The Ump is out umping and I am home alone.
It is blessedly quiet. No television. No noise at all. The dogs have been out and are quiet resting in disparate locations.
It's been a long few weeks with heavy writing at work. Combined with my dog story experiment, I haven't felt much like sitting down to Valley Words for awhile.
That doesn't mean I don't think about writing, er blogging. No, I think of this as writing pure and simple. The vehicle is different, but I'm still in the driver's seat.
I think about writing all the time. Ruminate. I am in a fairly constant state of rumination. Just for kicks, I looked up the word rumination and there are two definitions.
The first is: The act of pondering; meditation.
The second is: The act or process of chewing cud.
I love it! I love to ponder. New words, new thoughts, memories, ideas, suggestions, riddles, crosswords, design. Pondering rules!
In my imagination, pondering is exactly like chewing cud. My mind latches onto an idea and rolls it around, examines it, thinks on it a little more, punches it here, stabs it there and finally swallows it (or spits it out).
I do that a lot with words. Three of us from work went to a museum recently where we absorbed the way the museum told its story. We have a museum of our own to create, and I thought we would find great inspiration there. Which we did. Lots of great ideas we could put our own spin on after a little rumination.
One of my favorite moments of our excursion, however, was sitting in a restaurant after our tour. Brian ordered a hickory chicken sandwich. I simply love the way that sounds. Hickory chicken. Hickory chicken. Say it out loud and feel it roll around in your mouth. I know that one day I will write a children's story or a column or a novel and somewhere hickory chicken will play a role.
Today was such a lovely day. It would have been a good day to sit out back and ruminate. I'm sure the cows were doing it.
Everything is turning green - even our raggedy lawn created by the installation of our beautiful sidewalk. The contractor said the lawn would come back just like it used to be. Maybe I forgot to ask him when that might happen. I accepted his word without rumination. My mistake.
But it has created a great scientific experiment for the Ump and I.
That, and the garden out back.
You should have seen us planting onions. It was sad. For some reason (I can think of 44), it hurt my back to lean over and plant the onion sets. I gave it the old college try before giving in to the gravity that was pulling me down. I sat down on the ground and then laid on my side like I was on the couch in the living room. Much easier. The Ump tried it too.
Someone passing by might have mistaken our ingenuity for an assignation.
However, if that same someone was there 10 minutes later when we tried to get up off the ground, all things would have revealed.
This felt good. I apologize for my mini break. I'll be back. The Story of a Dog will end this week.
I think Tip will retire from his storytelling.
Maybe the voice in my next story will come from a hickory chicken.
