Just Write {21}

We found some keys in the parking lot during pick-up from school, on the ground. I picked them up and looked around. No one. I looked for an answer but there were no words. No name or kind of car, just a symbol. I’m sure the symbol should have meant something to me but it didn’t. I needed words.

We put the keys on the mirror of the driver’s side on the nearest car and Miles wanted to know what would happen if that wasn’t the right car.

I don’t know, honey, but we tried. Maybe the people who find them next will keep trying. The keys were right by that car, so let’s hope we did the right thing.

I say, Use your words a lot, all through the day, teaching. Miles says his teacher says that, too. He doesn’t like to talk to her all that much. He says he’s too shy. I try to tell him that his words will give him power but he’s not ready to use them.

After my three are in bed at night I play Words With Friends and Hanging With Friends and Scramble With Friends. It could be said that I have an addiction to words. I type them out in posts and emails and status updates and tweets and I read, read, read in books and in posts and in status updates and tweets. But in Kindergarten, I vaguely remember, I too was afraid of words.

I don’t know when or how it changed but I was even in a special reading class in second grade. I was behind. Not ahead. Nervous and shy with words. But it did change and then years later, my roommate and bestie, Katie and I would play Boggle after nights of serving tacos and burritos until the wee hours, while eating pizza rolls. And I would sit on the stoop of the front door to our apartment and read books. I still clearly remember reading I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb on those steps.

A lot of the time I miss the years of words that weren’t digital. Unscreened. Boggle tiles that rattled, pencils and paper and the flipping of the pages with my feet on the next step.

The keys just reminded me that everything is harder without words. So I’m glad to have them in all their ways.

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This is the 21st installment of Just Write, an exercise in free writing your ordinary and extraordinary moments. {Please see the details here.}  I would love to read your freely written words so join me and link up below. You can add the url of your post at any time. Just be sure it’s a link to your Just Write post, not to your main page. There are really no rules, besides Just Write! (Then link back to this post in your post so people know where to go if they’d like to join in.) (Any links not following those two guidelines will be deleted.) 

Also. Please take a moment to visit someone else who has linked up! It’s a really good way to meet new writers and get inspired by the meaning behind their moments. Word?

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