Time and talent

I’ve often wished I could draw or paint.  I admire those who can take a pencil and with a few lines sketch a face or a scene or an object.  Art was never my forte.  As a small child, some of my older cousins managed to win a small prize for a simple drawing on the children’s page in my old hometown newspaper.  I wanted to do the same but I couldn’t draw.  Even in a coloring book, I often struggled to stay within the lines.  So I decided I would write.  I already made up stories in my head and created new versions of old games.  Playing house is an age old childhood game but I made sub specialties of the original.  I liked to play “Western Days” which was a version of house but one in which my cohorts and I were either traveling via wagon train or eking out life in a cabin, along the lines of Laura Ingalls Wilder. 

            My first published poem – actually my first publication of any kind – was a poem I wrote about the pioneer history of St. Joseph, Missouri, my hometown.  History always seemed close enough to touch and some of my ancestors had been pioneers en route to California when circumstances and preferences caused them to make the raw new city on the frontier home.  So I wrote about the old wagon trains and the pioneers.  The Saturday morning St. Joseph Gazette printed it on their children’s page and the rest is history.

            I learned that everyone has different talents.  At school, students would often tell me that they “can’t” do math or read well or learn history.  My answer is always, “Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses.” Then I ask what they can do, what they enjoy, what they do well.  And there’s always an answer.  A kid who despairs at understanding literature may turn out to be a math or science whiz.  The student who is almost as clumsy in gym as I was may be a genius in an academic subject or outstanding in one of the performing arts.

            I like to think writing is one of my talents.  I also believe I’m a reasonably good cook.  But since I’d rather not spend my working life in the kitchen, I rely on writing.  Some people can sing beautifully, hitting the right notes with little seeming effort but that’s another gift I didn’t receive.  I like to use words to paint my pictures in someone’s imagination or to inform or to persuade or education.

            Words are my tools.  I patch them together in a way similar to a quilt, piece by piece to create a whole.  Sometimes I’m fancy, like embroidery and at other times, I’m making something necessary to last.  There are times when I have to pick out words like missed stitches and put them together again until they are right.

            My Granny told me that her grandmother, my great-great grandmother, wove on a loom.  That fascinated me and I enjoyed imagining the way she wove threads into whole cloth, then used that fabric to make garments for her large family.  I’ve never used a large loom but I’ve had the small ones made for children to fashion pot holders and I’ve made a few simplistic looms to do something similar but it seems it would be both enjoyable as well as be powerful to view the work of one’s’ hands.

            Although I don’t write much poetry these days, having chosen other mediums to express myself and to use words, I wrote one once that included the line, “I work my words the way my grandmother’s grandmother worked her loom and like her, I create something that will last the

years.”

            I hope that I do and that everyone remembers we all have a talent or two.  We each have strengths and weaknesses.  It’s up to us, however, to discover what those may be.