Charlotte Rains Dixon

The China Cabinet Syndrome

A couple weeks ago my dining room table was covered with china, cut glass, pitchers, and an odd assortment of knick-knacks.  This was all stuff brought over from my Mom's house, which we were cleaning out before an estate sale.

I was really happy with all the things I'd claimed but the problem was that I needed to find room for them in my china cabinets.  A quick glance at the already bulging cabinets let me know that finding room was going to be quite the chore.  So I procrastinated.

I'd walk through the dining room, pause, look at the table, look at the china cabinets, and not see any way to make this happen.  It was going to take a massive reorganization and I simply didn't know where to begin.  So I procrastinated more.

Finally, as is so often the case, I was backed up against the wall.  We were having people over for dinner and so I absolutely had to get the china put away.  I opened the cabinet door and figured out a plan of action.  But then a funny thing happened.  Once I started working and putting the china away, I realized that my plan wasn't going to work after all.  However, by then it didn't matter because another, better, plan, revealed itself to me.  And all the china got put away with relative ease.

As I arranged tea cups and stacked plates, I thought about how often this happens in writing.  You start out desirous of writing something--a novel, an essay, a short story--but don't know how to begin.   You finally come up with a plan of action, and then you labor under the delusion that you will actually follow that plan.  But once you get going on the work, once you are in the china cabinet, so to speak, you realize that the writing wants to go a completely different way.

But here's the key: you would never have found that way if you hadn't just waded in.  Found a place to start and began.  My dining room table would still be covered with china if I hadn't begun following my initial plan of action.  Many a piece of writing would still be left unwritten if we all waited for the grand plan to reveal itself.

So remember the China Cabinet Syndrome and plunge in.  You'll find room in that cabinet for everything you need.

Death, Rebirth, and Writing

It has come to my attention that my absence from writing posts has been noticed.  I was hoping I could slide under the missing blogger wire and nobody would care.  And I am thrilled that such is not the case.

So, an explanation is in order.  Over the last couple of months, my 92-year-old mother's health took a nose dive.  Up until January, she had been living alone in my childhood home.  On the first day of this year, she fell and broke her hip and as is so often the case, everything went downhill from there.  For the last couple of months my sister and I have not only been dealing with her care, searching for a nursing home and a foster home and dealing with Medicare (now there's a fun chore), but we also sold her house, had an estate sale, and cleaned everything out of it.  The house was in the family for 70 years, so this was no small chore.

Mom died on June 11, peacefully, after her family had kept a vigil at her side for many hours.  I miss her terribly and sometimes I forget that she is dead, thinking that I'll just pop up and visit her.  Then I remember.

But I also feel strangely at peace with it now, knowing that both her mind and body were failing and she would not have wanted to live in a diminished state.  She led a wonderful life, as she would be the first to say, and that is a comfort, too.  (You can read her obituary here.)

And there are good things that have come from this time in my life--increased closeness with my sister and other family members, for one.  And a budding feeling that I want to use my remaining time on this planet to accomplish good and many of my goals.  I've got new ideas bubbling up, both for my personal writing and for projects that will be of service, I hope, to writers.

So stay tuned.  I'm planning to begin blogging again on a regular basis next week, after Mom's Celebration of Life is over and all the relatives and friends have returned home.

In the meantime, thanks for sticking with me and caring that I've been gone.