Word Count

This is just a folderol that serves to exemplify word count. We are reading or typing, eating or snoozing or staring out at the Long Distance, our coats full and poofed in the cool shadows of the living room or his study.
Working thus, we are examining the silver grey afternoon light that should be hot and gold, dropped through the windows like pikes from the bare sky. Today, however, there are clouds. We have hoped for rain and we have received a bit of it, but not enough to do more that evaporate from the driveway and the street so that it looks clean but not wet.
Like ourselves after a shower, the hard ground betrays little of the water so lately poured over it, but the grass, like hair, keeps a few drops close to its roots. More showers may intervene. I am happy for the clouds and the coolness.
One dog has disappeared to his food. The other lays behind me, taking his food in crumbles from the bowls, grinding it by gulpful while looking at me. Why do I glance at him? Why does the reader chuckle to himself, deep in another scene that relates to neither the food nor the stares?
I glance back to see him, to make sure that the food is filling him and that he has not stopped because of the pain of old teeth or the lack of savour of the food shaped and consumed like dirt clods in his bowl. There is other food, softer food, that will appear later in the evening. He may not find much of that, however. At least the water is gentle and the bowl is full.
The break that is formed by the writing helps the words that have been read to find their places in my head. If they are not to remain they will drain out, perhaps in rhythms of typing or speech and then be gone. If they are to stay, they will wait to peer out during the writing that I will sometimes do.
In fact, this count of words itself is in service to that other writing, the writing that is intended for more eyes than those that are variously watching these appear or closed against the brightness. That writing has gone underground and has not found the ground or the slope or the hill from which it can filter again.
The fiction table has dropped and little stories flop about and wait for edits or for new ideas. Given enough time, they will silt into the filing cabinets and will be brought forth in time, relics of ideas that sparked against a particular moment and failed to catch.
Have any caught in recent memory? No, I don’t believe so. Some have been placed on paper but then I began this bout of reading. There were stacks and stacks of books that waited for me and once I pulled one from the tower it was as if I’d pulled a knocker on a gate that swung only one way—inward.
Inside the gate are stories of every hue, biography, fiction, literate short stories and silly fairy stories, half-done stories and full-grown ones. Between them and within them stretch hours cramped into a chair, neck folded almost to my chest so that I could see the words even after I had grown weary of holding that same head upright.
Some books were finished with relief. Biographies, we know they end like the classics, in death. The material of a life, however, runs in odd places and through the commonalities of time and away from them until you are within, not the skin, but the distant circle of the subject. At least, if the biographer is good and the person has come and gone in living memory. Relief, then, is not in coming to the end but in coming back to your life, to a little less of it, in which to act.
Relief comes also at the end of this exercise, as the margins of this page filled with ragged and indented thoughts delimit what might generously be done daily—693 words.