Three Cheers for Mental Exhaustion!
Residency Diary Days Three and Four
This morning, in town to get a proper breakfast instead of a banana, the streets were lined with people holding signs with names, shaking pom poms, ringing cowbells, all wearing green. Someone was playing "Celebration” on a speaker. Since it’s Friday, and I didn’t see any signs of a race finish, I asked someone what was happening. Evidently the high school band had made it to state (competition, I assume), and they were all waiting for the coach bus to drive down Main Street to send the kids off.
Last night, we joined our hosts to visit the woman who lives next door for an hour before dinner. She’s 97 years old, and she sits on her porch every night serving wine to neighbors (and residents). The world comes to her, and she was a delight. These little moments reminded me why I write—to find what’s good in the world, to process what is troublesome or confusing. To notice.
It was a well-timed reminder as, after the first two days of almost 10 hours of writing per day, my brain was about as useful as a bucket with a hole. I needed a reset, and my back was trashed and needed to stand for a few hours. I write at home, but in shorter bursts, and I had forgotten how intensely exhausting it can be (mentally and physically) to sit and hear only the sound of the words in your head for so long, to stare at a page or a screen and try to make something happen there. So, yesterday morning, I gave myself permission to explore the downtown area of Summerville - had an iced tea, browsed the bookstore, stopped in the quilt shop and bought some sale fat-quarters to use in new art pieces at home, visited the local arts center/gallery, and treated myself to a hearty, healthy lunch instead of eating tuna with cucumber slices and Triscuits back at the cottage.
But I was able to get back on track and work all afternoon and into the evening, refreshed that my brain had found something else to attach itself to for a short while. I made friends with this enormous grasshopper and some small lizards out on the porch where I was drafting. And last night, I even indulged in a little TV while I worked on a small watercolor, the first TV I’ve watched in days. Reset. Recharge. And today, although I did some drafting, I also took a Zine Lunch class with
and sent out seven new submissions to change up the focus, leaving me ready to fill the last two days with assessing and gathering and revising to see what this week has wrought, to keep using this gift of time with a renewed sense of purpose and hope.I hope the band wins their competition at state. I hope that Janie the neighbor has many more good years on her porch. I hope my grasshopper friend did not get scooped up by a bird. I hope that we find tacos for dinner on our walk to town this evening. And I hope that what I am making will come to some sort of creative fruition, will in hindsight be worth the time and effort.