Strawberries and peppercorns

Life is an oddly-shaped thing.

For as long as I can remember, I have used the loops and curves of letters, the ravines of pens pressed into paper, the blurred smudges of pencil lines, or the sporadic blur of fingers tapping keys to measure my life. I love the writing and speaking of words, the buzzing in my mind before I find them, the precision and the play in recording my most glorious and my most mundane moments. These renderings measure me.

I used to mine my life for its meaning in journals that I prized. I have not revisited some of them in years, but I can still recall how some of the entries sit on their pages and remember the lilt of lines birthed out of deep concentration that captured a moment or a feeling or an experience with perfect specificity. Those lines transport me to moments of honesty, to aches and joys with their own outlines and shadows and lightness.

I am still a writer; a writer of grocery lists, belated birthday cards, email upon email upon email, sermons, autocorrected texts, legal motions, lesson plans, meeting minutes, and Sharpie notes on the back of my hand. I love finding old grocery lists stuffed in jacket pockets and remembering who I was on the day I needed strawberries, black peppercorns, and tequila. 

My oddly-shaped (and beautiful) life sometimes feels unmoored. I have remembered of late that my words contain stories and pieces of my life regardless of where they are written, if they make their beds in battered journals or deep in hard drives, or are produced stamped with boot marks from the floor of my car. They both reveal and anchor me. This corner of the internet is many things, including my celebration of that remembering.