A shower of words

If you’re a writer or someone who whips up dreams or solves problems, you know how the best brain blasts always come at the most inopportune times—such as when you’re in the shower.

For me it never fails, I’ve slept like a rock, exhausted from writing for days on end, or I’ve tossed and turned all night, listening as my muse tell me where it’s taking me next in my latest written work. The ideas either come or they don’t, but one thing is for certain. As I stand in the shower, the words come pouring down faster than the drops of water. I’m there with no pen, no paper, and a shower of words and ideas that would drown a cruise ship. 

To celebrate a special anniversary last year, my husband tried hard to get me to go to Hawaii—the real place—but because we were planning to move at the time, making job changes, and more, I said, “No, not now, please.”

The week of anniversary rolled around and I drove from our new home in Missouri to the apartment he was renting near his job in Illinois until his pending retirement date. 

We left the apartment one morning to go out for a nice lunch, run some errands, and leave for our destination. 

Remember how I said, “Not Hawaii. Not this year.”

He took me anyway. 

We opened our motel room and saw a rainforest shower, a volcano pouring into our hot tub, a sauna, and a room with thatched roof and tiki torches. We were in Hawaii—on the prairies of Illinois. He’d rented us one of those themed hotel rooms. The atmosphere of the islands was there—for a whole lot less money. 

We, both in our sixties, were like a couple of little kids in that room, hoping from one attraction to the next, giggling when we discovered a bidet in the Jack and Jill bathroom. 

We were having a wonderful time, until I decided to take a shower. This rainforest didn’t just have trees and tropical vegetation painted on the walls, it also had shower heads with all sorts of knobs and spouts and sprayers. I turned it on, and the next thing I knew water was coming at me from everywhere.  It was pounding my yes, drenching my hair, beating against my body. It was liquid sensory overload. 

And, it was a lot like those word showers I have at home, when the story or blog or news article ideas come when I don’t have a waterproof pen and paper, a bucket in which to catch the ideas before they are lost forever down the drain. 

A big fluffy towel helped me to wipe the water from my eyes, to see my Hawaiian room again on that special vacation day. 

Maybe that’s why the torrents of words come pouring down on me at home, so that as I step from the shower, and pat myself dry, the best ideas have soaked through to my core, to fall as thoughts onto a page, helping me to bring my readers to our destinations in the posts within this blog. 

© Ann Tracy Mueller 2013

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