I would like to share the guest post The Things with Feathers by Rebecca Wenrich Wheeler and then to ask you to check out my review for her book here:
Writing takes perseverance. Writing in hopes of getting published takes perseverance and an unbounded (maybe even irrational) level of hope. I’m sure when people ask me, “What motivates you?”, they expect something more complicated than simply hope, but that’s all I’ve got. Hope that I can leave the world a better place than when I found it. Hope that I can be better. Hope that I can write something worth reading.
My Grandma Helen passed away almost 12 years ago at the age of 100. I’m not sure how you live to 100 without an unbounded level of hope. As a young adult, Grandma taught in a one-room schoolhouse in Western Maryland. She supplied me with poetry books, novels, and blank journals. Grandma also fostered my love for gardening (and banana peppers!). Her backyard was a maze of garden beds including a path lined with cedar trees. She named the path: “the bunny trail” which my sister and I used for epic games of hide and seek. I’m sure Grandma would laugh at my store-bought compost drum. She built one out of chicken wire and turned the compost herself. After writing When Mama Grows with Me, the list of potential dedicatees contained one name.
For Grandma Helen—master gardener, rescuer of ladybugs, and advocate for birds— who taught me what it meant to grow.
When Grandma was in her late seventies, she went to Europe for the first time, and when she was in her early eighties, she went back. This made such an impression on me as a young teenager; she never gave up on her dream to travel no matter how long it took to come true.
Grandma also had a love for Emily Dickinson, which she shared with me. Honestly, I cannot remember when I started using Dickinson’s “Hope 1” as a mantra, but over the years I find myself repeating these words, both during times when I feel little hope and when I feel it in abundance.
Hope is the thing with feathers That perches on the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all
I love Dickinson’s explanation of hope because it’s not really an explanation at all. It’s a metaphor, a feeling, a movement, a song with no words. You know when you have it and when you’ve lost it. Hope is relentless. Hope doesn’t let go easily and thank God it doesn’t.
Thank you,
Glenda, Charlie and David Cates
