Creating your own story board

There have been big loops in my life where I’ve been at the precipice of a new undertaking. The first came in 1989, having gone back to complete my bachelor’s and having told my employer (a law firm) that I would like to move to a four-day a week schedule in order to have time to write. Yes, I took a pay cut. I was living on General Pershing Street in uptown New Orleans renting a half a double with a camelback and small garden with a large pecan tree in the back. It was a period in my life where I felt I had time and I had the ability to frame what would come next.

I had divorced my first husband and just gotten a puppy, Samm Lightning – who went on to be my companion for 14 years. I had begun working on longer pieces of fiction and more importantly working on myself. Then one day as if to provide a metaphor, the kitchen cabinets all slipped off the wall on their own volition and shattered all of the dishes I had been given as a wedding gift.

My transformation was complete.

I moved to Spain with my second husband, which led me on an odyssey that ended in San Francisco where within months I met my third husband and a new chapter of life began. None of this was on my story board. I had intended to find a place eventually in the French Quarter to live, work and write alone.

In 1995, I began my second new undertaking. Once married for the third time, I longed to be back in New Orleans and created an opportunity to do just that. I visited an architectural firm that had doing work with my husband’s San Francisco firm and introduced him to them in absentia. When we returned for a visit to New Orleans together, I sealed the deal – or rather he did. New Orleans’ romantic allure aligned with a juncture in my husband’s architectural career and made this idea more compelling than you might imagine.

My return to New Orleans lasted ten months and included a broken down Saab 900S, two cross country moves, a new puppy name Arlene Starr, and the reemergence of my panic attacks. In no time at all, I found myself back in San Francisco writing a new chapter of my life. I had now decided to be the Madonna of fiction writers and I spent my free time translating Chekov into English, writing novels, and starting my own writing group. Meanwhile, my work took me into the world of finance and it is because of this slight jog to the left in my work where my version on my story board and real life diverged yet again.

I helped build a company in the financial industry that was riding the dizzying heights of the 90’s and I rode that wave into my return to New Orleans a decade later, and three months shy of the 2005 Federal Flood, and this chapter included the building of the LaLa, the ensuing sad and numbing divorce, the death of my mother, the adoption of my son, the loss of my job and my hair, and a realization that change was not finished with me.

Yesterday, in the gloaming, on my knees in the garden I had just created – I was planting the nasturtiums that will glide along the top of the earth and I thought about my story board, about where I am now. Towering behind me is a burned out house with bullet holes in it that I’m contemplating as an investment for my future, to my left was a wee sidelong shadow of the new puppy, Stella, who stole my heart after much deliberation on my part, while housed inside of me is a book bursting from my seams, a new work path opening up, a heart that is finally healed from one too many heartaches, and my hands are deep into the terrain of my living narrative [yet again].

Freeze Frame

I am creating a new story board even though I know real life is about to intervene.

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