Well here we are again. The Nelson Sisters are returning yet again in concert! It's really becoming an annual event. This is our third year, and we're expecting rather a crowd. On top of the two formal concert nights, we're also adding a night of music at our favorite coffee shop, which has a sweet piano in their adjoining room. People have been asking all winter and fall if we were planning a concert for this summer, and I told them 'yes, of course' and crossed my fingers because I actually wasn't sure if we were. It's a touchy sort of thing, working around both our work schedules, and all the other summer engagements we've acquired. But the music has been selected, the dates have been set, and now we're just trying to get enough practice in. I always get worried that we'll never be ready on time. In about two weeks I will begin eating, breathing, and sleeping the music. It will be ever present in my sub-conscious mind. I keep a running list in my head about everything we need to do:
Buy matching tops
Practice
Take picture for poster
Design new poster
Put add in papers
Practice
Practice
Radio spot?
Practice
But as much as I doubt our ability to 'pull it off', we always do. And people always love us (of course, they can't help that) and the masses clamour for another performance. Aaah, the life of a musician.

My sister and I were talking today about running, and were laughing about how our differant styles come out even in the world of exercise. She is a distance, endurance, set-a-longterm-goal-and-get-there kind of person. She will take on a mountain, no sweat. Somehow she is able to pace herself just right, so she can last for way longer than you think she will. There is some secret reserve of MegaStrongWoman in her that is really quite admirable.
I, on the other hand, am much more of a Go-Bang-TaDah! kind of girl. I would have made a really good sprinter had I done track in school. I can be really fast for shorter distances. I go really hard, put absolutely everything I am into what I'm doing, but I finish quickly, not hours and hours from now. Kind of like a firework, in that it's glorious while it lasts, but I don't last very long. I guess it's a good thing that we're sisters, cause I've been learning to push myself and endure for just a little longer.

It was a lovely afternoon, so my younger sister and I went on a long walk. The street was lined in perfect little houses with perfect lawns, and flower beds full of purple daisies and red poppies. The road ended in a dirt path leisurely winding it's way through the woods of evergreen trees. My sister and I don't get much of a chance to really talk beyond me telling her to pick up her things, and she asking if she can pick out my lip-color in the morning, but as we made our way up the road, amid our teasing and laughing and playful shoving, I managed to get a peek into who this girl is and who she's becoming. She's eight years younger than me, and taller by at least two inches and I alternately make the mistakes of thinking she's 14, and treating her like she's 5. But on this afternoon I realized that she's a very mature eleven year old with theories and convictions and a heck of a lot of intelligence, and she's not just my little sister, but she can be a really good friend.

Forgive the silence of the last week, but I am presently afflicted by a malady for which there is no cure but time. Yes I must say, I am struggling with writers block. But it's not the sort that prevents me from writing altogether, but everything I write sounds the same. It all deals with basically the same subject, but from differant angles, and for the life of me I can't get away from it. All four poems I've written in the past three days are so similar, you would think they were verses of the same poem. Dear heaven, what shall I do? I write every day, but nothing changes. Here is one poem which slightly stood out among the others:

Silver shattered yesterday.
Silver doesn't break, you know
But this silver did.
It fell there beside me
Violently on concrete
Right beside my feet - just missed my head.
For a solitary moment
I saw it's lovely shape.
The reflection of my eyes
Haunted me later in the night.
It frightened me to see it smash
Like my life was taken with it
I could break at any moment
Like the drop of silver rain.

But even that is weak, weak! I lack conviction, eloquence, simplicity - everything necessary to write well. I must be cured quickly, or I shall be very frustrated indeed.

"Tomorrow," he said. "Tomorrow
I will love her.
Tomorrow I will leave my work
My petty likes
My false delights.
But today I need them
Just for now I'll keep them
Until I turn into a man
Worthy of her love."

"Tomorrow," she sighed. "Tomorrow
He will love me.
Tomorrow he will hold my heart
My petty heart
In manly hands.
But today he shuns me.
The pain of it undoes me.
For now I'll think of yesterday
And try to understand."

"Tomorrow," Fate said. "Tomorrow
Should be sweeter.
Tomorrow love would have It's way
Bring soft delight
Tomorrow might.
But today burns fiercely -
For her, has desperate meaning.
I'd change it oh! so gladly; but
Tomorrow she must die."