Just Keep Writing….

I’ve been trying to force myself to keep writing, lately.  I don’t know what the block is, but when I think of something deep and meaningful, I can’t get past the first few sentences.  This entry is rambling, with no particular point.  I’m  just going to let it go where it wants to take me.

This morning, I watched the “All Access” preview of “David Makes Man,” as well as episode 1.  My heart is pounding from the power of this first episode, but not for the reasons you might think.  I think.  Maybe.  I don’t know.

I grew up in this tiny little blip on the map of California.  It’s so small that the towns of Sutter, Yuba City, Marysville, Olivehurst, Linda, Live Oak, Wheatland, and Lincoln, are all basically part of what most of us who hail from the Yuba-Sutter Area consider our “hometown.”  One may have lived their whole life in Olivehurst, but if a person from Sutter makes the news for a happy reason, we all feel pride.  When tragedy occurs, we all gather to mourn, and sadly, we have.

We moved away from this area when I was six years old.  We moved to Germany because my step-father was in the USAF.  We lived there for three years, then we were transferred to San Angelo, TX.  In the nearly six years that we were away, I longed for anything California.  Silly things like being taken to a restaurant with a California Taco on the menu got me so excited!  Hearing the song “Hotel California,” made my throat tighten.  I wanted to go home so badly.

When the day finally came that we were back in the Yuba-Sutter area, there was a huge sense of grief for me.  In six years, which may not seem like much, but was precisely half my life at the time, everything had changed.  Grandma had been killed in a car accident while we were in Germany, so Papa had remarried, and the house at which I’d spent half of my life playing in the dirt, climbing trees, or playing house in the cracked, concrete, in-ground swimming pool that was just a hole in the ground with stairs had been sold, torn down, and didn’t even look like the place I’d left.

I can recall the smell of Grandma’s tea roses growing around the place.  I can remember how walnuts that had fallen from the trees but never picked up would rot, and fall in half, leaving a weird, half shell with two holes that reminded me of an electrical outlet.  There was always the smell of coffee, bacon, and cigarette smoke.

One of the things that I loved about my small community was the 4th of July celebrations at Ellis Lake.  Ellis Lake is a stinky, green, man-made lake of duck excrement soup and fish.  When I was a small child, it was covered with lily pads.  The whole community would gather around.  There were picnics and balloons and of course fireworks.

And this is as far as I got before I got distracted by who knows what.  I’m not in the mood to keep writing or even to proof read and/or edit.