writing, now, will wait for me

It will be a long time now—months—before I am able to return to my own work, my Florence novel.  This is the height of my busy season—the teaching at Penn, the annual reports and magazines for clients, the taxes that I must sort through and pay.

I have learned to live with stepping away from the writing for awhile.  I have come to believe that it makes the work better.  At the very least, not being able to write for such a long stretch renders me incredibly grateful when the writing window opens.  Perhaps because I must fight so hard for personal time, writing never feels like work to me.  It always feels like privilege.

Every day now, on the way to my client work, I will walk past this windowsill.  To the left, the leather book I made in a workshop in Florence; the leather master is a character in my book.  Just past the Santa Fe skull, the gift my son gave me for Christmas—his favorite view of Philadelphia, our shared city, set down by a local artist.  Beside that, a glorious etching bought for me by my friend Alyson Hagy. Complexity, she says, she favors, she sees.  Which is never the same as complication. 

I will not be writing, not for a while now.  But I will remember, thanks to these artifacts, this art, these people in my life, that writing is still possible.  That it waits for me.