We’re less than a week away from showtime for the local high school musical, and as usual, I’m up to my eyeballs in something or other and loving every minute of it. This year the kids are performing The Music Man, and my older daughter and I will primarily be concerning ourselves with hair–tons of big, Titanic Period hair– along with Native headdresses for the Pick-a-Little Ladies (learn how to make them here), various hats, and the construction of an honest-to-goodness Iowa picnic dress for one young woman, who couldn’t find anything within her budget to wear (and then her engine on her car blew, so my diligent work, which included learning last minute pattern grading, has become charity, which I don’t mind because I have to get into heaven somehow).  If everything runs smoothly backstage at dress rehearsal, I may actually get to see my youngest daughter in her all-school production debut as that bit part kid who sings the line “In March I got a grey mackinaw” in The Wells Fargo Wagon on opening night, but I’m not holding my breath, even though I don’t have any beards to glue on this year and no one has to be spontaneously painted green in the last three minutes of each show.  There is plenty of big hair to be maintained through costume changes.  Needless to say, I’m being kept fairly busy and having great fun in the process.

With all of this happening, this past week I haven’t had any time to write, let alone to think about what I could possibly post on the old blog that would have meaning to potential readers or be relevant to my work.  I mean, Sunday rolled around and it was snowing and the house was still covered in feathers.  Someone decided it would be great fun to pretend it was Christmas already and created a caroling station on Pandora, so we were dancing and singing, between gluing headdresses together.  Monday was a snow day, and the girls went sledding instead of to school, play practice was cancelled, so I made an enormous pot of potato soup (recipe), finished everything but the sleeves and the darts on the dress, and spent the evening doing something I hadn’t done in days–sat still, unbothered, and just relaxed.

Other people’s blogs have been particularly helpful to me this past week, but this morning, faced with a self-imposed every-Tuesday-or-else deadline on my own blog, I thought what the heck is there to write about?  I haven’t actually written a single sentence since last Wednesday, and until close of curtain next Tuesday night, I am fairly certain my whole world is going to revolve around that stage and whatever meals can be thrown together in one pot and left to their own devices while I play theater mom.  As a rule, this site is meant to be about The Eleventh Age and my journey as an author, so I thought that I would just post a picture of all the feathers and a note that I would be back next Wednesday with something insightful and purposeful to say, but when I sat down at the computer, it occurred to me that there is something so important to write that I am actually going to write it twice:

Sunday rolled around and it was snowing and the house was still covered in feathers.

There is so much joy in that one sentence.  I love musical season.  I’ll be back next Wednesday.