The Muse on Holiday...

Home again.

I smiled to see familiar crows fluffed and grumpy on their cold branches. Not so very different, after all, from the bold and curious grackle birds of Yucatan,  who called me to feed them with high pitched shrieks—a sound exactly like the rapid release of air squeezed from a child’s balloon.

Yup. We’ve traded the sight of the high-soaring frigate birds over the Gulf of Mexico, for our beloved bald eagles—the humid air wafting from jungle and marsh, for the cool, clean scent of our northern ocean.

As we pulled in the driveway at home, I saw our heather in its full amethyst bloom and sighed.

 Did being on unfamiliar earth challenge me when it came to my writing? Am I so very rooted to home? When the El Norte wind blew around the sharp, stone angles of the beach casa—I heard voices unlike the forest songs at home and I stumbled in my thoughts. I am an intruder here—I struggle not only with the language, but its alien earth.

Perhaps because my WIP is based in the land I have always known, whose voices are those of  evergreen rainforest giants and the northern Pacific Ocean. 

I think perhaps I should have started to write something new—about the ancient Maiya, the land of underground rivers and sonatas, where the jungle trees trail their roots thirty feet downward to the surface of the water. 

I will be better prepared, next time.