Today I need to remind myself of two things:

1.  Creativity is often helped by limits and structure.

2. You get to decide that everything will turn out fine.  You can write your own story and invite a stranger through the front door who reminds you about what matters most.

This little story came out of a challenge at Artella.com in which we were asked to write something containing the words:  hermits, sombrero, plastic, chime, sample, now.  I love doing things like this.  My mind instantly starts whirling!

Hope you enjoy it, and also that you unabashedly gorge on a plate of hermits – or whatever taste or sensation brings you to hope and freshness.

Hermits

“Nobody makes hermits any more,” she complained, biting into an oatmeal-raisin cookie and looking as though it were a slice of aspic or a mouthful of fire-ants.  “They’ve become quaint, like letter-writing.”  Like me, she thought.  “My mother,” she began, but a look from her friend quelled her.  “But really, where are the hermits?  Both kinds, I mean?  Does anybody wander around without a plan anymore?  And where are the old ladies baking hermits for picnics – back in the days before cookies grew to the size of hubcaps and sombreros?”  Their eyes swiveled to the plate, and without speaking they agreed that treats had expanded alarmingly.  She knew she was getting heated, but she couldn’t help thundering on.

“And is it any coincidence that everything seems to be made of plastic these days?  Even people?” she added, slam-dunking the cookie in her watery tea so that it slopped over the edges like a tiny, turbulent lake.  Her friend hustled away to the counter and grabbed a fistful of napkins, and she sat by the little mess and felt oddly homesick.

The door opened with its metallic chime and a man strode in, carrying a basket from which wafted an intoxicating fragrance.  “Ladies,” he said, approaching their table, “May I offer you a sample?”  With that, he peeled back the blue checkered cloth and revealed… a tray of freshly baked hermits.

“You can’t eat that!” protested the other woman.  “We don’t even know who this guy is, or where these things came from.  Don’t be stupid!”  She reached out to intercept the hermit but it was too late.  With an expression of almost worshipful concentration, her friend set to work on the cookie.

“Mmmm, raisins,” she said, nodding.  “And nutmeg, yes.  And very finely chopped walnuts.”  She smiled, her eyes shone, and the lines melted from her face.  “These are every bit as good as the ones my mother used to make.  And I don’t mind telling you,” she said, looking directly at her companion, “that my mother was a genius when it came to the good things in life.”

The man handed her another hermit and she accepted it gratefully while her friend looked on in confusion.  “This one,” she said munching, “is even nicer than the first.  It reminds me,” she brushed a crumb from her cheek into her hand and then ate it, “of my grandmother’s house at the lake somehow.  The fun we had there!”  As she spoke, her face softened even more so that she looked now some twenty years younger.

When the man handed her a third hermit, she reached out for it eagerly.  Her belly was nearly full but she felt that one more hermit could not hurt, after all those years without them and without so much else that she’d missed.  All of that seemed less painful now she thought, tasting this third and most delicious hermit.  “I now believe,” she said with a new steadiness in her voice, “that there is a time outside time where the best of the past and the best of the present and maybe even of the future exist together.”  She looked at the man, and he nodded.  By now she had regained the freshness of her girlhood and she seemed to glow as though she’d just come in from a walk in the wind.  “And I see, too, that we can go there if we have a key – like you’ve given me today.”

He nodded once more and handed her a piece of paper.  “And here is one more key for you, dear one,” and with that, he walked out the door.

She stared at the paper, noting the lovely old handwriting and the fine green ink.  “A Recipe for Hermits Eaten by the Lake with People You Love and Who Love You,” she read aloud.

And without looking back at her companion, she too sailed through the door and into a refreshed life in which she baked delicious and properly-sized hermits in a cottage by the lake, wrote unabashed letters in fine green ink, and offered a seat at her table to any hungry person who wandered the world without a plan.  In that time outside time, she lived and continues to live and indeed will always live, happily ever after.