That Will Happen Only When the Fairies Sing

My little believer and my (slightly older) skeptic:

We were walking home from "Family Sports Night" at the kids' school-- which was, by the way, about 100x more fun than I expected it to be--and we passed a patch of Lilies-0f-the-Valley. I stopped and showed the kids the little tiny bell-shaped flowers and sang them the song my mom first taught me, in her lovely clear voice, when they popped up next to our garage one spring--

White coral bells, upon a slender stalk

Lilies-of-the-valley deck my garden walk.

Oh, don't you wish, that you could hear them ring...

That will happen only when the fairies sing.

Me: "So do you understand the story the song tells?"

7-year-old: "Yes, the bells can't ring until the fairies sing."

5-year-old: "Well, how come I can't hear them singing?"

Me, trying to keep it going: "Probably because it's raining. Fairies don't sing when it's raining."

7-year-old, muttering slightly irritably out of the side of her mouth: "Mama, there ARE no such thing as fairies."

5-year-old, on the other hand, doesn't hear 7-year-old...

and starts a long, earnest monologue about how tomorrow if it's not raining she's going to come and listen and hear the fairies singing, and if it is raining, we'll have to come another day and listen, and then she'll hear the fairies singing...

I kinda hope she doesn't grow out of this one quite yet.

Maybe I will be able to write, after all...

What would happen if I just wrote, just put one word after another? Here's what Louise Erdrich said in an interview with Bill Moyers, it spoke to me immediately...

Louise Erdrich, on writing: How do I do—I don't know. I've—my sisters have seen me. My husband has seen me. My kids have seen me every day, and they don't know how it happens, but I suspect it has to do with a small, incremental persistent insect-like devotion to putting one word next to the next word. It's a very dogged process.

I make myself go upstairs, where I write, whenever I can, no matter how—one thing about this is I never have writer's block, because I—if I went up there and I had writer's block, I think I'd lose my mind. You know, I have to get up to my papers and my books and my notebooks. I jot things down all the time. I just keep going.

What if I just put one word after another? Wrote for 5 minutes and then came back to it as necessary? Thought in terms of incremental progress-- not even "progress," really, but incremental writing simply for the sake of writing?

Then writing would not be a monumental task, but instead, something I just love to do and get to do in dribs and drabs here and there 'cause I want to, not toward a goal at all but about the journey....and if and when I arrived somewhere, that would be the exciting side benefit, not the reason for any of it...