The Midnight Hour

At midnight, it’s possible to pop out 500 words about anything.

Braids? They look cute on everybody. You can braid them in front of your ears like Princess Tiger Lily or behind them like Half Pint in Little House on the Prairie. If you have help, you can French braid them along the sides and down the back of your head like the girl in True Grit. (No way she sat up from the ground after days on the trail and fixed those braids herself.) That is still my favorite way to fix my hair, but I’m over 25 – waaay over – so that style is verboten to me. Why?  I don't know.

Tinnitus vs. crickets? Tinnitus is one thin stream whereas crickets have rhythm. Also, they will jump into your house. Last night a cricket came in our house. My husband, so fearless in many respects,asks me to please take care of bugs. I chased the cricket around until it jumped on my sock. Hah! Nabbed it and put it outside. I don’t kill crickets although they are eat stuff in and outside the house, but they don’t creep me out like stink bugs nor do they bite like mosquitoes, so out they go.

Raindrops on roses? Whiskers on kittens? Doorknobs and dewdrops? Warm woolen mittens? Oh, wait, several years ago I wrote a post about warm woolen mittens. (And, yes, I realize the words are not doorknobs and dewdrops.)

At midnight, the problem isn’t that you can’t think of a blog topic, it’s that you don’t WANT to be thinking about a blog topic. You want to be – and I can’t stress this enough – you want to be ASLEEP! If you’re obsessive like me, you pull your pad of paper and pen out of the night table drawer and jot stuff down, hoping that emptying it from your brain will allow you to drift off.  You're too weary and, at the same time, too hopeful of rest, to get up and boot up the computer and write. You don’t WANT to write about anything; you want to be dead to the world, to re-ravel the sleeve of care, as it were. You curse what drives you to write those notes. You curse your over-active brain. You certainly curse whatever pushes you to pull the thoughts out of your head and put them on paper.

Then you are distracted by a huge aftershock to yesterday’s earthquake. You could write about that.
For all of you who wonder what I find to write about – it comes, often, during some non-descript daily event: a road trip, a grandchild, a wiener dog. Just as often, it comes at the midnight hour.