why I write

             I have had a hard time writing lately and it is frustrating me.  Normally writing is such a release but not today and not yesterday or the day before that or not every day before that for weeks now.     I’m blaming it on lack of inspiration, and also this incredibly critical place I’m in personally, in which I play a song on the piano and stop because it’s not how I want it to sound, and start scribbling down words and throw them out because I don’t enjoy them. 
                Yesterday when I got out of work, I went to the Stone Arch Bridge in Gilsum. I clambered down the cliffs to the river, dancing over granite and old bricks that had lost their sharp edges over years of riverbed existence.  The heat hung over New Hampshire like a massive curtain that was taken out of the dryer too soon, and I escaped its weight by letting the clear cold water envelop me.  I walked up the river towards the bridge, carefully placing my feet on the few moss-less rocks to keep myself from slipping into the current.  I halted at a sandbar, still as stone, and breathed in the magnificence of the woods, and the cliffs, and the water, and I wanted to be able to write about it so badly, so that you could breathe in the magnificence too. 
                And there I had the epiphany- this is why I will keep writing.  This is why I will keep writing even when odium is all I feel towards the sentences I string together.   I will keep writing, because if I do, there’s that chance that one day, merely by reading my words, you too will be able to feel the Ashuelot tumble over your toes as you stand beneath the Stone Arch Bridge in Gilsum on the first day of summer.  Until then, I will scribble and toss and backspace and keep trying.