Leah is standing in the meadow in her heavy rubber-soled boots and her emerald green jacket. The sky is brand new, a blue like she's never seen before. Wherever she turns, there is brown stubble sticking up out of the crusty snow. Poco sticks her nose in one tuft or another and Leah keeps telling her "do not eat the grass!"
Leah sighs. She's been taking a new medication and it has the effect of dampening her emotions. The doctor says she doesn't want Leah going "manic."
"What you went through while you were writing last spring was a dangerous high, a high that's always followed by a deep depression!"
When Leah tells the doctor that she misses feeling her creative spirit, that she misses writing, the doctor says: "I don't care if you don't write for six months! I just want you to stay calm."
Leah kicks at the icy crystals. She's not so certain she likes what the doctor says. What she didn't say to the doctor was: "You may not care if I write for six months but I care, I care a lot!"
Still, as much as she doesn't like what the doctor said, she is still a bit nervous about writing. Last fall, Leah crashed; the low got so bad that she couldn't drive. She couldn't call friends. She couldn't even muster the energy to go to the grocery store!
Poco scampers across the meadow and heads toward the wetland.. The pine trees -- the same color as Leah's jacket -- tower over the house. Last week, during the ice storm, a gigantic branch crashed into the yard while she was meditating. She jumped as she saw the tree split in half. The branch lay just a few feet from her door!
After that she looked up at the other towering trees and said a quiet prayer: "Please, pines, please stay in place."
Leah wants to write again. She wants the feeling that she can sail away on her words. She wants the feeling that her heart is steering the narrative toward the place it's supposed to go. Toward healing. Toward telling the stories of her ancestors. Especially the stories that have carried negative messages down through the generations.
Leah calls to Poco. "Let's go sweetie!"
Maybe because the ice is melting. Or the wind has a certain scent, that smell of earth coming alive. She feels an upsurge. She feels sentences, or at least words, starting to flutter up in the back of her mind.
An hour later, she sits with pen and paper. Beside her is the large green notebook where she stores all the chapters she's done for the book she calls "Angels Keep Whispering in My Ears." There are three or four inches of manuscript paper in the notebooks.
She's not sure how to begin revision. So she decides to open the notebook to a random page.
She opens to the page where there's a photo of a sign that her dear friend Kellie gave her years ago:
"Trust Your Crazy Ideas," it reads. And in Italian, "Fidati Delle Tue Idee Folli!"
Folly. Yes. Writing books is certainly folly. It can be such a long arduous process. You can write thousands of pages (as she did for her first novel, Dreaming Maples) to produce a book of 425 pages.
But Leah can't help herself. The mania be damned. She wants to feel swept up in the spirit of this book again.
"I'm not writing to be famous, or to be published, or to be on Oprah," she says. "I'm writing to heal myself."
She looks out the window. Sunlight makes the wetland grasses and the willow trees glow. Questions occur to her now: what does it mean to be healed? And once you're healed, are you healed for good?
She smiles. She opens her laptop and begins to write.
