Sometimes I feel like a lush. I’m unemployed now – sort of. I’m a writer, and I write from my little cabin on the bayou. But I’d previously had “real” jobs since I was seventeen years old. Even when I was a stay-at-home mom, I had a job to do every day – a reason to get a move on. Now (as always), words compel me to get out of bed – they pester me until I give them their say.

Today I send these words to you from a frosty Louisiana. I was hunkering down by the fire, listening to an old Cheap Trick song, (Did anyone else have a crush on Tom Peterssen? He blew me a kiss at a concert when I was fifteen – talk about swoon!) contemplating where I would hang this picture or that, when I glanced out the living room window, and there before me was a wondrous sight.  The trees were glistening, the product of a rain that had been present for several days. Only today, the dewy drops had magically transmuted into ice.

Ice is so much more regal than water.

An ice storm in Louisiana – oh, this winter soul was in heaven! I grabbed my raincoat and rushed outside to look more closely at the gift that Mother Nature had surreptitiously bestowed upon my corner of the world.

Life is not a linear equation. It’s not mathematical and logical. It’s a dance. Sometimes slow and methodical, like a waltz. Sometimes a headbanging good time, like a Cheap Trick concert. Sometimes it’s movement from here to there and sometimes it’s swaying in the same place over and over, like the ebb and flow of the tide.

Today it dances before me in the form of an ice storm and invites me to join in the beauty.

Come with me, y’all. Dance to this magnificent song called Life.