It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, as the song goes, and I’ve been out gathering food for the week and now I’m in for awhile. After I brought in the groceries I spent some time sorting out the bag o’stuff in the car, the glove box and other stuff that accumulates in the car. The bag has important stuff like jumper cables and a couple flares, a plastic bag, some gloves etc. It rounds up the weird assortment of maps and I threw out some ancient ones. (Why was there one for Florida, a place I’ve only flown through and am unlikely to go?).

I put the ziplock bag of handy stuff like screwdriver/multi-function tool etc in the front seat drawer of the car, leaving only the FIAT manuals, flashlight and insurance cards etc in the glove box. Also in the trunk, a bag of writing related stuff (yeah that’s pretty weird, I know): my extra laptop charger, the mighty squid extension cable, a handful of mechanical pencils… Non-writing related: a monopod, and a tiny tripod that I’d thought lost but which is now found-again!

There’s not much happening in the shadowy pause after NaPoWriMo – I hope all the other folks out there writing poems for the month of April enjoyed the subtle pressure and urging of the thirty days. Lots of other things happen in the space of the same thirty days but it does get you in the habit of noticing little moments that can be poem-inspiring, gives you some practice at trying to hang onto nice phrases and turns of words that come your way, and the daily practice of sitting down at least once a day to get something onto whatever surface you write on.

When you’ve come to the end of the month, you’re about two-thirds of the way through the commonly held idea of six weeks it takes to seat a new habit. Were you new to this idea of writing each and every day? Keep going for another couple-three weeks to get the corners rounded a bit more so it feels more comfortable in your day to day world.