Prompt: (incompleted) ode-like essay-ette to the apron

What is an apron? I have heard the word applied in countless ways, including as if it were synonymous with skirt, as in the description of the concrete margin between a pool's edge and that of the lawn surrounding it. Historically, the word itself has been a victim of fraudulent division, and, were it restored to its rightful state, would be pronounced it "a napron" instead of "an apron".

Aprons, as we have known them through the ages, have provided much to our lives: a fringe, an extra layer, a protective coating. Inherent in aprons are responsibility. They shield, they combat, they preserve, defend, hedge, shelter, screen, fortify, secure, guard, insulate. In a sense, they are akin to the doormat, yet more demure, and perhaps more free than their stationery kin, in that they are not tethered by gravity to a singular place.

Many are those who utilize the humble article: the horseshoer, the welder, the chef, the preschool teacher, the butcher, the baker, and if they have survived the present economy, the elusive candlestick maker. Each wearer expects so much and yet so little from their simple garment. This halter, this frockish enclosure, light outer shell, frontispiece, stained with the residue of an honest day's work, this piece of throwaway clothing is so much more than a catch all for wayward dirt.

Prompt: who is your coven?

Every time I see the word, coven, I think of this spoof movie my husband A and I saw with the same title.  The characters were from somewhere near the Canadian border, so they pronounced it, "cooven", which A and I thought was hilarious.  Whenever we're in the midst of any situation fraught with tension, we look at each other and one of us can just quietly utter the word, "cooven" and we both start laughing.

I suppose having seen that movie together when it premiered is a kind of shorthand for how long we've known each other, but the truth is, we met in high school about a dozen years before cooven entered our lexicon.

Who are my oldest friends?  I was thinking about this the other day, about how chance has so much to do with circumstance.  How we meet other people and whether or not they become our friends is such a random equation.

On the last day of July in 1981, A's friend Allistair invited him to go to a party and, because A was at loose ends that night, he said yes, he'd go, even though he didn't know the guy throwing the thing or anyone who might be there.  Oren, whose party it was, had told me it was in honor of my moving away to the other side of the country later that summer.  Much later I found out he also told Allistair it was for him because Allister was headed to Switzerland in a few weeks.  If I had not been going west and A had not been at loose ends and Allistair wasn't expected overseas, we'd never have met that night.  It's the chance of confluence, this life. Who you meet, when and where you meet. And if the "heady" mixing of the minds is that perfect recipe for staying power, for forging that mysterious tenuous bond of friendship it can last a lifetime or a summer or just one night.

Post Script: If I hadn't met Denise by chance in line at the Delta of Venus over a decade ago on a break from the chaos of the Whole Earth Festival, I wouldn't be with you writing, right here, right now.

Prompt: Before that exact moment

caveat: another "aak!"

Before that exact moment I don't believe I had given much thought to the future. When you're twelve, you're just about hanging on that apex of the limbo between the living-in-the-momentness of childhood and the long, slow slope of growing up, where the future is always looming ahead of you. Just this morning I was thinking about the business of having all those years to advance in a career, of working hard to move up, get ahead, exercise ambition.

I don't completely understand that concept, ambition. It could be because it's so all-or-nothing. If you don't have it you will never amount to anything, I've been told. But there can be so much more to life, you know?

When I was twelve, the world started to become more sharply focused. In school, everyone began to be divided into categories: slow, average, gifted. We all knew who was who. I felt like I was watching the beginnings of so many stories and if I were on Facebook, I would know how they've unfolded. I imagine I might even be surprised in a few cases.

Well you won't be surprised to learn, I haven't been that ambitious, but I don't know I would have seen that coming at twelve, when I still felt I had so many years ahead of me. But then that was an entirely different world, a far more forgiving world.

Prompt: "It was so clear to me it was almost invisible"

Disclaimer: ugh.

I don't know that I've ever been unable to face a blank page, but here I am, facing it at this very moment and I am drawing nothing but a blank. This phrase, today's prompt, is, ironically proving quite evocative to me. Yet, here I am failing to describe it in any terms that might cause one to visualize a thing, a scenario, an atmosphere.

What is clear to me, now, is that it is not that I have nothing to say, per se, but that I want to say so much. I don't quite know where to begin. Within the last week, since we met here, in this room, so much of life has elapsed. And yet, I feel that words on this blank page could never describe any of it in a way that would be meaningful. To you.

It could be that a certain event, an unexpected and tragic event that began here in this room and then unfolded, sadly, rather quickly, over the next days to come, has temporarily muted our world. And yet, in its sharpness of effect, its unanticipatedness, its consequences have inspired a burst of heartfelt emotion in those who were directly affected.

I'm again drawing a blank. I feel so inadequate in my ability to write about this if only because my own life has been so even-keeled these past few years and at this very moment it's becoming clear to me that I've worked very hard to make it that way. It's been a seamless process, this gradual invisibility. This isn't making much sense, but having written it down, seeing it on a page that now is no longer blank, I feel a sudden revelation has taken place without my even having realized it, until this very sentence, this word, and it is so clear to me, right now, that it is no longer invisible.