Siren Call

Where to start - that's the question I'm always faced with when I give in to the writer's block I am dealing with on a daily basis. It's not that I don't want to write or that I have nothing to write about - rather it's the opposite - there are so many things I want to write about and ponder - but I'm choosing to not write and here I am months later depressed at the lack of writing and feeling rather like I'm going to implode if I don't start writing again.

Every year around the time of Fall - or Indian Summer - I get melancholy for the mountains - Montana - specifically. It's been 13 years since I left my home state - with my family. We've never been back. I am pining for the mountains, the prairies - for Monarch and Neihart - for Memorial Falls - for the view from the back porch of our house. I miss the bluffs of the Missouri river - the Giant Springs park and the monstrous falls of my town's namesake : Great Falls.

I feel trapped in Florida. I love my husband and my kids and my family - and I have a few very dear friends here - but there's nothing else that keeps me wanting to stay here. Maybe it's just my eternal wanderlust  - but I want to be elsewhere.

Go ahead and judge me but I hate the South. All I see here is intolerance and judgement. I'm not ignorant - I know that those things exist everywhere - it just seems to me that they exist even more HERE in the South than other parts of the country where I've lived (and I've lived in several places of our great country, plus abroad for 6 years of my life!). I've seen lots of positive things here as well - but it's hard to keep seeing the beauty when you're seeing so much ugly.

It's possible that I'm just burned out - on people, on heat, humidity and the lack of elevation - the constant barrage of mosquitoes, the oil spill, the days upon days without a break of silence and time for myself.

I went to the beach last night with Wyatt. Just me and him - we took a blanket and a frisbee and went to watch the sun dip into the water. It was pretty and as the light waned and the temperature dropped I found a brief moment of quiet as Wyatt was happily playing in the sand and I wrote in my journal in the first time in forever. We were almost alone on the beach - there was a couple probably several hundred feet away. And then a large family came down the beach access and plopped their stuff just feet away from me. I mean they had the whole beach - why did they have to interrupt my little bit of solitude? When the woman started taking pictures (it was dark out!) with her larger than life flash - I found myself increasingly irritated as the night sky was lit up over and over by something that was no act of nature. We packed up and left.

So where does all this leave me? I'm not sure. The kids and I are packing up and heading to the mountains in TN in a week or two (once maddie's arm is healed). Mike can't come because he's trying to recap lost fishing money now that snapper season is open on the weekends.

I had a small meltdown last night when I told him I thought I needed a break and wanted to take a trip by myself somewhere in November. I'm debating between going to MT or Seattle where my good friend lives. I'm leaning towards Seattle because she's a kindred spirit and she gets what my issues are! She understands completely and it would be great to spend some time with her (and meet her newest little one).

The mountains call to my soul and I've been burying their song in the depths of my heart for too long. It's like a siren call - I need to go.