the view I love the most

“Now you’ve gone and done it,” said Urania whose sassy, smart bob bobbed in time to a rhythm nobody else could hear. “That song is going to be with me all day.”

“Me too!” Thalia’s body started to sway.

“It’s a great song, isn’t it?” asked the muse of many questions. “Reminds me of that quote that saves us from feeling like navel gazers… help me out Tal?”

“Thoreau? It’s not what you look at that matters, but what you see?”

“Yes to Thoreau, and no to the quote. Will you try again?” asked Cal.

“I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well?”

Cal gave a little applause with eyes wide. “That’s the one!”

“Why’d you choose today’s title, and Lonestar crooning about the view I love the most is my front porch looking in… and Thoreau?” Thalia asked Calliope. “Feeling self-conscious? Is that why we haven’t written a lick for Meandering Muses yet?”

“Per my calculations… if we’re going to get this book to our editor Noosha by the fifteenth of May… we need to write… let’s see… 12,000 words divided by 40 days equals… 300 words per day.” Urania thought of their friend Jack’s math socks and hoped he’d be impressed.

“Only 300 words per day?” Thalia sat back in her chair, picked up a recently delivered copy of Nate the Great and the Wandering Word by Marjorie Weinman Sharmat, and put her feet up. “We’ve got days… maybe even weeks… of procrastination ahead of us.”

“I prefer to think of us as self-aware.” Calliope jumped in before Nia and Cal could run the conversation further into the brush — as if they were chasing a black Lab… who was chasing a cottontail. “What happens inside of us shapes the world we experience outside of us. That is why we write! If people spent a little more time looking inside for their answers and thrills, the outside would take care of itself.”

Calliope sat down — spent.

“Cal?” asked Urania.

Calliope looked up at Nia and Tal’s smiling faces.

“We think we’ve just written the Introduction for our book!”