When the words wash away: Nicci Kadilak

Guest post: Can you Imagine this?

Welcome lovely

Nicci Kadilak

for this terrific guest post.

When the words wash away

It was past time to build the chicken coop.

The day-old chicks we’d gotten in April had worn out their welcome in first the basement and then the garage. The colorful hexagonal baby fence we’d borrowed from my friend, Martha, was covered in chicken dust (Was it food? Was it dander? Was it poop? It was anyone’s guess.), and the floor of flattened cardboard had long since given up.

I cannot build a chicken coop. Or rather, my husband and I could have built one, but it would have taken far too long and we would have probably pissed each other off and screwed things up enough along the way for the project not to be worth undertaking. So we hired a guy.

We found some plans online and modified them to meet our needs, then I drew up a sketch on my Rocketbook to show him.

I bought myself a Rocketbook a while back, thinking it would be a good place to do some planning and freewriting. Unlike anachronists—er, traditionalists—I use my computer 98% of the time, but there are times when I just need to let the ink flow.

image via Amazon

When I get stuck on a story’s plot point, or when I’m trying to unravel an idea or outline a new project, I like to write it down. Usually, I’ll write a question to myself or to one of my characters at the top of the page and then spend anywhere from five lines to five pages answering it. Once it’s figured out, I never need to reference those pages again. So, it seemed a reusable notebook would be just the thing. Sure, they cost $40 and the pens are expensive and inconsistent and—wait, am I talking myself out of this purchase four years after I made it?

Whatever, it saves paper and there’s a certain catharsis to wetting a cloth and wiping clean the pages when I no longer need them.

My Rocketbook is full of ink—red and blue and pink and purple and everything in between. Notes from agent conversations and writing workshops. A planner of events coming up in the next few weeks. Book and story ideas. Notes from that one time I spent two hours tutoring a friend’s son in high school chemistry. Drawings and stories my kids make when I’m not looking. A lot of the time, when I want to use it, I have to pick a page to erase because they’re all full.

I erased a page of toddler scribbles to sketch up the chicken coop and handed it to Mike, the carpenter/handyman/whatever we pay him to be, and he got started.

He made good progress. By the end of the first day, he had the structure created, leveled, and ready to roof. My husband and I nodded appreciatively and Mike said he’d be back the next day to finish.

In the morning, I wanted to do some planning for the novel I was working on. “Have you seen my Rocketbook?” I asked my husband.

He shrugged. “Did you bring it back in yesterday?”

“Blah. Probably not,” I said, annoyed at having to go out back at such an ungodly hour. When my bare feet hit the grass, my heart hit the ground with them. The soaking wet ground. The irrigation had been on overnight.

I gulped down my hesitation and headed out toward the half-built structure. I could see the orange cover from across the yard. It was inside the coop, as much as anything can be inside something with no walls or roof. Still, I held out hope the studs had somehow sheltered the book, just a little, from the oscillating sprinkler heads.

They had not.

Standing water was pooled on the cover; it cascaded off when I picked up the book. The pages were all adhered together in a solid block. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, let it out, and brought the book inside to see what I could salvage.

Nicci’s collage

Not much, it turns out. I opened page after page to see smudged, indecipherable blotches in a rainbow of colors. I took pictures of the worst of them, hoping that maybe, when I needed them, I could pull up the pictures from my phone and try reading the tiny, no-longer-tidy print and uncover the secrets of the universe that were surely stored there.

And guess what? Over a year, 64 dozen eggs (that is a conservative estimate, which is insane), and countless toddler scribbles later, do you know how many times I’ve referenced those photos?

If you guessed any whole number less than one, then you’re right. I’ve finished two books since then, and written a huge handful of essays and newsletters and social media posts, and not once have I even thought of that information, much less used it. In fact, the only time I ever think of it is when I open my Rocketbook and have to decide which of the smudged, blotchy pages to erase to make space for the new ideas I want to write down.

Yet I still have those photos. Why? Because I can’t let go. I know I don’t need them. I know I’ll never look at them again. But there is still an attachment, the feeling that erasing them might be tantamount to wiping away the key to everything. (To what? To the book that’s already written? To the inner workings of a one-year-old or the exact molar mass of sodium hydroxide? I know the meaning of life isn’t there. And even if it were, I wouldn’t trust myself to have a clue what I’m talking about in that regard.)

This is where I remind myself the reason I got myself a Rocketbook in the first place.

Erasable. Reusable. Fleeting. Temporary.

Everything in this book is trash. It’s word vomit, the circuitous conversations I have with myself in the shower or the car, just written down on polymer paper. What attachment do I need to trash? None.

Open the faucets. I’m coming.

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Gotta love, Nicci!

Nicci is a writer, educator, and mom living outside Boston. She writes

Nicci’s Notes

— a mashup of musings about parenting, writing, and life. Look out for her debut novel, When We Were Mothers, in January 2023.

Love,

Nicci &