#sosmagic20 Heartstretched

It started with a picture.
One picture on Facebook.
Four smiling faces. Four friends looking forward to a night of fun and laughter. Four friends. Soon, much too soon, to become three.
One picture and it was seven years ago, the Monday after prom.

In high schools, the Monday after prom is lazy, full of chatter about weekend events, and whispers in the corners about things teachers shouldn't hear. Phones get passed around with pictures to share and underclassmen listen wistfully about the magic of the night.

But they don't prepare you for Monday after proms like that one,

"for the silence

for the echo in the hallway

even though students walk through them"

I wrote those words seven years ago, and as I write them again today, my heart remembers breaking for a young man who thought there was no other way. The eerie quiet came back, the silent tears remembered. I thought I was prepared for the day, but I wasn't.

This week, as I've checked out Facebook memories, those from seven years ago stand out. His friends are still grieving and I offer virtual hugs, though I know it's not the same as wrapping them in my arms and listening through the tears like I tried to do that day.

#sosmagic20 Small {Spring} Matters

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Spring comes slowly around here.
Winter does not quite want to give up her grip.
A 70-degree day arrives and you think,
"Spring is here!"

You start to believe you can
Drag the deck chairs from the garage and
The flip-flops from the closet.

You watch the buds on the trees
Grow bigger each day,
Almost while you watch.

You walk your way around the yard,
Checking, checking,
For tiny green sprouts to poke through the ground.

The Tiger Lilies fight their way through their leaf blankets.
and the Lily of the Valley finds holes in the rock garden
to spread their little white bells through the gnome village.

Sedums hope you will soon
Cut away the old stems
So they can push to the sky

You itch to grab a rake and
Clear the flower beds of their leaf blankets.
You want to give them
A little more warmth,
A little more room to spread their roots and grow.
So the warmth of the sun
Can work it's MAGIC.

But you don't. Not yet.

Because a day and half later
It snows.

If This Isn't Nice... Magic.

I almost gave up on MAGIC this year. My One Little Word for 2020 just didn't seem appropriate with the way the world is right now. I mean, how can you look for the MAGIC around you when you can't leave your house!

Almost. Not quite.


An unexpected invitation to chat with writing friends led to
                         an unexpected writing group,
                                                 which led to an unexpected joy of finding more old writing friends
                                                                           and blogging with them again.

And that got me thinking about all the other MAGIC in my life because of writing. 

• TeachWrite I joined them a while back and loved the people, but really thought about leaving the group until...
• #100daysofnotebooking Joining this group kickstarted my writing again. We're now on day 102! And this lead me to...
• The TeachWrite pop-ups on Zoom.
• This helped me keep connected to people (because this quarantining stuff is hard!)

Writing has been a lifeline this last month!

Video Chats have also been MAGIC. I don't know who figured out the Jetson's way of communicating, but it has also been a blessing. I'm able to keep in contact with family and feel like we're (almost) together. 

Really, Who doesn't love a happy hour video chat?

We "see" the boys and their families at least once a week. The grandkids have Snapchat and House Party and Kids Messenger, so we hear from them even without their parents.

And there is nothing better than the sweet goodnights I'm getting from one of the youngest.

We are probably keeping in closer contact with others now than we were before! But it's one habit that won't go away when the quarantine is over!

A Red Letter Day

A RED letter day!

Never did I think I would write for ONE HUNDRED days.
Really.
I prepared myself for failure.

I believed I would write consistently for a week or two and then it would dwindle off to once or twice a week until I quit.

Especially after I saw all those pretty pages or those pages of writers who tried something new. It could be pretty intimidating.

But I kept telling myself, "This is my notebook and I can do what I want!"

So I did.

When I hit 31 days and the end of January, I celebrated. And urged myself to write through February too.

And I did.

I celebrated Day 40.
I celebrated the finishing of one notebook and the beginning of another.
I wrote through vacation and a weekend visit with family.

But could I keep it up?

And, somewhere around the end of February, a little voice in my head asked, "What about March?"

I've always loved blogging and I did miss it. But could I do both?

I signed up for the slice of life challenge in a moment of weakness. Before I knew it, I was notebooking and blogging every day. I'm not saying it wasn't hard--it was--but writing has become such a habit, that I couldn't skip a day.

So here I am. One hundred days in a row of writing. My life is chronicled in the pages of these notebooks (and in 31 days of blog posts). My current notebook is almost full and a new one arrives tomorrow that will replace it.

I'll continue recording my days, and fill the notebook with words that are speaking to me and the news of the day. There will be poems and drafts and some things that will never see the light of day. But they will be mine.

I hope that someday

when I am gone,

someone

somewhere,

picks my soul up

off of these pages

and thinks, 

"I would have loved her."

                                            Nicole Lyons