A Graceful Surprise

I call them pearls. I receive six of them every day. Six quiet hours of writing time during which the children are in school.  It's a term borrowed from Virginia Woolf, who named a free day in which to write, a "pure and rounded pearl."  I rarely have a fully free day, and when I do, I waste much of it, so I've chosen to attach the designation to a free hour. It has made all the difference.

To receive six pure and rounded pearls of grace in a day is a gift unimagined, brought to me by daughter Sarah and her children. It makes for more productive and focused writing. At long last I can see the end of the little work of fiction I've been playing with for the past SEVEN years (!!!!), have even gone so far as to claim a goal to finish it off before my next birthday, two months from now, thanks to having grandchildren move into my house.

The astonishing thing about all this is that I didn't realize it was happening until a hummingbird pointed it out during my long sit on the deck this morning.  More about that surprising encounter next post.  dkm