Smell the sawdust?!
I have just started here, feeling strange. Like it's the first day of school, and I have just arrived with my newly sharpened pencils. You can still smell the wood shavings.
I like pencils. In the end, I am just a girl with a pencil--so it feels strange to be here in the virtual ether, tapping into a square box that blinks back me. When I was still living with my parents, I wrote at an old roll-top desk that had belonged to my grandfather. At one point, its dark brown stain was green with age and cigarette smoke, but my father and I refinished it after we moved to the farm on Back Orrville Road in Wayne County, Ohio. The finish has held up, and my father uses this desk now. But when I was in high school, the newly refurbished desk sat in my room, and I did my homework on it. I wrote in a series of journals, on loose-leaf notebook paper held in folders with metal fasteners. On the desk I was a pencil cup covered with red fabric and tiny white dots; the seat cushion I'd made for the chair was in matching fabric. I wrote entirely in pen, and still do now. But I love pencils--precise German drafting pencils and mechanical ones with the ever-consistent tips. They never disappoint.
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