I couldn’t shake the feeling that no matter how much hope it might create, the Hope House deals with dark issues. The sky, say like today, might be blue, but there’s something hanging over the cottage-like setting in Lee’s Summit. The picture of a happy house is a false one. Things are so much better for the women inside and their children, in some cases, but it would be wrong to paint a sunny picture. I took the opposite approach from the outside.

The last paragraph on Page One that begins with “Shehan has stories to tell” was written several days after I finished the piece. I contacted Pete Dulin and told him I felt the story needed some more emotional weight, primarily a story from a survivor – someone who’d experienced the services provided by the organization and came out changed, for the better. That happens to be the best piece to the story, especially given that the women were not offered for the interview. I was able to tap back into the story’s voice and add something that was more relevant than scene setting. The story hadn’t been told yet though I finished writing a few nights before. How does Hope House save lives? In most cases, they do it by altering them, come rain or shine.

I told him about the distractions I’d hoped to avoid that they’d caught up to me. He was understanding. His wife, Pam, who is copied on all Present e-mail, forwarded her kind sentiments to me. Both volunteered to lend an ear if I needed to talk, but I planned once again to submerge myself in the writing trade as a way to forget things. I My deadline was extended to April 22. Their kindness should have been the motivation to start writing, but it wasn’t. Last week I got a calmly worded e-mail from Pete titled “Update” and inside was a single sentence: Just wondering where you’re at with the story draft?

Me too. I wrote back that I’d have the story soon. I sent it over yesterday and, in the end, it took me just two hours to put the story together. Somewhere along the way I’d started to enjoy my personal writing: blogs that you’ve seen here, a few that I started and abandoned after a few hundred words (usually the pieces I write when lying in bed, about to fall asleep and the glow from Blackberry lighting my face and the bedside mirror), some fiction that isn’t ready to post yet, and other personal material that I never intended to write. Sometimes those pieces come out unexpectedly.

My reluctance to get started had nothing to do with the subject. The Hope House story is inspiring. There are so many images to draw from and amazing stories to tell. Still, the organization’s wishes to conduct the interview via the phone and not in person, made it more difficult. All it took was sitting down to write to get me interested. And that is always the hardest part, no matter who your editor is, no matter what the topic might be, and no matter what’s going on with you. Writing can take your mind away from you troubles, but you have to follow through on the commitment to sit and put the words down.

Pete, thanks again for the opportunity. I post the link when the story goes online.

I tapped the keys for that story and the beat eventually ended. The results – the words on the page – are the movements to the beat that died and soon as I wrote the last sentence. Once my work is done, it belongs to the editors and proofreaders, the critics, and they take the work that didn’t come from them and try their best to improve it or comment on its quality, never hearing the source of the rhythm it was written to or what it accomplished for the author.

This particular piece came out unscathed despite the trimming and that is the gift of a talented editor. Present’s Pete Dulin is always up for the risk. I know I have the greenlight to shoot at all times, and yet this is probably the most conventional writing I’ve done in some time. As for the readers and the critics, now it’s up to you. Happy reading.

Pared into a crescent shape, the moon above resembled a thin sliver set in the dawn by a hand that had mistakenly carved too much. Arched as it was, high, in a blue band, the shape hung above the stove pipes on the house tops blowing warm air into the February cold.

The air was busy with train whistles and the first whishes from vehicles fleeing the working homes for work in the city. Once the initial traffic is gone from the new neighborhoods and onto the rural roads, the streets sometimes become the property of door to door sellers who find that most people work in ordinary careers or don’t answer their door for strangers. The intruders dressed nicely and holding leather cases filled with products can be more dangerous than the hooded kind with crow bars.

Living is balanced in these neighborhoods on a solitude that does not exist, a right to privacy that everyone believes they have. But the schedules the neighbors keep inadvertently reveals something about them. What drives them is the love and the need to provide, a home most importantly, vacations, sometimes certain extravagancies depending on the holiday and birthday schedule. And the determination finds them everyday, whether it’s artificial, ground out from coffee beans and boiling water, or a place in their heart, they never quit most of them, no matter how fragile the day begins.