Property for Sale: Hedgerow

Lowell approached me today in the parking lot, looking disheveled, but happy. “I decided to sell my property,” he said.

I smiled, waiting for the punchline. I knew Lowell didn’t own any property. He slept under bridges, or wherever he could find a spot on a cold night, without the Police kicking him out.

“Know anyone who wants to buy Hedgerow?” he asked. “Cause I’d like to sell it. I woke up this morning by the hedge, freezing. They cut it real low yesterday. Anyhow, I decided to try to get into a transition house.”

This is a big step in our world, the world of my homeless friends. The step from comfort on the street, to moving towards a home, and doing the work required to get there and to keep one. Lowell has some addictions, after a life of hardship. We went to my car and turned the heat on real high. We sat there and warmed up and talked and then went back out into the parking lot with the others.

How to write a book

I just returned from my New York Publishing meetings. As always, the city was a whirlwind. I don’t really consider what I do as work, because I’m living my dream. And my goal in my writing is to help everyone else live theirs. Traveling to the city was a merging of my two worlds, toddler land and books. As always, I traveled with the two boys in tow. They love the city – especially Times Square. The lights, the stimulation, the energy. We’d experience it all for a couple of hours and then rush back to the hotel, climb in bed, and order room service. I wasn’t feeling well so I had hot tea with honey, and did my best to look human at my publisher breakfasts. McGraw Hill gave me my latest book, which I saw in print for the very first time. That’s always an exciting moment. It’s a gorgeous hard cover of a man in a suit, sitting on the beach in a chair. The dichotomy of that image is great! Because when I was in a suit, in the corporate world, I was always dreaming about sitting on the beach anyways, lost in my head at some fabulous oceanfront resort, in the midst of a sales meeting. Now I get to write about the daydream I had years prior. (Oh, here’s where my publishers want me to mention the name of the book – There’s More to Life Than the Corner Office, and more importantly, The Compass! Please read that one because it will change a lot of lives. More on that later.)

Anyhow, I have escaped the corporate world, so to speak. But now I write about it on this blog. I don’t think I want to escape suburbia, necessarily. I think I should be grateful for suburbia, since it’s a far cry from who I am inside. I’m more of a write in the jungle, write in the woods, write when the kids are throwing ketchup on the walls, write all the time, sort of person, and I’m darn lucky to be accepted in suburbia. It seems no one has discovered I’m an impostor…

Love Hurts, or Does it?

One of the central themes of my most recent literary work, The Compass, is Love and the way it wounds us.  I’ve learned so much about love, but never the answer to it.   I’ve learned that there are so many different kinds.

There’s passionate love, agape love, and the kind of love you have for your dog.

At times I am reminded of the Romeo and Juliet kind of love.  That feels like the kind of love you’d die for.  Open, exposed, like a forest fire threatening to extinguish the life of everything in the forest.  The good, the bad, the large mammals and small.  The wildlife, flowers and bonfires.  All of it gone.  Most of us feel as if we are experiencing this type of love at some point in our lives.  Usually when we are teenagers grasping at the meaning of emotion.

Then, I am reminded of a different kind of love, the kind that you’d die with, not for.

This is the type of love with depth, but a love so deep you don’t feel the need to shout it from the rooftops.  It’s a bury the body kind of love.  A 3am friend kind of love.  An unspoken , indescribable, cannot stop thinking of you kind of love.  It’s the kind of love you’d be prepared to die with, take to the grave.

Last in my pondering, I think of the kind of love that one dies from.