Here I Am Again

Rainy days again. In winter we expect rain. It is good for growing green things...trees and grass and flowers. I am hoping there is a good wildflower season over in the desert this spring and that I get over there to see it. Some flowers are already blooming there. It is all timing. The rain has to be enough and at the right time.

Here everything is green. Our hills are covered in green grass. Lawns are looking shaggy. Tall grass and weeds grow along the roadways. So the rain is needed. It is just that I am used to sunny days and get a little down when it stays gloomy too much.

Hailey had to write some poems for her English class. She needed six poems but only did five. I couldn’t get her to do the last one. It is hard to just sit down and write a poem. Well unless you are a professional poet. What ever that is? I do think she could have done the poem but she just wouldn’t! Stubborn or what! I used to write poems. Over the years I saved some of them. Most went into the trash. Then I put what was left of them on my web pages. I haven’t added to them in years. Just a few poems and that represents over a half century of living! Then Hailey has to write six poems in a couple of weeks.

There are two ways to write a poem. One you just sit down with a pencil and paper and think up something to write about and make yourself do it. If it has to rhyme then you let the rhyming words rhyme in your head and make them into lines that hopefully make some sense. Of course there is more to poetry than rhyming words… or not. There is structure and rhythm.

The other way to write poetry is to let it write itself. The words float around in your head born of some deep feeling that just has to flow out of your brain like water out of a bottle. Some might say wine instead of water. But we are not made of wine, and we are made of water.

So, for ordinary people , writing poetry is not something easily done especially when you are forced to do it. I do think learning to write is important and should be a good positive experience. Everyone has the ability to be creative. But when we force children to be creative we are pushing them too much. They can shut down and start feeling like failures. Creativity should be fun, and exciting. Learning should be fun and exciting. We put so much on our school children it is a wonder we don’t have more problems with them than we do. We are not giving our children a good place to learn or teaching them the skills they need to survive in adult life.

It is three am here and my big black cat is sleeping beside me on the bed. I have this tablet laptop and can write these words with a digital pen. Just like writing a letter. In not a bad typist. I learned to type in school back in the ‘50s. My dad bought me a portable typewriter. My typing speed was never spectacular. I could do sixty words per minute. I also had problems because my little fingers are crooked. I was born with bent little fingers. My mother and her father also had them. Not my children though. Then from my Dad I got slight dyslexia. We could read just fine but writing words and transposing numbers caused us problems. When typing, I have a problem typing i for e and vice versa. My daughter also is slightly dyslexic. She is more so than I am. She can read because we took her to therapy when she was young. My Dad stuttered when he was young and I still do that a little when I’m stressed. My daughter too. She has to sometimes slow herself down. I think the stuttering happens when our brain is thinking faster then we can talk. I used to hate to get called on to talk in class. Most of my teachers were kind enough to not call on me and I didn’t raise my hand either!

Having a typewriter handy all my life was great for when home computers came into daily life. I didn‘t have to take a class in keyboarding when I went back to school in the late 1980s.

So now I’m writing words on my computer screen, and this way a person doesn’t even need to know how to type. I do need half way decent handwriting. This program sort of guesses at the words. I write my name, Dorothy, and sometimes it comes out toothy or slowly or Dowdy or….