Things have been blurry around here lately. The weeks seem long, yet the hours are so full that the days speed right by. I haven’t been able to find the time, or the brainpower, to write. When I sit down to try, everything that comes out feels useless, like I’ve been futilely throwing precious minutes at flabby, flaccid prose. I finish each page and can’t find anything worth anything, and I abandon it.

Part of this problem is that my energies have been focused elsewhere. The wedding is now less than four months away, and each new task gives me greater understanding of why there is a whole profession dedicated to this process. I’ve lost entire days to research, reading, websites, and preparation, days that end with me feeling as empty and unproductive as I have been after all my hours of writing. I know that, really, progress is being made on each front, but it’s difficult to shake this feeling of wasted time.

I really hate to be one of those bloggers that blogs about not blogging, and yet, here I am. I have updates on the garden, some good, some bad. I have stories to tell, things to say. I have so many recipes to share that I’m beginning to feel mean for withholding them. It’s not that there’s nothing to write, it’s just that my brain won’t let me.

One could say I have issues. I like things to be in order, tidy, sequential. At times, my mind gets stuck on something that I want to say, am struggling to say, am having three separate Word documents worth of difficulty spitting out—but I can’t move on. The subject becomes like that old lady at the checkout counter, searching madly, insistently through her purse for a single twenty-five-cent coupon. There’s a whole queue of other ideas behind her, sighing loudly, craning over each other’s shoulders for a better look at what is holding everything up, and shouting, “Hey lady, I’ll give you a whole dollar if you just move!” But she knows that that coupon is somewhere in the cluttered depths of her bag, and as soon as—and only as soon as—she finds it, the next in line may have their turn. This is the twisted scenario happening inside my head as of late.

Combine that perfectionist nonsense with all the rest of the mess that is our days lately and it’s the perfect recipe for “What the hell happened to July?”

So I’m using this post as my own personal deus ex machina, my device to push this plot forward, to allow myself to move on from all the hopeless half-written posts cluttering my desktop and clogging my brain. This post is the young, handsome gentleman passing by that checkout line. He stops and moves toward the old woman, bending to grab something from the floor. “I believe you dropped this ma’am,” he says, handing her the coupon. She smiles. The whole line erupts in applause.

Letting out a long sigh of relief, the cashier hands the old woman her receipt. She looks up, ready. “Next!”