Down the Habit Hole

Once upon a time, there was a girl who lived in a very exclusive gated community. A gated community with only one house, one dog, and one apple tree. The girl was an empress whose empire stretched far and wide, all the way to the brick wall and the iron gate. The girl reigned over her dominion with a velvet glove which she also used to test for dust on the mantle.

The boy, er, emperor was happy. Their supreme highnesses were happy. The dog was happy. The girl had a soul that couldn't be held within a brick-and-iron enclosure. The girl longed for the open spaces of her youth spent in a foreign land. A youth of bare feet and mockingbirds and the warm tilled soil of a garden patch on the side of the mountain ridge.

The girl's soul flitted from one project to another, each an artistic expression of who she thought she was. Each one had its roots in her childhood at her mother's knee, all except the lone expression with its roots at the end of Julie Child's pen.

The girl's fascination and adoration of the pen itself prodded her to fill countless blank-page books and empty gigabytes with her prose. Stories were everywhere, in the frozen pose of a delicate porcelain figurine, in her everyday life, in her vivid imagination of the world when she would be restored to her throne. Writing for the girl was a pleasure that flowed from her fingertips so effortlessly that whole days spent writing could pass by in the blink of an eye.

One day, the girl awoke to find that her emoting needed an eloquent pacemaker. A doctor was called. He took a look at the girl's elan and determined it needed more than a etymological pacemaker; she needed an idiomatic defibrillator until a solecismic transplant could be found.

Alas, the girl finally relented to the doctor's orders to keep quiet. She retrieved her buckskin gloves from the carriage house and began to tend to her other projects while she waited for Francis de Sales to resurrect her elegiac heart.

As she plunged her spade underneath the expanding roots of an invasive weed, her eyes caught something moving over in the distance by the brick wall. A small rounded tuft of fur stopped and twitched its nose at her as their eyes met. A smile crossed the furball's lips as it produced a pocket watch from its breast pocket, winked at the girl, and hopped away.