Going home again.

I got on my writers' group's web site last night to RSVP for the next meeting and quickly realized that I had missed this week's gathering. It hadn't even occurred to me that two weeks had gone by already. It definitely didn't feel like a fortnight, that's for sure. I guess it didn't matter all too much. I hadn't done any new writing, only had gone back and tried to work on all the critiques of last meeting, which did end up adding on two more pages to the "novel." So now I have six pages. My grandfather has been dead nearly a whole two months and I have six pages to show for it and only 10 months to go.

I suppose it's only natural that I've been a little flaky the past two weeks with the whole house hunting process. We did find a house already and have had our offer accepted, which is super speedy from what I've heard when it comes to buying a house. In a way, I'm glad that it only took two weeks, because it's such a demanding and chaotic process. So while the idea of paying both a mortgage and a rent payment for two months because we can't break our lease scares the bejeebus out of me, at least I have little excuse not to write now.

And you would think I would be full of words after last weekend, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Chris left town with his father for some male bonding time and I stayed at my Mom's, talking about Grandpa, going to Grandpa's house, visiting his grave. My senior year of high school, I lived with my grandfather for five months and I know I thought it was terrible at the time, but I can't remember why. So I even dug out the journal I kept senior year and stayed up late at night reading it in hopes of figuring some of that out. Unfortunately, I was involved in a very ridiculous drama-filled high school romance at the time and the majority of the journal was riddled with "love is grand" or "boys suck," with a few "I hate living in Grandpa's house" thrown in there, and that was about it. So no help from that.

I'm not really sure I got the closure I was looking for being in Grandpa's house. I think it made the wound more open, to be honest. I was hoping that I would get to explore the house on my own, to have some quiet time with my memories, but my godparents were there when we showed up, so no luck. I'm not sure it would have made a difference. I'm not even sure what I was really looking for. I felt like I was the ghost in the house, not Grandpa, haunting every room, lingering for no reason in places, trying to take it all in before having to give it all up. I spent most of my time hovering near the coffee cup tree, touching a coffee cup that Grandpa didn't even use, but I felt that coffee cup alone summed up all my memories of that house. I traced the black lines on the dirty-colored porcelain with my fingers, outlining the design of vibrant oranges and their leaves, thinking about how my father used to drink his morning coffee on Sundays from those mugs, how Aunt Beth would take the pot to the living room, first filling up Uncle Jim's mug and then Grandpa's even though no one asked her to. Mom asked me more than once if I wanted to take the mug home or if I wanted the entire mug tree, but I kept saying no. What would I do with a mug tree? What would I do with these hideous '60s mugs? Part of me wanted to take everything home, and part of me wanted everything to stay exactly as it was.

The house wasn't anything like it should have been. So many things have been cleared out and what was still left was stacked against walls on top of each other, often in boxes. It didn't really matter. It was still Grandpa's house to me. I could still see it how it should have been. My cousins are moving into it, changing things around and painting, but I think no matter how they decorate or renovate, I'll still be able to walk into that house and see things just as they always were, rewind the clock and see everything in its proper place, my grandfather rocking happily in his plush mauve lazyboy in the living room.

The gloomy balloon that rolls on the floor after a bad party.

I've been working on this book for two weeks now. I've written a lot in the meantime, but as far as the actual book goes, I have exactly one page written, which I workshopped all last night and still am not happy with. My mom asked if I was following any sort of outline or time line, and as of yet, I'm not. It's hard to come up with an outline since I'm still not entirely sure what all I want the book to contain. I figured I'd just write like a banshee for a few weeks and see what resulted. But if I've only written a page in two weeks, I think it's time to find some kind of schedule to stick to.

I've come across a few obstacles so far with this writing business. Firstly is my husband. I'm sure he doesn't do it on purpose, but he is great company and a fabulous companion. So during weekday evenings when we usually watch "The Office" or "Dog the Bounty Hunter" reruns and talk and laugh and cuddle together on the couch, I am now armed with pen and paper at the kitchen table or glued to the computer. Choosing writing over TV time with the man I love is definitely a hard sacrifice to make. It's as John from the writing group said, writing is a lonely business. It's sitting at the table by myself all evening long with only my thoughts to keep me company.

If I have to be alone anywhere, though, it's nice that it's the kitchen table. I find it's my favorite place to work. It's a nice solid surface for scribbling in my composition book. I just grab myself a glass of iced tea from the kitchen and get to work. My table is open to the living room, and there are many windows that look out to the all the trees that surround our apartment. And I can soften the dining room light with the dimmer switch that Chris and I installed when we first moved in (which was a task and a half, but that's another blog). It's a very cozy feeling.

Kitchen tables are made for important memories, I think. It's where meals are served, daily conversation is had, Easter eggs are colored, toothpick bridges are built. My mom spends a lot of time at the kitchen table paying bills and working on projects. It's always the place to find her in the evenings. In both the house of my childhood and in her current house, you can see the kitchen table from the door. She always has the front door open when the weather allows it and oftentimes, as you walk up the sidewalk, you can see her sitting here working, unaware of her approaching visitor. It's a rather comforting image for me, which is probably why I find the kitchen table such an encouraging workspace.

