We went over to the house I was raised in to check in on the state of lawn, pool, hedges and etc…

The pool was green. No surprise. Anyone we’ve ever hired to take care of it seems to be stricken with the auto-immune disease of lazy.

While dad was flushing the pool, I went down to the lower yard. The little playhouse that I never spent the night in, even though I told my ten year old self that I would every night of the summer – was long gone. It’s been gone several years actually, since it became the moldy crooked little house full of hornets and centipedes.

I saw indentions on the ground of all the big and tiny holes I had dug during my childhood. I loved to dig, mostly with my hands. I’d make complex tunnels and caves for our puppies to explore. I didn’t just dig, every summer that we spent out at the marina, I’d be chipping away at the limestone exposed on one of the big hills. I’d find a shard and start carving elaborate buildings into the face of the stone. They weren’t great, but I had made a change in a substance that had been around long before me. I don’t know if my desire to change the landscape around me was to connect myself with something, as people were more balloons to me. Sometimes I had ahold of the string, but most of the times I just let go.

It didn’t take me long to find Milo’s old tennis balls. They were stripped of their outer fuzz, half collapsed and full of tiny sprouts of clover. I took all that I found and put them in a safe place by the pool. I didn’t want another run of the lawnmower to shred them into oblivion. Just as my parents were calling me to leave, which I don’t blame them at all — it’s sweltering out here, I looked down and saw a red circle completely even with the ground. I hunkered down and brushed enough dirt off of it to recognize what it was. The object was one of Milo’s frisbees and just like that, I had my hands in the dirt again. The protectant Sally Hanson nail care flaked away during the first few scrapes. Then the nails started growing ragged and the space beneath grew thick with dry soil. I got one finger under the lip of the frisbee and lifted it free. I’m not the sort of person that smiles to themselves when they’re alone. But this time I did, I felt a little curl starting at the corners of my mouth as I carried the frisbee and bald tennis balls back up to the pool.

Most of my past is buried. Literally.

I feel like I’m playing a game of black jack.

I’ve got a good set of cards.

Problem is, anytime I start thinking I’m lucky – I lose that streak. Funny thing, that. Auto-humble.

But that’s okay. Whatever I want, I’m going to work hard for it. And when it starts working out, I’m not just going to cruise. I’m going to bust my ass even more.

The writing is going well. I never liked writing on paper because I hated the lag time. Typing seemed a hell of a lot faster. But when I wrote Tides I was sitting exhausted on a plane back from Jamaica. It hit me like the wall of a skating rink. I borrowed a pen from the steward and set to work. My deadline was the flight landing. I knew if I had a break, I’d lose what was coming. When I type, I stop myself – I’m constantly pausing to think too damn much. To make the sentence perfect the first time, so I never had to edit.

But something about putting pen to paper makes you honest with your skill level. The most famous books, ones that will be classics for all time, were done this way. It was quill and paper. It was blood and prison walls.

Maybe this first story ain’t perfect, but that’s not what I’m aiming for. A piece can be like a child to me. It can get colicy and cough in your face. Other times it backfires when the kid has his hands in his pants in a grocery store.

But sometimes, just sometimes. It’s something different all together, and whatever it is crawls inside you and stretches your bones until you’re an whole inch taller. Closer to whatever it is that writers reach for. Closer to changing the lives you love, to strangers, and spreading like wildfire towards the next generation. It’s not immortality. It’s about waking up the mortals to pictures of all sizes.

I have more than enough acacia wood to make frames for whatever I dream of. Whatever I create. That tree of life is alight and I’ll let it illuminate my way for as long as it wills me to.

Because I won’t be a rose bud anymore.