Finding Your Life's Passion- or Passion? What Passion?

The Truth Is...Continued

Here I am with my old "The truth is" writing prompt again. You start with "the truth is" and go on from there...

The truth is, if y'all have any good ideas for other writing prompts you'd like to hear from this writer, feel free to let me know...Except for you, Billy! You are a dear, dear sweetie, but you'd probably have me writing about goats invading alien spaceships or some such as that!

The truth is I have no idea what my passion is. You know when I was talking about visualizing your dream into reality? Well, every time I think on it lately, I come up with dead air.

Marti and I tried thinking together in the same room and we both had the same result- nada.

We've asked ourselves if we're just chicken shit. We've wondered if we're afraid of failure, so we're blocking our wish from popping up into our heads so we can go visualize it. We've analyzed, proselytized, finalized and idealized all sorts of notions, but it doesn't help.

This is as far as I've gotten...My dream reality is so far a plot of land on Kerr Lake where I will put 4 tobacco barns- two joined together to make a roomy and nice cottage, then the other two will each be transformed into little guest cottages for the boys and their families when they come home to visit.

When the boys aren't there, I can rent them out to folks like a bed and breakfast, thus supporting me in my old age. When the boys are there, we'll jump off the end of the dock, water ski, catch fish and raise a good amount of hell...Then, when we're done with the racket and the fussing, we'll send them off to their cottages with their families and lock the door behind them until morning.

I'll have a study overlooking the water, so I can write and look out the window at the red-headed woodpecker who's made a home in the tree ten yards away. I'll have a little, manageable vegetable and flower garden and perhaps a few rose bushes, but not the well-behaved kind, the old "found" rose type bush, the kind that still grows around the foundations of home places long ago reduced to their stone foundations.

There will be music and the smell of muffins and cinnamon rolls wafting out my kitchen window in the morning. The window will be the kind that you turn a crank at the bottom to open it and it opens out from the cabin, like tiny glass barn doors.

There should be a screened in porch overlooking the lake, too. The beds will have feather mattresses, pillows and comforters. Old quilts will be piled in a trunk in front of the overstuffed sofa. And my friends won't have to call before they come over, just pop in the back door...Unless I've stuck my little yellow "Not right now" flag into its holder off the back porch railing.

Bird houses. Bird feeders. Fresh zinnias on the old wooden kitchen table in the summer. Fresh tomatoes, shaved Parmesan cheese, balsamic vinegar, olive oil and basil for summer lunch. Thick vegetable soup in the winter time. The quiet stillness of a gray winter morning that heralds snow by mid-afternoon. Snow that clings to the cedars and looks like a Christmas card from my front gate.

A red kettle on the stove. Mismatched mugs hanging from hooks beneath the open-faced cabinets. A yellow hooked rug in the middle of the kitchen floor. Warm dogs snuggled beside me on the sofa for their afternoon naps. Someone who loves me, who loves to laugh, puttering around the place, sometimes taking the '48 Chevy truck into town to pick up one Bubba thing or another.

Bright, faded colors against old barn wood, soft, worn quilt fabric against ancient barn wood...and time, always more time. No one pushing me to do things I don't want to do. No paperwork or time clocks. Just the serenity of the sunlight hitting lake ripples, the quiet lapping of water against the dock, the scent of approaching rain on a hot summer day.

This is all I know of what I want and perhaps for now, it is enough.