February 2005 Issue - Essay # 2
Falling
in Love Again
By Karen Elwis
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I
was eight years old when I fell in love for the first time. There I was,
strolling along the farm track as I’d done so often before, when
suddenly the lines of my first poem popped disjointed and unbidden into my
head. I juggled those five lines in my mind as I hopped and skipped along
the ruts of the track, and by the time I had reached the farm, my
masterpiece was complete. Two
months later, it was published in the school magazine and my love affair
with the written word began in earnest. Once I had seen those words - my
own words - immortalised in Times Roman, I was smitten. Over the next
eight years, my long-suffering mother grew accustomed to me writing
furiously into the dark recesses of the night, when good sense dictated
that I should have been asleep many hours before. Then,
at sixteen, I was led out onto an isolated hillside by an Outward Bound
instructor, there to be abandoned for a three-day “solo” expedition.
It would be a “character-building” experience, they assured
course participants - each of whom was to submit to an identical
“solo” fate. The others
were quick to voice their disbelief and horror on learning that no radios,
Walkmans, books or magazines were allowed and that our only “luxuries”
were to be a pen and paper. Yours
Truly, however, said not a word. Whilst far away my peers sulked and moped
in their heathery isolation, I luxuriated in my own personal heaven: 72
hours of uninterrupted writing time, all the while surrounded by arguably
some of the most inspiring scenery this side of the Milky Way. Life
didn’t get much better than this … In
those heady, idealistic days of adolescence, I was convinced
that writing was my future – I could think of no other way I
would rather spend my life, and my course seemed clearly mapped out.
Yet somehow (thanks to well-intentioned advice from a school
guidance teacher who no doubt envisaged me starving in a garret somewhere)
I strayed off-track for four years and trained instead to be a translator.
Granted, I was still working with words – but they were always
other people’s words which had to be ingested, digested and then
regurgitated in another language. The confines of this cruelly
constricting verbal straightjacket made me yearn desperately for the day
when my hands would be free to write in my own words once more. Sadly,
however, economic necessity intervened, especially once first a husband
and then three demanding dependants were vying for my attention.
For another ten frustrating years, I continued to peddle
“second-hand words” until one day last August – a day apparently
like any other - when I spread a week-old edition of the local newspaper
out on the kitchen table. As I
proceeded to deposit my potato peelings on to the public notices, my eye
alighted quite by chance on an advertisement for The
rest, as they say, is history. Now I am still earning my living peddling second-hand words by day,
but I am also writing my own words furiously in the dark recesses of the
night, when good sense
dictates that I should have been in bed hours before.
The washing pile may be ten foot high, the dust on the mantle-piece
thick enough to write a novel in, far less my name, and I may be surviving
on four hours’ sleep a night - but I’m back on track and falling in
love all over again...
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Karen
Elwis grew up on a Perthshire farm and has always loved writing,
especially about country life. For thirteen years she has combined
a career as a translator with the challenges of bringing up three
children and a husband!
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Essay
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