Northport, Alabama

Sometimes the grass really is greener on the other side of the fence. My neighbor’s side, to be exact.

Marcy has a green thumb and a golden tongue. There’s not much that gets in her way. Sometimes, when I’m standing in my 80-year-old house, watching the rain drip through the cracks in the ceiling, I look out my window towards her house and try to imagine it as she found it — try to picture when it was just like mine.

She’s put a lot of time and effort into making her house a home, and it shows. From the perfect white picket fence outside to the perfectly manicured sidewalk, her house is a historic showcase.

Sometimes I stand on the street and feel sorry for our house. How ashamed it must feel next to hers. But then I remember, ours too is a work in progress. Who knows how it may look a year from now?

Sometimes we need to see life from the other side of the fence for a change. Sometimes we need to lie down in the dirt, smell the grass, watch the ants go about their simple tasks. We get so strung out over what we should do, what we have to do, that we forget to live. We forget to breathe. Like parakeets trapped in a golden cage, we fail to see the moments when the door is open.

Would we take a chance and fly if we knew we could?

I know exactly why the caged bird sings. And every once in a while, when I’m out lying in the grass somewhere — camera in hand — I hear the faint timbre of a song, vaguely familiar and yet not anything I have ever heard before. A completely new arrangement. A song written by the girl I have momentarily set free.

Music: Aidos by Bexar Bexar.

Note: My friend Sarah, also a writer, has posted her take on yesterday’s post, which grew out of lengthy conversations with both her and my dear friend Alec Long Sunday night.

Everyone struggles with the notion of creativity. How to find it. How to feed it. How to make time for it. You can read Sarah’s version of “Write. Right? Wrong” here (scroll to the bottom of the page).

Posted on January 16, 2006 by Carmen K. Sisson tagged Abstract, Alabama, Northport, writing