Wednesday 15 October 2014

Sorting, tossing and packing words.

I have been sorting, tossing and packing my friend's personal belongings has not been a happy experience.
It is the one thing that needed to be done fairly quickly. Nursing homes give families (or friends) very little time to clear things out. We packed everything in a great hurry and then, having no time to arrange storage anywhere else, had it stored at the home of my sister's father-in-law. Things could not be left there too long. Even though he now lives alone we felt it was improper.
My friend had made a list - or rather, I had made a list at her direction. We have now dealt with the list to the point where everything is sorted, tossed or packed and ready to pass on. Right. I will be glad when it is done.
And that made me start to think about sorting, tossing and packing words. I need to do some of that.
My own writing has been on hold for far too long. No, the morning blog-post does not count. I need to be writing other words. I need to sort them into neat piles. There will be words I need to toss out and words I want to pack together in the hope they make something worth keeping and sharing with others. Recently I had not even been sure I could do it again. I still wonder whether I am just wasting time that would be better spent knitting blanket squares and handing out those blankets to the homeless. I wonder whether it is just self-indulgent to write.
But....I have come back to the need to write. There are words that need to spill out of me. Words are funny things. They are "just" sounds or marks on paper or on the screen. They can mean nothing - and everything. I have been neglecting them. They need to be collected together, dusted off and oiled. They need sorting. Some will need to be tossed aside. Some will need to be packed carefully into sentences - and, oh yes, they will often need to be rearranged to fit. It's a big job - but all writers know that.
The only problem is that I don't know to whom I should give the words when I have packed them. Who will want to take them out?

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