Inside Out

   “Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is really rather odd when you realize that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts. We have been taught to be ashamed of not being ‘outgoing’. But a writer’s job is ingoing.”

 ~ Ursula K. Le Guin ~

     I am an introvert. And I am also a writer. It isn’t easy trying to look and act like an extrovert when you aren’t one. The way I make it work is to pretend I am someone else. No kidding. My first job interview after college, in order to calm my nerves and boost my confidence, I pretended I was a princess who had fallen on hard times. I got the job.

     In a recent issue of TIME magazine, Brian Walsh wrote an article about the upside of being an introvert. There are a lot of cool people who are shy. I think Mr. Walsh is pretty cool for turning himself inside out and admitting to the public that he hides in the bathroom when he needs a few minutes to recover from working a social event as a reporter. He says he would rather cover a famine or flood than make small talk with strangers at a cocktail party. I get it.

     Insofar as it challenges me to be friendly and helpful, to get the job or to get the job done, I’m glad to make the effort to be more outgoing even when it makes me feel frizzled afterward. But it has taken me decades to understand: introversion isn’t a flaw, it is part and parcel to the kind of writer I am. I like sitting in a quiet house for hours on end with no other sound but the tick of the clocks and the hum inside my head. I like the solitary work of harvesting words from the fields of imagination to feed my need for expression. I don’t mind turning myself inside out for perfect strangers, as long as they aren’t standing around in a circle looking at me. I like being alone. Some of the time.

     While I am an introvert, I am not antisocial. I could never thrive as a hermit. I like people too much to eschew them altogether, especially children, and adults who have kept a child-like wonder of the world around them, and people who are interested in interesting things. But I like them one or two at a time.

     I could have been a wallflower, standing around the edges of life watching others have all the fun—in many ways it would have been easier—but I have realized the satisfaction and joy of personal experience that observation alone cannot deliver. So I write a novel and try to get it published, help a refugee settle into her new life, get a sales job in a posh store, travel to Brazil to speak to a group of pastor’s wives, and try to make others feel more comfortable at parties than I do. I put on shoes a little too big for me, clomp around in them and hope that nobody notices they don’t quite fit. Someday I may grow into them. Meanwhile, I pretend I am a princess.

Ugly Cake

     My cousin makes ugly cakes. I am not being mean, she told me so herself. She and her youngest daughter have toyed with the idea of opening a tea shop and serving sweeties with their teas, but every time they test a cake recipe it turns out ugly. A cake doesn’t have to look good to taste good–hers are delicious–but if it is true that you eat with your eyes first, there could be a problem.

     She came for a visit last month. She hasn’t been to see me in a long while, so I wanted to make our time together memorable. I baked a buttery cream cake one sunny morning and left it to cool on the counter while we packed up some cucumber and strawberry sandwiches and went for a long walk to the river. When we returned, I sliced the cake into two layers and spread lemon curd between them. Something went wrong. When the cake was assembled it looked wonky. My cousin seemed pleased that I had made an ugly cake just for her. It was so yummy we both ate two pieces.

     I’ve been thinking we should collaborate on a project in which the confectionary challenged submit their unsightly but tasty recipes for publication in the Ugly Cake Cookbook. If we market it well, she could use the capital to open her Ugly Cake Tea Room. Stranger things have happened. I can remember when people used to buy Pet Rocks.

Bunny Business

     My daughter works in a rehabilitation center. As she was going about her duties yesterday morning, she passed a gray-haired woman in a wheelchair propelling herself rapidly through the hallway with an empty Easter basket clutched between her teeth.

     “Out collecting eggs this morning?” she asked the woman as she entered her room a few minutes later.

     “No,” the older woman responded with her usual abrupt manner, “I was delivering them.”

     It turns out the unit secretary keeps a ceramic bunny dish on her desk this time of year. It is usually empty because her candy disappears so quickly she cannot afford to keep it filled. In the early hours of the morning, before the secretary’s shift began, the old woman had filled the dish with jellybeans, Cadbury minis and chocolate bunnies. My daughter passed her in the hallway while she was making her getaway.

    Medical care facilities are often filled with cranks, grumps and melancholics. It is natural and understandable because many of them are suffering. But there are also those special people who, despite their own difficult circumstances, reach out to others.

     And there are some folks who just make you smile.

