UNIT 6
A Woman's Distress
The morning was moist,
and the fog had set in last evening
and still masked over the shabby cabin hidden deep
within the Turtle Mountains.
She shivered as she stepped barefoot onto unfinished slabs
that held her deck together.
She had purchased the slabs from the Hillbilly Board Store.
Her white sleeping gown hung below her knees
with just a white cotton lace.
Her soft hair was loosely tied back
with a piece of purple ribbon softly and gloriously
falling out the sides and touching her cheeks of pale skin.
Jen was so glad to be out of the city for a few days.
This was her weekend retreat.
She loved the cabin,
and it gave her confidence and peace and complacency in herself.
Jen worked everyday in an attorney’s office as a consultant.
She handled stacks of legal documents daily.
So when the weekend and holidays came around
she would head for her cabin.
Her cabin was thirtyseven miles from the city.
It was excluded from other cabins at the lake.
She liked it that way.
Jen had a secret,
a secret she never told anyone:
she was an amateur writer.
She had a love for writing.
Her writing is comprised by essays, fables, poems,
and true stories about people she had come to know.
Writing compositions about her childhood
she could recall or anything that kept her interest.
Jen never told anyone about her love for writing.
She always felt people would consider her as a bit crazy.
With so many activities to do on weekends,
why would she choose to sit and write?
The cabin was perfect:
the breeze was fragrant and she could hear frogs
croak from time to time.
She would sit with her pen in hand and her spiral tablets
and would write whatever came to her mind.
Sometimes her novels and stories would dominate her
and make her cry so hard
that she would have to put her writing down
and ask herself why she was doing this.
She would write a song,
then hum it and sing it to herself
until she believed it was a real song,
real like the songs on the radio or television
or even imagined some famous singer singing her song.
From her standpoint,
writing gave her a feeling of complete satisfaction with herself.
It’s not her expertise
but it helped her to experience successes
and overcome the pain she had endured throughout her lifetime.
It helped her to articulate the feelings deep in her heart.
It helped her to bring imaginary people and places
to reality in her mind.
It was a freedom no one ever knew.
Her writing was her true complement and soul mate
that she could trust.
Jen recently has purchased a computer
and took an oath to herself
that she would compile her writings
and put them into the computer just to have for herself.
It was an undertaking
which would take a while but having her writings organized
for the first time would be great.
It was going to be a dreary weekend,
but Jen didn’t mind.
She didn’t plan on spending it outside anyway.
For her, it was a stress