The problem with words.

I've made a small discovery tonight. I think the problem I've been having is simply a problem of words. I haven't written in so long that I've lost some of my facility with them. That's been a bit of a rude awakening. For most of my life, or at least all of it I can remember, I have been able to express myself with words. It has always been my “thing.” Some people can dance, some can sing, some fell from the womb with the ability to draw or paint anything in such a way that you can't tell it apart from the real thing. My ability has always been with words. I could always write, beginning in the first grade when I made up a story and wrote it down. I handed it to my first grade teacher, Mrs. Godfry, and she gave me a weird look. I had done it in cursive, since they were on the green cards lining the top of the blackboard in the room. I simply looked at the green cards and copied what I saw. Anyway, nothing came of that. I don't know if she showed it to my mother or not. Anyway, I always wrote. And I always read. My mother insisted on that. For all of us four kids, we had to read. If it was raining outside, we read. She didn't care what we read, just that we read. She never discouraged us from reading anything, and for the longest time I would read anything I could get my hands on. I remember reading the backs of cereal boxes while sitting at the table.

I went through a bad poetry phase. I would write tons of little poems, all rhymed, nearly all in quatrains. I have no idea where they are now, but hopefully they will never be found. It was easy too. At the time, it was almost like I was thinking in rhyme.

Well, no longer. Now it's an effort. That is leaving me a bit disgruntled. It's not so much that the world needs any more badly written quatrains that rhyme, it's that I can't just roll them off like I used to. I think it's like a muscle. Either use it or lose it. In my case, I think I've let it atrophy. It's possible that I can get it back. I will see. I don't plan on writing a boatload of quatrains just to prove to myself that I can, but I do want to work in more rhyme. Since it appears that only one or two people are reading this, I hope you will indulge me. Thanks again.