Finding Inspiration in Fallow Ground: A Writer’s Journey

I’ve been camping and gardening and building and researching my family genealogy and crocheting. Everything but writing. There has been plenty to write about–heaven knows I generally always have something to say–yet even my journal lay unopened for days on end. I have been living life rather than writing about it, or even speaking much about it. I had no words that needed expressing. I fell silent.

Someone suggested to me the word fallow.

There is the old term fallow ground. This is when a field is left unplanted for a period of time. The purpose is to allow the soil to rest and rejuvenate. I think people do well to practice such time. I have fallen into a fallow time, and I think I will embrace it.

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Even though I wrote these books, they are now stories apart from me, as if written by someone else. Time has given me distance, and I come to the book as a reader without memory of exactly what happens. I do know generally speaking the story will take me to the warmhearted town of Valentine, where I’m safe and entertained, and inspired to believe in the goodness of people and life for one more day.

Christmas Comes to Valentine is the story of Corrine, a precocious thirteen-going-on-thirty-three teenager, and her views on life and her family and her world set against the backdrop of the Christmas season in a small rural town of Valentine, Oklahoma, a town such as the majority of us knew growing up. I opened the book at random and came upon these paragraphs that made me chuckle:

“Aunt Marilee went all out on the presents, and Corrine knew from her past two Christmases with her aunt that the closets were filling up. When the tree went up, soon would follow piles of presents beneath it for Corrine and Willie Lee, so many that Corrine would often feel embarrassed. She would think about poor children in China, who weren’t even Christians, so they didn’t have Christmas, or starving children in Africa, who wouldn’t have a Christmas dinner. Thinking of those children made her feel guilty for her bounty.

Often, about this time of year, she would consider growing up and entering missionary work.

After several minutes of standing there staring at the artificial trees, Corrine reached out and touched one.

“Looks real, don’ it?” said a man she just then saw nearby. He was an older man, a rancher, with pointy-toed boots and a cowboy hat.

While Corrine was wondering about talking to a stranger, Aunt Marilee said with some wonderment, “Yes, it really does,” then reached out and felt it for herself.

Corrine looked at the skinny stick of a trunk on each tree and thought that if the branches could be made to look so lifelike, why didn’t some manufacturer think to make the trunk look more real?

The old gentleman said, “They have come a long way in this world. Now people put up a tree on Thanksgiving weekend. Used to, we went out and chopped us down a cedar on Christmas Eve, put it up that night, and took it down Christmas night.”

You on-ly had a tree for one night?” Willie Lee asked.

“Yep. Had Christmas all day long, but that was it. We got back to chores the next day, up before the sun.”

Another deprived childhood story.

I laugh again as I read it over. I invite you to come away with me from the clamor of today’s world into Valentine for some time of rest and renewal of the Christmas spirit.

Blessings,