The kitchen table can only hold its trance over me for a certain amount of time, however. Because my topic of choice is my grandfather, who is newly deceased, another obstacle of the writing process is my own emotion. After about an hour, I find myself getting caught up in all the memories, and writing about it becomes unbearable. In a way, it's keeping the wound fresh. Everything about this experience is emotional, it seems. For example, the last two weekends, I've juggled back and forth about whether or not I should make a trip home to gather some of Grandpa's things and recipes for inspiration, but mostly just to walk around his house again before anything in it was changed. My cousin and his wife are considering moving into his house, and it may be sooner or later, so I was determined to get home again before that happened.

My husband, the voice of reason, tried to help me understand how unnecessary that was, reminding me of how far away home really is. It's not like I can just "run home." It's a two and a half hour drive, so even if I were to stay only a few hours once I got there, it would consume the entire day, most of it spent staring out of the car window at the same old boring farmland that spans from one side of the state to the other. It would be a large waste of gas (an expensive waste, too) for what? The house will still be there next month. "Nothing will be different," he assured me.

"Everything will be different!" I exclaimed. His things will be moved. His smell will be gone. His spirit will have wilted and it will just be another house. I needed to touch the furniture, the counters, I needed to climb the stairs and stand in that bedroom that I called mine at one time. I needed to have that last moment with him in his house, my last chance to experience his presence, to feel his comfort. It was an encounter I craved, not only for the book's sake, but for my sake.

The furniture has been moved already, most of it removed. And my aunts and uncles have organized what remains, arranging things in boxes or taking some things home with them. I'm hoping none of that will matter when I finally get my chance to go inside.

When my grandmother died, we would pay to have Mass in her honor a few times a year. It would always be a Saturday evening Mass. My grandpa, my cousin, and I would take up the gifts during the collection. We would all go out to the cemetery after Mass and Father would say a few words, and we'd all let go of balloons, sending them up into heaven for her to enjoy.

In my current book-about-how-to-write-books, I read a blurb written by a student in some writing class, a name that was changed to protect anonymity, called, "On Grief" that went like this:

"Time heals nothing. Those that are gone, stay gone. Your heart is like a balloon with it, a gloomy balloon. The kind that rolls on the floor after bad parties. Swollen and dejected. Might explode at any minute... In grief, the air around us is filled with the heaviness of loss and our chest is filled like a rising balloon. A sinking balloon. Our chest is filled too full with some gas heavier than air."

I love that image of the balloon rolling on the floor after a bad party. Is there anything so sad as deflating balloons? I don't think so.

You could be, like, a writer.

"Write a book," my brother said from his comfy spot in my new Ikea lounger across the living room. "Just write a book already," he repeated, as it is was the obvious solution all along.

"Seriously, Jen, what is it you want out of life?" he asked.

"I want to be a literature professor, I want to open a dance-slash-exercise studio for women, and I want to write a novel."

"Okay, so start with the one that's the most attainable."

I didn't have a PhD, I wasn't a professional dancer, and I definitely wasn't a professional writer, so I really wasn't sure which one he was suggesting.

He continued on as if I had smacked my hand against my forehead and proclaimed, "OF COURSE!" "If you write for an hour a day," he advised, "think how fast you could write a book."

"Write a book" seemed to be my brother's answer to all of life's tough questions. He had been saying the same thing to my mother since he discovered that she was hiding a 20-year-old manuscript up in the attic. Nevermind that our mother wasn't a writer, never had been, and the manuscript was probably 50 pages in total double-spaced. He believed finishing her "book" would solve all her financial problems, let her quit her job, give her closure with her dead mother and may even help her meet a sophisticated businessman who loved to travel to live out the rest of her life with. IF ONLY SHE'D FINISH THE BOOK.

"You're sitting on a gold mine," he'd tell her, "If only you'd finish the book."

I wanted to tell him to sit down for an hour every day and try to write a novel and see how easy he thought it was then.

Besides that, I wasn't a writer, either. I got my degree in literature, which you would think would mean that I could write, but really, all it means is I can read. The only things I have experience writing about are those things that I read. To actually write something creative that was worthy enough (and long enough--good gracious!) to be published was a whole new ballgame entirely.

Go ahead and disregard the fact that I'd been writing since I was six, typing away stories on my aunt's commodore 64 all summer long, stories about stealing freshly baked banana cream pies and taking adventurous walks in haunted forests, then printing out my literary masterpieces on her tractor-feed printer paper, proudly creasing and ripping the edges off before stapling the multiple pages together. It's astonishing that I, a writer with so much experience, a multiple-time Young Authors Award winner, was now, in her late 20s, cowering at the idea of writing a novel, not when I had had so much promise.

But it was true, as sad as it was. When I became old enough to be self-conscious and when my teen years started to resemble fantasy fiction more than actual life, my creativity disappeared with my pigtails and different-colored socks.

A whole ten months passed before my brother brought it all up again. My grandfather had just passed away and I had written an essay to read at his funeral, my own little eulogy of sorts, a last chance to say all the things I've always wanted to say. Well, it turns out most of the family got a chance to read it a whole two days beforehand because my proud mother, who believes everything I write is pure gold, e-mailed it to all my aunts who then forwarded it onto my cousins. The night before the funeral when we were all gathered for his showing, family members kept coming up to me saying how wonderful my speech was before I even had a chance to speak it. My brother's girlfriend even had already read it, to which she commented, "You could be, like, a writer."

"Thank you!" my brother belted out, throwing his hands into the air. That was only what he had been trying to tell me all along.

So fine, you win. Here I am, giving it a try, testing the waters to see if I'm any good at this writing thing and whether or not my brother was right all along.