Penning a piece about Dad and mold

Here I am, Sunday, Father’s Day, and alone, so rolling up my proverbial sleeves on the sunniest day of the year to write about mold! Of all the freewrite prompts to come up today!

Last night, I spent my evening sorting through some of my writing’s as a fellow poet is encouraging me to do so after I cried at my monthly library writing group about how I seemed incapable of assembling, and producing, a collection of writings. Sarah, a very short and past middle-aged woman who moved here from the Midwest is the most amazing fiery poet and artist, with a printing press and art supplies that fill her entire living room!

I suppose she took pity on me and invited me for tea to show me some of her past projects she thought I could use as a model. Pair these with photos of my soul collage and put together in nice report-folder looking things and make them available to the public.

Easy enough when I look at the requirements for completed project, like I could have thrown this together in an hour as a 5th grader wanting an A on my state or presidential report, so what’s my problem now I wonder? But there’s something that nearly paralyzes me when it comes to compiling and sharing my writings?

Is that because someone may be able to break some code of who I am if they take the time to lie them all out one beside the other? Like some invisible map of me will emerge with such clarity and simplicity and it will be so easy for perfect strangers to locate the parts of me I’ve hidden for a reason?

Many in my stack are directly linked with my Dad. I note in my journal this morning, that I don’t think that I’ve ever written a poem devoted entirely to my mother, she does show up as a side character, or just as her in the occasional dream, but so queer I’ve never penned a tribute to her besides the ones I write in Valentine and Birthday cards. I suppose there’s no remaining mold on those memories? Perhaps, we start with the top tiles working our way into the entirely dark corners so we don’t have to keep switching rags?

I started to pen some ideas of how to weave all together, dreams, poems, life vignette’s and observations and to define a purpose for these, something not unlike a manual devoted to cleaning persevering black mold from bathroom windows and walls. Surely, not any kind of best seller, but a life-raft for someone else attempting the same kind of psychological cleaning--I’ve learned to write and write and write in an attempt to excavate that which threatens my health.

When do I just pull out the spray-bottle of bleach?

Photo: Me and Dad, shortly after his stroke.