Water Over (and Under) the Dam

Between working Saturday, chopping ice off the driveway, making killer chili and watching Green Bay Go. All. The. Way. I hadn’t a clue what I’d write for Middle Passages this morning. Over the last several days, ice dams on our roof have caused minor leaking above the family room window. When those gutter-clogging nightmares began backing up, they reminded me of writer’s block. The water trapped behind the impenetrable ridge embodied the flow of words locked inside a frozen brain. Water on a roof has to find an outlet. The liquid that dripped into buckets on the back of our couch trickled in like the ideas that pop up when you don’t expect them—in the middle of the night—or when you are singing in the shower. Only, I wasn't getting any of those.

Over the weekend, we did some Googling. We discovered that if you chop off the legs of old pantyhose, fill them with ice-melt, knot them and lay them vertically down the edge of your roof, drooping over the gutter, it creates ridges in the ice and gives the water a conduit in which to travel. For the time being it worked.

Laying in bed early today, listening to water dripping off the house in above-freezing temperatures, I pondered the best method to apply ice-melt to my brain. What could I use to carve a clear channel, ensuring that words would flow as easily as the snow, thawing off the top of our house? Here’s where synchronicity rolled in. My first email today came from WM Freelance Writers’ Connection and contained a post called: Blizzard Brainstorm: Using Prompts to Keep your Writing Flowing. The article contains two links to websites that provide prompts to writers.

I’m pretty sure things warming up already.