing. The photo of the flowers, below, from Margaret, writer, friend and neighbor, didn’t get written about. I don’t even know what kind they are but when I saw that they bloomed, days after the death of my neighbor, in the border where dry sand and stone were at the base, where I planted and hoped but expected nothing last year….  It is the neighbor’s water, not mine, that poured on them. My neighbor Charlie, who, from his basement, would empty a basin daily and instead of wasting it would pour the water on my flowers. Daily. He is gone, cancer took him quick, in three months. Last summer he was a grieving man who had lost his wife, now he is with her, but people and flowers remain.

I know what I’m referring to but in free-write scrawl I hadn’t fleshed it out, didn’t even get to the point, entirely or completely, but that’s o.k.

The beauty of free-write is that it requires nothing, besides the time with the words. Maybe more will come, perhaps I will return to the piece, write about friends as bobby pins, the neighbor I keep expecting to see when I pull in or out of my driveway, his family, grieving going in and out of his home and they seem like strangers, to me. They do not know his water nourished these flowers, from down the street, growing between us when we stand and chat.

The small kindness of my neighbor Charlie might have made those flowers live.

So on this Free-Write Friday, find an image, the first one close to you. Maybe it’s a photo on your desk, a magazine by your hand, an image on the computer screen or the flower sin your yard. Stare at it for a moment, and let it, instead of words let an image be your prompt.

Write for ten minutes. That’s all. Go.