Placeholder post

Here's a placeholder post: an I'm-putting-my-quarter-on-the-arcade-game-edge-to-say-I-get-the-next-round post.

It's not that there is nothing to say. There is plenty to say. How the kids on the street spill out from the houses in the long afternoons to play, and how we moms talk in driveways about whether evolutionary theory really contradicts the story of creation from the Bible, and whether the careful phrases required by Positive Discipline are really worth it when one swat on the bottom seems imminently more expedient and effective, and where there's a good deal on groceries, and what we women on the cusp (or just past) of 40 want to be when we grow up. There is plenty to write about the satisfaction of so many blossoms on the orchid in the bathroom, and the simple gratitude that it is still alive, after all these years. About what isn't still alive - the relationships and habits and reactions that have died either tortuous or unnoticed deaths, the stars whose light we are still getting. About the mixed blessing of a rejection letter from a literary magazine. About the rat coming to us when she is loose in the house and we call her. About cheese. About whale cheese. About Wales. About what is inherited and what is learned. About the smell of basil, and the perfect blue-grey color of the BMW driven by the boy in High School I had a crush on.

But today, I'm just writing to record that at least I know, now, that when I sit down to write, there is plenty to say. And the words to say it all are waiting just like those kids to spill out into the world and play.