I Love To Write With a #2 Pencil

    When I was younger, unmarried, and at home with my parents I would draw constantly. I didn't call it sketching, it was drawing to me. I spent hours at it, drawing hands, feet, noses, filling every corner of the paper. I thought not as much about what to draw, as about pencils, the different effects, on paper, and in hand.

    There was a sound that a pencil made on rag paper that satisfied my soul. If I were the last one up at night, the world was mine, with only the sound of crickets coming through my attic window. I sat at my desk feeling a delicious sense of aloneness pulling out the vain imaginations of my heart. Some fantasy that kept the loneliness sweet and sought after. I loved that more than anything at that time. I still can feel the sound of drawing.

   Then I got older, moved, married and ran out of time or imagination to draw. My feelings turned into words and I still wanted to express them. I always wanted to be a great novelist, writing the ultimate love story. But once I married all those notions seemed small, besides I live my ultimate love story. I found myself collecting  cheap notebooks, and a stash  of #2 pencils.

  A list is a list, a necessary for me in my busy life with six children. But there is an old longing in  my heart sometimes that a jot and tittle are not enough. I need this list to revolutionize my day, my week! A dull piece of paper and flat hard pencil, a texture that stops me and keeps the motivation bottled up inside me.

   There, still, is that satisfying scratch. The sound that assures me that my chore list, goals, and projects are good ideas. It tells me that my letters will be well received, that my husband will be reading his "honey-do" list and be further inspired in that sway of script and strike of lead to complete a task. I am touched with confidence that I can stick with a plan written with#2.  A heavy color that smacks of boldness, Yes, it says, you can accomplish this feat!

   I don't draw much any more. I have other ways of coping with life's pressures. The steam comes out in words, filling notebooks with lists and ideas and possible scenarios. When I am overwhelmed with the desire to use a pencil, drawing doesn't carry out my need so much. The visual beauty of well shaped words, the comforting sound that words make as they are written takes me back to the time in my life when  the smear of a soft #2 pencil  was a sign that I had what I wanted.