The Gnome

I need everyone to understand that I’m not even exaggerating in the slightest when I say that every single time I go to write something — anything, literally this post or a text or an email or an essay or a one-sentence description of my book which is, at its current state, like 90,000 words — I think: I can’t. do it. Like, I won’t be able to. Not this time. The well is dry. The brain is dust. The magic has finally packed a duffel bag, changed its number, and moved to Tampa with a woman named Cheryl and I’m left there blinking like well. it was fun while it lasted.

And then — somehow — in the trying, I word-vomit this amorphous blob of stone and start fumblin’ around in mah internal lawn shed for a chisel, and then I realize I’ve got some spare paint in me pocket (now I’m a pirate? sure) and before I’ve even finished my first cuppa I’ve made a very odd, very portly, cross-between-Santa-and-Gimli, definitely, er, "one-of-a-kind" little lawn gnome.

And at first I’m like no. Absolutely not. He is awkward. He is misplaced. He is giving The-Tomten-meets-Kathy-Bates-in-Misery and I would like to formally opt out. So I abandon the guy in the garden and storm off to get lost in to-do lists and errands and grocery stores and the thousand tiny indignities of being alive, and later, when I’m hauling all eight grocery bags into the house with my forearms on absolute fire with battle scars of stubborn pride, I look over and there he is — peeking out through the dandelions and dead brown grass of winter like he’s been there all along — and I think, huh.

He’s kinda cute.

Did he just… wink at me?

So I keep him.

And then, the next day, while grabbing the kids and the backpacks and the now-cold coffee and trying to persuade my five-year-old to head toward the car and not, in fact, become one with the earth beneath our bushes, I glance over again and think, in a fake British accent because obviously, “hmm I rather like that peculiar fellow.”

And then, against all available evidence, against the full historical record of me insisting I cannot do this, I have the audacity to think maybe I could make another one. He needs a little friend. If I’ve still got the magic touch. (I don’t.) (I absolutely do not.) But also… let’s just see what happens.

::Sips coffee. Opens laptop.::

This is, I guess, how this whole thing works. At least for me. Not belief or confidence or clarity or detailed visions of hand-painted birdbaths. Just… a deeply suspicious willingness to try anyway despite the barrage of self-doubt and then — like the dad and the dog he didn’t want — slowly, accidentally, irrevocably loving the weird little creature that shows up.

Round and round we go. And at some point you’re naming a lawn gnome Julius and defending him with your life.