Bunny dish by a. speer studio 

Eye of the Beholder

     Sometime around the age of forty I began to fade. My strawberry-blonde hair lost its brightness; my peaches-and-cream complexion grew pale. Even my eyes went dim and I had to buy reading glasses. It's the kind of thing that sneaks up on you. I am not afraid of aging, in most ways I even embrace it, but I began to feel dull and unlovely. I must have begun moaning aloud because, one day, I found this card waiting for me in the kitchen:



     My husband is not a traditional romantic, at least not in the candy and flowers sense of the word, so when he gives me a rare, unexpected card it makes an impression. This one is so dear I keep it close to remind myself that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

     There is such desperation in our modern world to cling to the beauty of one's youth. Alas, it has infiltrated my own thinking at times and affected the way I see myself. I do keep myself clean, curled and moderately well decorated, but there is something ineffably sweet in knowing I can show up frowsy-haired in a bathrobe and bunny slippers, and my husband thinks even the skin-deep part of me is still beautiful.

     I like my husband's eyes.

Somebunny

     Winter is long in the upper Midwest. It usually outwears its welcome. By the time spring pokes its shy head above ground we are color-starved. Not this year. An unexpected week of warm breathed over the land and has the bulbs blooming and the treetops bursting with promise. The earth is laughing. A pair of doves built a nest in the evergreen outside my window, and the robins have settled their dispute over who gets the girl. The rabbits are feasting on tender shoots in the garden instead of stripping bark from my shrubbery, and I am feasting on color. Pink. Yellow. Purple. Green. And foil-wrapped eggs.

     Someone has hidden dozens of chocolate eggs all over the house for my husband and me to find. I discovered one beneath my pillow a few nights ago and another in the cupboard among the teacups in the morning. It was the same last year…and the year before. It is still two weeks until Easter so I know the Bunny hasn’t been here, but some bunny has. We don’t go looking for the eggs all at once; it would spoil the fun. Instead, we wait until a chocolate craving grabs us and then snag one from the clock case in the hall or the bookshelf in the study. Oddly enough, the daughter who still lives with us doesn’t eat a single one. She just watches with a gleam in her eyes as her gray-haired parents scour corners for stray eggs like a couple of delighted children.

Snow Angels

     It snowed last night. Only three inches but it is wet, heavy, heart-attack snow. My husband is on the other side of the globe sweating it out on the side of a volcano and forgot to leave directions for starting the new snowblower, so I pulled on boots and gloves and went out to clear the driveway with a shovel. I took a couple of swipes from top to bottom before my shoulder began to ache. It's a casualty from the days when I used to garden carelessly, thinking I could tackle just about anything with persistence. Just then, a gentleman came strolling down the street with a shovel over his shoulder and offered to clear the bottom of the driveway for me. It's the worst spot to shovel because of the overgenerous contributions from the snowplows. I accepted his offer eagerly and asked if I could pay him, thinking he might be a dad without work who was just trying to make a few extra dollars to feed his struggling family, but he refused. He was just being kind.

    
     When I was done clearing the front walk, I grabbed my camera and walked down the street to snap a few pictures. Wet snow clings to the shrubbery and trees like layers of thick white frosting. Eye candy. Then I thought it would be nice to take a picture of a snow angel. I threw myself backward into a smooth, blank patch of snow in the front yard and waved my arms and legs like I was doing jumping-jacks. I am not as limber as I once was, so I had some trouble getting back up without messing up my angel. A truck drove by, stopped and backed up. The gentleman inside rolled down his window and asked:

    
     "Are you alright?"

  
      "I'm fine," I replied, smiling, brushing snow from the seat of my pants. "I was just making a snow angel."

    
     The man laughed.

    
     "I'm probably too old to be doing that," I said sheepishly. Especially if it alarms the neighbors, I added to myself.

    
     "No, no," the man said charitably, "my wife does that too."

    
     I already like his wife, even though we've never met, and would like to invite her over for a cup of tea. "Well, thank you for stopping to ask, that was kind of you."

    
     Angels. Both of those gentlemen. Not the kind sent from heaven with messages from the Almighty, but heaven-sent nevertheless, for their acts of kindness have blessed me with unexpected joy today and reminded me that I abide in the palm of His hand.

Dust Of Snow

Dust of Snow

The way a crow

Shook down on me

The dust of snow

From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart 

A change of mood,

And saved some part

Of a day I rued.
           ~ Robert Frost ~

     Do you know how it is that on some days, whether the sky outside is sunny or sullen, it is gray inside your heart? But then something happens; something as small as finding a child's smudged handprint on the windowpane, or walking through a gust of golden leaves, or stepping out your front door into a sudden sunset...and then the gray goes away.

     That is why I like this poem.

     The bird you see is a raven rather than a crow, but he insisted on posing for this post. He likes poetry. I bought him from Amber Alexander and call him Quoth because he appears to be a very literary bird from the days of yore. He perches in my stairwell rather than above my chamber door and he never speaks–at least he hasn't yet...