I didn't but I like it now

...a peek into Mark Diacono's Abundance Writing Group Gathering

To everyone new here, welcome. I’m Elizabeth, the writer of The Delicious Bits Dispatch, a weekly missive for the curious, blending discovery, reflection, and musings, always wrapped up with a seasonal recipe worth lingering over.

I’m sharing a bonus post this week that’s not the usual.

In January, I joined a merry band of writers under the gentle and witty hand of Mark Diacono to practice our writing skills. Called the Abundance Writing Group Gathering, every month, we’re given a prompt with the singular instruction to take no more than an hour to write and see what results.

When we gather, we discuss where the prompt led us, what the process was like and a few brave souls put up our hands to share our writing with the group.

This month’s prompt was: I didn’t, but I like it now

Kalee Tilli, Tessa Oram, Kelly and I shared our writing, and the disparate places this simple prompt took us could not have been more gloriously different.

To read aloud what you sit and produce in the silence of your mind is both exhilarating and intimidating. But in this intimate online setting, the words hold deeper meaning, the feedback is generous and the hour flies by.

Here’s what I wrote in an hour.

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I didn’t but I like it now, this getting up early.

The edge of light like icing on top of the buildings, the moon saying how’d you do to the sun before passing the baton.

The city looks weirdly futuristic, even though an old fire hall…a church steeple… an ancient tree belie the idea.

In the predawn morning, I feel the sense of possibility, an unbroken egg teetering on the edge of the bowl waiting for the decisive wrist flick to crack it wide open. In the here and now, I am not yet late or run out of time or impatiently waiting on the subway car.

I can still choose the skin I want to inhabit today…

…casual chic in denim and leather;
…buttoned up corporate in navy head to toe;
…flirty and feeling 40 in a floral dress.

The early morning is an offering that allows me to think of the hours ahead and make decisions. Not exactly planned or within the lines, but loose, confident, a cocky teen swaggering down the street of my schedule.

The best kind of early morning, of course, is before the alarm clock rings: a slow fluttering of my eyes awake, knowing without looking that I had a full 45 minutes more.

But still, I’m awake now, and the aerie view from my bird’s nest terrace is an ever-changing canvas. Not quite and sometimes never an arbiter of the day ahead…a tease of pink and fiery clear sky, or a brute of an angry Zeus, busily gathering thunderbolts hidden behind a grey roiling curtain of clouds, both as petulant and changeable as toddlers.

That I missed so much of this in my idle and frivolous youth, is not to be mistaken for regret. Because I really didn’t like it then, the unwilling separation of my warm body away from a tangle of sheets and blankets, my mother’s insistent voice calling me to svegliati! the reluctant making of the bed.

There I might have found the book I tried to vainly read until the end, with a purloined flashlight. I might have wanted to wander back into a dream, cinematic in length and scale, me the star player in a screwball comedy so like the old black and whites I adored.

When, then, the shift?

It wasn’t in the early days of my irresponsible adulthood, with its all-nighters and projects left to the very last moment. Never a planner, I; the midnight hour was my friend, the darkness and silence of nights in that tiny first flat as comforting as a weighted blanket. Part vampire, perhaps, my senses alert as a nocturnal creature, eyes adjusting to the dark, a cat on the prowl.

It was only when I moved into a wee fairy tale house with my husband that Helios started to claim my early morning devotion with a sentinel’s clarion call, its first early beckoning at an ungodly hour.

What messenger was this?

I remember going outside and peering into the trees, trying to train my eyes to follow that thread of sound as if it were a scored line of music. And there, there, it was, brilliant red, high, high on the tree branches, full-throated and glorious—as thrilling as anything I’d seen or heard before. A cardinal, a morning miracle.

Now, I sit above the city, a condo dweller who feels like she can touch the sky. It is harder to see the cardinals as I peer into the leafy trees that front my view, but if I’m quiet enough, early enough, I can still hear them along with abundant house wrens and song sparrows, humble kin to their more glamorous cousin but no less joyful and effusive in their song.

Others might lament the early morning light of summer, the hallelujah chorus of the birds that starts ever and ever earlier. Yet I now know it is my ain true love, this morning, the awakening and calming of my restless mind. That quiet bracket of time between rising and stretching and fully waking that bring me to life.

The rituals of morning…the steaming coffee, the hungry cats arching at my feet, a snatch of lovely reading before I’m beset with news… my husband still soundly asleep. I am in my element.

And while it is true the glorious sunrise I saw at 6:40 am might have ducked behind rain clouds by the time I leave home at 8:30 still, I know it is there. My little secret, a gift, a reminder that brighter days are always in the offing.

And if I didn’t like it now, that preternatural dawn, how flat and bereft might the day be in its absence.

If you’re curious where this prompt took other writers in the group, I’d encourage you to read the pieces Mark Thomas and Marjan wrote.

I didn't, but I like it now

I didn’t, but I like it now

And if you want to be inspired by a generous community of writers who love words as much as you, consider joining Mark Diacono for this group, and so much more.

I’ll be back with my usual Dispatch on Sunday, with a full report on the inaugural Food Writers’ Retreat plus some delicious recipes to share from that fabulous gathering.

If you’re drawn to discovery, reflection and the shared experience of food, subscribe to The Delicious Bits Dispatch. You’ll feel right at home with this weekly newsletter that finds magic in the beautiful details of everyday life.