Sandhills Summer

I did not become a writer, I was born a writer. I haven’t always been aware of the fact but it is true. As to when necessity called upon my talent to emerge? That is a question I can answer…

Back in my ‘tween years, my normally open-minded parents had been going through a stage of myopic stagnancy. ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ was just becoming mainstream and my parents held an unsavory opinion about the game. The game found itself banned from my parents’ house. My cousin would and I would huddle together in my bedroom, thrown into the thrill of the game by our parents’ prohibition. We sat for hours drawing game boards that more closely resembled “Candyland”, rolling six-sided Yahtzee dice and making the story up as we went along.

The opportunity to imagine a life and world different from my own led to my discovery of how exhilarating the creative process could be. I did not understand how integral to my health imagination was until it was forced underground. My freedom of thought vanished too quickly for my sanity to handle. We were discovered playing our pseudo-D&D and we were no longer allowed to visit together.

Years of dark depression followed. My parents could not fathom the cause of my funk. I did not know what had swept over me, nor did I care. I did not discern my soul was dying, not until recently. One summer two years later, my mother decided that it must be my environment so she sent me to spend the summer with my Great-Grandmother and Great-Uncle in a small Nebraska town. My mother sent me away with only a suitcase of clothes and my sadness. Although I hated her for it at the time; please do not feel ill towards her, she was at a complete lose and had other small children to think of.

After a month in the small town which had only four cable television stations and no kids I knew, I had read every readers digest compendium my Great-Grandmother owned. I found myself bored, bordering on apathetic. My Great-Grandmother recommended I read the bible AGAIN. Which I was not real excited about. God had turned his back on me; I thought. When in truth, God had lovingly sent my Great-Uncle to save me.

One day when my Great-Grandmother went out to a social event my Great-Uncle was charged with entertaining me. He went back into his apartment behind the house and returned to the living room a moment later, handing me a plastic wrapped bundle of loose leaf paper and a pen.

“Since you don’t have any stories to read, why don’t you write yourself one?” He said smiling.

My Great-Uncle passed on two years ago, but I will remember his words forever. Running out onto the porch I forgot the world around me as I built my own universe of white and blue.

My soul healed with each stroke of the pen. My broken heart stitched together with every page I filled. The words I strung into sentences, and the sentences I cobbled into paragraphs became hymns of holy thanksgiving. I spent every free moment of the warm days and breezy nights sitting on an old porch rail, my head bent over the growing stack of text. Despite the discomfort I sat for hours, my back propped against a porch support scrawling out my first story of adventure and romance.

That first story is lost now, buried deep in the sands of time. I cannot remember its characters but I can remember its theme. A lost little girl with a sorrowful heart finds her destiny. And as I directed the now nameless girl on her path, I found my own. Mine may not be as grand or as influential as the destiny I created for her or the characters that have come after, but it is who I am. I am a writer. In the summer of 1990 I wrote my story as a way of letting my heart sing. Now, in the winter of 2008, my purpose has not changed. I still write because the simple act of writing completes me.

MSWord word count: 695