I helped arrange flowers for a family wedding last month. One of the other helpers was my five-year old great-grand niece, N. No matter what her mom said, N. would counter “Are you sure?” Soon we were all laughing.
“Are you sure?” became my amused mental refrain throughout the next day, right up to the vows – at which point there was no doubt both parties were sure.
But what, really, can we be sure of? Frankly, I am not yet sure what I am writing for this space today.
It doesn’t help that the weather is indecisive. The seasons have changed and we are locked into rainy gray skies, but then we get a few bright sunbreaks. Of course, as soon as I head out to garden, it changes again. “Are you sure?” I ask the sky.
And our puppy Charley is sometimes unconvinced when we call her. Is she thinking, “Are you sure?”
Ben Franklin famously said all we can be sure of is death and taxes. So what is left to be sure of when we sit down to write a story? Not much more than the promise to ourselves to show up.
My friend Liz Sandvig, who was an amazing artist right up to the end of her 87 years, used to say what interested her in making art was to find out what any particular piece was meant to be, what it was waiting to become. “You have get in there and stick with it,” she added.
Finding what a piece inherently is is what interests me, too, as I worm my way inside whatever story I am sussing out. Why does a particular story call out to be written in the first place? What am I trying to understand by puzzling out the voice, characters, plot, setting, theme, word choice, etc.? Yes, writing can be pretty compelling once a project gets underway, but can you ever be sure as you work through drafts and edits that you have created what was meant to be?
I’m not so sure – but I am pretty sure I will follow Liz’s lead and stick with it, anyway.
This Seamus Heaney poem asked to be included. Happy digging!
DIGGING
By Seamus Heaney
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
