That Hope Thing

 

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

(Emily Dickinson)

The optimist sees the glass as half full, the pessimist as half empty, but the realist makes sure the contents won’t kill them.

This has been the toughest February in decades for me and I haven’t been able to figure out why. Yes, I’ll be 75 in a few weeks and my aversion to cold and snow have increased over the years, but there’s an intangible ‘something’ that sneaks up on me and devours my energy and enthusiasm on a frighteningly frequent basis. My February blog for Maine Crime Writers was an orgy of doom, much of it reality based. I’m not going to repeat that here, so optimism and hope? Here goes.

I have three grandchildren, Piper (9), Reid (3), and Gemma (2). Piper already is an avid fisherwoman, but has yet to catch a legal sized trout, so helping her do that is on my hope list. Reid and Gemma also want to learn how to fish, so they get their chances this summer.

 

I’m almost finished with a new book. The original title was Bent River, but I came up with a better one last week, When Magic Bleeds. My hope is to revise it, along with Don’t Say It and Over The Edge, the two I wrote last year. I seem to have this trait of writing books and then ignoring them. That body count is around 12 at the moment.

 A leap of faith, perhaps, is in order

I love taking unique photos. I hope to use more of them to create my own greeting cards this year. I also hope to visit another batch of Maine libraries. When I handled software for the Maine State Library, all of the specialists had different colored pins we stuck in towns on a Maine map to designate which libraries we’d been to. My yellow pins dominated the map, but I have many left to see.

I know next to nothing about Maine’s new Bendable Project, so wrapping my head around it is on my ‘I hope to’ list for 2023. https://www.maine.gov/msl/libs/grant_projects/BendableMaine.shtml