It’s been such a long while since I’ve flexed these fingers over the keyboard.  The movements have become awkward and unfamiliar.  It’s like losing touch with one’s close friends.  After awhile you find you have nothing to say to each other.   You look at each other and wonder how it happened – this strange awkwardness.  And so, I am sitting down with my old friend.

Can we get re-acquainted?  Can I get the Midas touch and let the letters and words flow from my fingertips again?  I hope so.  It’s been lonely without words and pictures and stories they tell.  There’s no reverberation.  I only hear the sound of one hand clapping.  It echoes in the canyon of my mind.  You can hear a pin drop in its grey emptiness.

I rouse myself from the lassitude that I have fallen in.  How I got here, I do not know.  But it has lasted long enough.  Time to get up, get dress and show up.  Time for the words to march across the page to tell the stories.  Time to show a little colour and life.  There’s a person living on Preston Avenue.  See how her vegetables and flowers overflow their beds and pots?  See the brilliance of the greens, pinks, blues and purples?  Then there is the orange of the lilies, blooming in defiance of the drought.  We are having a very dry summer.  Forest fires are raging up north and the military have stepped in to help.

The morning is beautiful.  The smoke has cleared and the sun is coming through.  Won’t you step around to the back and see what I have growing there?  There’s peas in the pod, grapes on the vine, the scarlet runners climbing the tower, green tomatoes and little cucumbers.  The broccoli is flowering and cabbages forming under cover.  The petunias are nodding their approval from above.

Oh, there’s the Bing Cherry bush, too.  It’s covered with fruit.  Sheba has discovered she likes sleeping outdoors and made her bed beneath it.  I wonder what else she has discovered as she sleeps with nature in the night.  Maybe if I can quiet my mind and open my heart, they will come to me.