Gumbo

A couple of days ago, the light in my office was yellow with warmth.  I had a break in between student appointments and I was eating my lunch.  The trees outside my window now slide through a scale of perfectly bare to alit with the flame of Fall.  The season is advancing like the term, rapidly. 

I'm sitting at my desk, looking out the window when suddenly I am struck dumb by "gumbo."  I don't know why the word appeared in my head.  My lunch didn't consist of anything remotely close to gumbo.  I hadn't read anything that had gumbo in it.  It was simply the word rising out of my consciousness and calling attention to itself.  I opened up a word document and started writing.  I got down three pages of a story.  "Gumbo."  That's all it takes sometimes.  A word, an image, a brief awareness of something outside the self and all of a sudden my fingers are flying across the keyboard trying to learn who Latisha and Carl are.  I don't know why "Latisha", I don't know why "Carl", but they are the two people occupying the home in the Eola Hills where the gumbo is being cooked.  Words have power when we listen to them.  Here's the first two ROUGH paragraphs of the story that was born out of gumbo:

Latisha stood over the pot, stirring in the last of the diced jalapenos when Carl returned from fishing.  She knew he'd return early.  He'd seen her pulling the gumbo pot out of the pantry the night before.  If there was one thing Carl couldn't resist, it was 'Tisha's gumbo.  He'd left before first light as he always did.  She'd watched him dress in the dark from under the covers.  Fall had arrived early this year and the night's chill resonated throughout the bedroom.

Stupid space heater, 'Tisha thought.  She wanted central air, or baseboard heaters that she didn't have to worry about bursting into flames in the middle of the night.  Sure, she knew plenty of people around who burned the space heaters all night, but 'Tisha'd lost her grandmother that way and she wasn't about to take the risk in her own house.