Words

I feel like I haven't had good words in ages.
This happens every now and then; my well dries up and I am left, parched and seeking refreshment.
It's not always a bad thing: this want, this dehydration. It slows me down. It makes me reach, stretch my creative arm, causing me to seek, knock, ask.
Why do I not have words?
What is it I am dying to say... but cannot?
Today I am thinking about a lot of things. My finite mind is trying to wrap around this life, all that is happening, all that is going to happen... I am consumed by thoughts of deadlines, office hours, jingle bells, kitty litter, cardboard boxes, and Christmas parties.
I just finished taking my first final of the semester. I turned in a photography portfolio last night. Monday is my comprehensive bio final, Tuesday is a comprehensive nutrition final along with a nutrition project that had some technical difficulties. Wednesday is a 100 question exam with 5 journals due. And then... then I am done. With school. For now.
Two days after that I will be moving. In that small window of time I will pack up fourteen months worth of stuff and I will leave Hays Boulevard. I want to get out and sit on my roof one more time. Light one more fire in the fireplace. Play with the garage door for a while, so I don't forget how one works. I know the day I leave, I will stand in my empty room and say goodbye. For the third time in eighteen months.
I am a gypsy.
I have no home.
There will be indentions in the carpet from my bed and bookshelf. The room will smell like me. Like vanilla candles and nag champa incense and gap body mist and sandalwood body lotion. The room will echo... I remember this feeling. I will take a mental picture. Shut the door. And I will leave.
And I will drive downtown in a car full of stuff. I will park outside a new apartment complex and I will use a new key to unlock a new door and walk into a new, empty space. This room will echo too. It will smell like cleaning agents and paint, and the musty heat pump will generate warm air. This new space will start to awaken.
Along with this new space, with the end of the semester, comes a new family member. Arthur is a 10 week old kitten who stole my heart last Saturday night. He's the color of my coat, with faint stripes and spots. He's rambunctious and energetic and loud... he likes to cuddle and play with Hershey kisses under the dining room table. He runs headlong into walls and collapses, belly up, on the couch when he's tired. He's staying at Katherine's until I move to my new space. But he will go home with me in nine days... When we will start a new life.
Soon the new empty space will be filled with smells of food, of perfume, of laundry detergent. Beds will be made, books put on shelves, art hung on the walls, dishes put away in the cupboards. We will start new traditions and get used to driving down Tates Creek Road to get home. There will be new mailboxes and new bathroom sinks. This will become my landing spot. I will make this new place my home.
Life will start to look different.
Life continues to change.
Christmas is coming and it will not be like any Christmas we've ever had before. Three of the Vaughans will have to travel to Winchester to celebrate the holiday; displaced from their own beds so that the six of us can be there on Christmas morning to eat cinnamon rolls and open stockings. There will be a new dog, my new cat, and another year of experience to be accounted for. We are looking for new traditions, new hope, new laughter. Such things are not as easy to purchase as Christmas lights or gingerbread. The process will sting a little, pull a bit at the tendons of our hearts, and stretch the muscles of our consciousness. Until we come to realize that Christmas is just another day. Christmas, just like life, continues to change. Some things will stay the same. Bulbs will go out in the string of lights, and we will have to replace them. Ornaments will break. We'll fill the holes in the Christmas tree under my mother's careful, obsessive supervision. I'm clinging to a Charlie Brown sort of hope... It may seem like I'm counting the chickens before they hatch.
But then Christmas will come and go.
My prayer is we will remember who we are again. When mistletoe will not be what guarantees kisses, once we have stowed away the excess wrapping paper, untangled the Christmas lights. Holiday spirit all exhausted, folded up, packed away. The New Year will be here. School will start again. My kitten will grow up. The world will shut down. Slipping into the gray hibernation of January and February.
All the while I will be praying. Praying for grace. That as January comes, my spirit would grow to be giving, patient, wise, and selfless; that I would embrace such change and custom and fervor, knowing that all things change.
And the dam will break.
And the water will come rushing in, quenching thirst.
And perhaps, then, words will come.
Come and stay.