THE RUT

Before and after

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I am in it. Deep. This rut has been left behind by a mighty tractor tire and I am in the deep part, arranging my body snuggly around the imprint of tire tread. I am laying there right now thinking about how I should get up and make better use of my time. Except I have done such a good job of fitting my body into that imprint that I am really stuck. I haven’t taken a picture in days. I stare at the writing project I started earlier this year. The most creative thing I did last week was to rearrange my closet. Saturday, I never changed out of my pajamas. I let the chickens out of their coop. I folded the last load of laundry. I made ricotta stuffed portabella mushrooms with homemade mashed potatoes for dinner. The rest of my time was spent laying on the couch, watching TV. More and more of my Saturdays are being spent with hours of couch time in pj’s and sometimes not even brushing my teeth.

There is a large stack of framed prints piled in the corner of our living room. They are right in my sight line from my spot on the couch. Every time I look at them, my heart deflates, as I think about the art showing that isn’t happening right now. I recently purchased a new tri-pod to hold my phone. It also came with a bluetooth remote. I bought it because I thought I might start a yoga video series. That tri-pod is out of sight, tucked away in my desk drawer of camera related stuff. I won a card case in a give-away from Epiphanie. It is made of a beautiful brown, soft leather. It is lovely and it is sitting right where I left it when Michael brought it to me from the mailbox. It is sitting inside my nightstand cube just waiting to be filled up with my business cards. I look at it and think what’s the point of filling it up now. “What’s the point?” keeps me from brushing my teeth and changing out of my pajamas.

Our neighbors to the west of us had a privacy fence installed last week. We love it and Michael talked to the guy who did the job about the possibility of attaching our own privacy fence to this one and finishing out our yard. It is something that might happen next Spring. There’s a very large tree that must come down first. In the meantime, I stare longingly at the neighbor’s fence. There is one particular spot in the fence that my eyes gravitate to every time I am in the backyard. There are two boards in the fence that are side by side and together form an image. I don’t see the Virgin Mary or anything like that. What I see is a simple lotus flower. I stare at this image and imagine taking colored chalk and filling in the image. I see my hand tracing out the petals with white chalk and then adding vivid green leaves at the base. I imagine it so clearly that I almost obsess over it. I look down at my hands they are dusted with colored chalk. There is something appealing in adding some grafitti to the neighbor’s fence knowing that they’ll never see it. So it doesn’t matter. I’m not doing anything really wrong like coloring on the horrible wallpaper in the stairwell of my childhood home.

I stare at that spot in the fence and only think about filling in the picture. Filling in the picture requires some movement on my part. It requires an effort I’m not sure I posses. It requires an artistic skill that I am not sure I posses. What if the picture I fill in looks more like a cake wreck than the image I have been imagining? Then we’re stuck with some blurry horrid chalk art until the next good rain. Then again, does it really matter if the finished product looks like what I have been imagining? Maybe I just need the action of experimenting with chalk. Maybe I just need to do the thing and stop thinking about doing the thing.