Last weekend I wrote about fish hooks. This week I want to write about water. While I was in high school, I lived a short block from a cold, clear lake in Maine. I now live across the street from a small, shallow lake in Colorado. My son and his wife live across the road from the Saco River where it falls over the Bar Mills Damn and crashes onto the rocks below. This watery lullaby makes sleeping at their house peaceful. My sister lives a block from the Sabattus River in Lisbon, Maine.

We are water people. As a writer, I think about metaphor a lot and water in its many forms is a deep well of metaphor. (See that?) It seems to me that the many qualities we ascribe to water might also describe writing: cloudy or clear, fast moving or sluggish, still, salty or sweet, polluted, poisonous, contaminated by fear? Powerful as an ocean wave? Nasty as sewage? At times I want a riverlet of words, just deep enough to dabble my toes in. At other times I want a shower of words–warm and clean and easily controlled. An unstoppable flood of words is called logorrhea, symptomatic of a mental disorder. So I’d better stop. Drink up!