Defeated stump with brush pile behind it.

John Clark is staring at his wall of creativity and shaking his head. It has always been nicely covered with an ever-changing patina of writing ideas, but this time, it’s blank. I know from experience that this is a temporary phenomenon, but annoying nonetheless.

It’s not like life is dull and boring. I’m driving a local house candidate around every Wednesday afternoon so she can knock on doors. I mentor a young man at the Alfond Center every Thursday afternoon, and I run an AA meeting the first Monday of the month at the Somerset County Jail. These are satisfying and give back to the world, but don’t merit a full blog.

I have a lot of fun finding bargains at library book sales and an occasional lawn/estate sale, plus help out friends/libraries/organizations who are too busy or overwhelmed to sell online. I love the challenge of turning what others think is dross, into money. (just sold a bunch of 3-D football cards an hour ago for $30. My cost was 0 because a friend wanted to get rid of them).

Who would care about my giving in and buying an expensive gaming laptop (64GB ram, 8 TB SSD) so I can waste hours playing the accumulation of role playing games I’ve never tried because my old laptop wasn’t powerful enough?

Then there’s our ambitious backyard project. We bought the ½ acre lot right behind us to ensure privacy and have an area that will give us and our grandkids a natural playground. It hadn’t been touched for years, save for serving as a dumping ground for unwanted trees and brush. When we first moved here in 2019, it was invisible due to overgrowth on out side of the property line. That led to the summer of endless itch, thanks to poison ivy and browntail moth hairs. It was so bad that at one point I was tempted to cut off both arms, but couldn’t figure out how to do so.

This time around, the cleanup involved cutting small trees and brush, bucking up two trees that fell during the big storm last winter, plus cutting a bunch of long dead fallen trees and a few that hadn’t toppled yet. The result was two big piles, one of logs, the other of brush, and the rental next month, of a 30 cubic yard dumpster coupled with a family clean-up day. I also spent weeks slowly hacking and cutting away at the monster maple stump and six feet of trunk that was left after the 2019 cutting spree.

That was an adventure all by itself. It involved making cuts, both vertical and horizontal and using a crowbar to pry pieces loose. In the process, my right arm took a beating every time the crowbar slipped and took a chunk out of my ever thinning skin. It looked so bad at one point where I was tempted to get a t-shirt that said “Blood, Sweat, But No Tears.”

Then there was the ‘blinding flash of the obvious’ that happened two days ago. We planted two of what I thought were self-pollination prune plum trees. When we were cleaning out a drawer, Beth found the tag and asked me if we needed to keep it. I read the tag and discovered both trees were Italian Plums that need another type to pollinate and bear fruit. Too late to buy one this year, so now I have to hope I live long enough to have my own plums again.

In between starting to write this, I’ve written 150 of the 200 postcards I agreed to make out and send to swing voters urging them to vote. This time they’ll go to Nevada, unlike the batch two years ago that went to Virginia.

150 down, 50 to go

Finally, while tossing chunks of dead, dry wood onto the to-be-burned pile, I got an idea for an essay to submit to Topsham Library’s “Joy of The Pen” writing contest. I submitted it in the creative nonfiction category, as well as entering the fiction category with the first three chapters of an in-process book called Highly Unlikely.

AND…If you like fantasy, you might want to read my new serialization on Substack  https://songthresher.substack.com/p/like-a-thief-in-the-night-the-further

I guess that wall wasn’t as blank as I first thought. What’s on your Wall of Creativity these days?