The quiet days

I didn't even know typewriters existed when I was that age, but I would have loved one.  And now I love my lap top where, as I learned way back a bit older than this little girl, not from a typing teacher  but from a piano teacher, I hold my hands as if I have an orange against my palm. And I have never stopped typing once I learned. 

Many a typewriter has died under my hands and a few computers also -- worked to death like a good old plough horse.  On one site alone, in the last three years, 750 word.com, I have typed over half a million words as a daily diary/meditation.

Today begins "the quiet days" the few days between Christmas and New Year.  I will continue my big work of the year about which I have not written here and will write no more until it's finished -- first draft, I mean -- and I will write these blogs and emails and a few things on the Swap-bot site and who knows what else.  I'm thinking of a poem that began in my mind last night.

The hubbub of Christmas day was over.  The noisy children from age one to four had left, the grown or nearly grown children from 14 to 26 had gone, except the oldest. Most of the dishes were done, most of the shreds of paper were in a garbage bag. Silence and the echos of the day blinked like tree lights. I went out into the fresh, chilled air and walked two blocks home with a distant, placid white moon above the bare trees, with colored lights trimming houses on both sides of the street and very little traffic.  Ah ... quiet ... and it will be quiet the rest of the week.  Just me and my very quiet little laptop, and sometimes my somewhat noisy sewing machine as I start to quilt a top that has been pieced. The refrigerator has plenty to sustain me.  And I have aplenty of books and magazines.  I'm content.