Lesson from yesterday on making home made cole slaw: Don't and/or buy a food processor.
My husband now realizes it can be made at home, instead of never thinking beyond the carton in the deli section and also realizes that it's much tastier when it's fresh. There's a lot of chopping, grating and mincing in my future now.
I'm finally getting back to my pre-move workout routine, but very slowly. My slipped disk has retightened the muscles in my lower back and thighs. The pain has gone away, but my toes have slipped farther and farther from my reach.
The length of the bedroom is perfect for walking lunges, but from now on I'll wait until my husband heads off to work before doing them. Otherwise, he assumes the sergeant and critiques. He can't help it, I know this. It's kind of cute, actually. I inspired him to do one arm push ups off the foot of our sleigh bed just to show off.
We've reached that point in unpacking where all the vital things have been discovered and placed but all the other stuff just sits around, waiting for initiative. There are stacks of opened boxes upstairs in the hall way that need to be sorted, but don't really have any place to go, the dining room table leaf sits against the wall, that sort of thing.
I finally discovered the Christmas decorations; they were mixed in with documents and pictures left from my time in Japan. It was an emotionally strange juxtaposition and I was suddenly caught up reading a short story I'd been working on during one of my visits there.
The story is about the marriage between an American woman and a Japanese man who have recently moved their four children from an ancestral rice farm in northern Japan to a larger farm in upstate New York. The dialogue is at times a little off, it needs editing and redirection, but really, it was an appealing story. The characters were true and well drawn.
Or maybe just to me, as I am the author of it. What was fascinating to me when reading it over again was noticing how even then, my longing for farm life imposed itself over my temperary fixation on Japan. Also, it caused me to notice that I haven't written anything fictional in a long time.
I think it must be easier to write fiction when one's real life is mostly made up of empty spaces and conjecture, as it was during that time. I'm fully engaged in my life now; I'm living the life that years ago I could only write about, I'm just living it in a different setting.
Still, I feel like writing short stories again now; I had forgotten about the compelling combination of hard work and ebullience that is imaginative writing. And what happened to my writing poems? I realize that normally only intensely aweful emotions evoked them, but still. It's been almost a year and I haven't written a single one.
