Although I have had many good intentions of organizing myself this week, it just hasn’t happened yet, or not in the way that I always hope for (ie: my desk a picture of perfection, no dishes in the sink, several day’s worth of meals planned, fall gardening done–you get the picture). I’m beginning to resign myself to the scattered person that I must be, incapable of maintaining a certain standard, or let’s just say–having to be content in creating my own way. So there may be a thin sheath of dust on the windowsill, a few cobwebs in the closet, after all. There’s no getting around it.

Outside of traveling south 3 days in a row since Monday, once all the way to Big Sur to sign books (a long roundtrip but worth it), I have yet to have more than a few minutes to do any writing, focus on my blog or pin down any one of the many things that seem to be in the works, let alone sit down for dinner with my kids or fold the piles of laundry crowding my bedroom floor since last weekend. And as much as I love to head west from my inland perch, I realize it takes a lot out of me. I pine for the sea on a daily basis, but I don’t envy the commute, not one minute.

And yet like so many of my creative friends and writers and artists in general, I have to work for a living and in my business sometimes that means driving a far. Mostly  it means that I’m just constantly in motion, and if not writing or developing recipes or working on a book, pondering the next step, the next recipe project, perhaps, or simply contemplating if what I’m doing will fall in line with the next opportunity. Will it lead me down the path, I ask? Will it help me pay my rent? I have plenty of free time, in the way that most working people don’t, while at the same time it seems no free time at all, because my brain is always on the go, gathering ideas, gathering stories, like a human lint trap.

Perhaps someday it won’t be this way, and I’ll be writing from a sweet little island cottage off the coast of Turkey, say, eating fresh yogurt drizzled with sage honey after my morning swim and updating you by some post blogosphere technology without a care in the world, or on the low down tending to my sheep rather than my children and writing poetic quatrains instead. Or maybe, I’ll be like the novelist and essayist Michael Chabon (Manhood for Amateurs), or more accurately like his wife, Ayelet Waldman (Bad Mother), both whom wrote recent memoirs about parenting coupled with the writers’ life–in other words, fully on my path. To be so lucky, and yet I am. I keep reminding myself of that.

Last night I heard Michael Chabon interviewed on KQED and I want to tell you that he was so sweet, so genuinely honest. Any preconceptions I may have had about him (not many) went out the door. I found myself smiling when he laughed, imagining his boyish self shyly responding to all the questions, personal ones that would make me wince. He has made it to the big league as a writer, it’s true, but the lonely boy that he spoke of as he remembered himself one poignant night as a young budding cartoonist–sitting at a big table all by himself while staring at an empty door–seemed somehow appropriate, something even I could relate to. And he’s not lonely, he has friends, a lot of them, he made sure we knew that. I have friends too. Still, there is just maybe a lingering sense of loneliness within the writer self, something deep down inside that always questions that empty door, making us what and who we are.

But back to the here and now. As of today, I have my brain wrapped around too many things to count coherently and because of that my desk remains cluttered but I am determined to carve out a little time to focus my thoughts. This morning, I drove my daughter to school, picked her up midday for an appointment, then dropped her off again. All in the veil of silence as she isn’t feeling well and thus is irritated with me. My son is equally quiet and reserved today, and hardly talking. So shouldn’t I be rejoicing in the peace, relishing the lack of resistance in the house? It doesn’t feel that way, somehow, but that’s how it goes.

And yet after making my bed, getting dressed (something writers are infamously known not to do), meeting a client, and the aforementioned shuttling of my daughter, I have actually managed to put a pot of chicken stock on the low boil (1 chicken carcass, a stalk or two of celery with its leaves, 1/2 an onion, 1 bay leaf, and a a few cracks of pepper, cover with cool water and simmer for at least 2 hours; strain and season with a touch of salt) and make banana-pecan bread from the blackest bananas you can imagine, next to the ripening sourdough starter (one of my other projects), beginning to gather flies.

The kitchen timer has just gone off. I’ve written this very indulgent post and my bread is ready.  Time for a cup of tea and to have a slice, toasted with a little sweet butter.