Note # 41 – The In Between Bits

I’m in the in between these days.

It’s not quite spring here, but it’s also not quite winter anymore – although the ten inches of ice in my driveway might beg to differ. It’s sunny and things are starting to melt and you can feel the sun on your skin for the first time in months, but then the next day it snows, thick and velvety as if it was Christmas Eve again. By our front door there are work shoes, running shoes, rubber boots and winter boots, kicked off and piled up because you never know what you might need to wear today.

March break is already long gone and summer vacation is too far away to feel real, although I confess to daydreaming about it. A lot. Usually while hacking at the aforementioned ice in my driveway.

The first draft of Date Square Dharma is just past the three quarter completed mark – in terms of words, anyway, although not necessarily time – I don’t know how long that last quarter is going to take to write and I can almost see the shore, so I just keep paddling.

So much of the in between.

The other day I opened my mouth to say to my partner that I will be so glad to finish writing Date Square Dharma, but then I realized that that’s a ridiculous thing to say because the moment I finish writing this book, I am going to start writing the next book. It’s what I do. It’s what I will always do as long as I can type or hold a pen. I am miserable if I’m not actively making up a story in my head. It’s who I am, so I will keep doing it.

And honestly, when I really think about it, sometimes I realize that it’s going to be a bit of a bittersweet experience to finish writing Date Square Dharma. Right now, it’s my private playground – I have Nana and Olivia and Julia and Stafford Falls all to myself. But when I finish, I will send the book out into the world and then it will belong to everybody who reads it, to everybody who chooses to hang out in Stafford Falls for a while. They will see it through their eyes, they will imagine it in their own way, pick out things I might not have even realized I’d put it. It won’t be mine anymore.

So am I really in such a rush to finish it, to be done with it?

No. I think what I really mean is that I will be proud to have two books in the world and that I will be glad to take a rest from working so hard. I think what I really mean is that I’m tired of being in the in between bit.

Yet, just like the middle of an Oreo, the in between bit is where a lot of the good stuff is. It’s where the ordinary day is, it’s the Wednesday when you went to work and roasted a chicken for dinner and maybe watched a movie with somebody you loved. You wrote some words, folded the laundry, walked the dog. You lived. It’s tempting to focus on all the big moments that are part of our lives – births and death and weddings and new jobs and retirements. But so much more of lives are made up of the ordinary, the daily, the Wednesdays.

Maybe we should make sure to savour the in between bits, too.

P.

P.S. And now I’m craving an Oreo…