10-minute writing prompt

Outside the Window: What’s the weather outside your window doing right now? If that’s not inspiring, what’s the weather like somewhere you wish you could be? (thanks thinkwritten.com)

The song is looping through my head: “The weather outside is frightful, but the fire is so delightful…” But why? The weather outside is beautiful. Some might even say perfect.

What is perfect weather? Sunshine, warm, but not too warm. Cool, but not too cool. Preferably with a blue sky that screams Spring!!! I have to open the shades and look out, because really, RIGHT NOW, RIGHT HERE is pretty damn beautiful.

Technically, it is not early Spring. The date on the calendar says May 10th, which means we are almost closer to Summer than Spring. But really, this year’s winter weather just ended about a week ago, so it feels like early spring. While the daffodils and tulips are, in truth, long gone, and even the irises are starting to sag, the roses are to die for and the green of the leaves is perfection. The heat of summer hasn’t started to suck the color from them, and the chill of autumn hasn’t begun to turn them, so they are indeed at that perfect moment in time.

I bet if I pulled out my trusty Sherwin Williams color book I would find several shades that say “spring” if not literally, figuratively. Now I have this strange craving to count the number of times the word “spring” is used in the paint color book. Silly, silly me. That is a fun activity for another day.

While the weather outside is decidedly NOT frightful, and it is the colors that are most compelling, I can’t help but enjoy the sweet, chirping sounds of the birds. I have no idea, and I mean NONE, of what birds are out there. A bird-watching expert I am not. Not even a bird-watching amateur. But, this house on this block in this city has to be where I have heard the most bird tweeting and chirping and whistling I have ever heard in my life. The whole family has noticed –particularly my ten-year-old who complained that the birds kept waking him up in the morning when I left his windows open.

10 minutes of free-form writing, huh? It seems like it would be a lot less than this. Is it possible to get carpal-tunnel disease from only a few minutes of rapid typing? And how much stream of consciousness is okay in this situation.
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Wow. There’s the buzzer. And I was just going to start my thought about modern writing – you know the kind of blogging and instagramming that requires images to go with those Times New Roman words? The internet is a pretty astounding invention. I could take a picture, try and record the sound of the birds, link to Sherwin Williams (and ideally all the Spring colors!) and what started as an exercise so I would feel I’d written some actual words today (as opposed to marketing plans and editing and plotting….) I would have put pen to paper, and voila! a blog post…Crazy nuts how this internet thing works. 😉

Happy Thursday!

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