*Guestblogger Jess is a quick-witted, stay-at-home mother-writer-friend who periodically discusses the various lenses of her life on She’sWrite. Here’s her story:

I’m going to embarrass myself.

In case you hadn’t heard, it rained the other day in Chicagoland. Our sump pump failed when the power went out and that was that.

Box after cardboard box full of photo albums and old papers were soaked. I had the enviable honor of pulling out each individual photo and laying it out to dry. Good memories, bad memories, and many “What the hell was I thinking?” head-scratchers ensued. (In one photo captioned “At the Taste of Chicago, July ’95”, I wore an old baseball hat with paint on it, frayed jean shorts, and an oversized t-shirt that read “Testicle Festival, Omaha, Nebraska.” Yes. I. Did.)

I sorted through hundreds of sheets of paper _ old term papers, letters, honors, newspaper articles, and my writing. Lots and lots of writing. I found poems, stories, beginning of stories, notes on scraps of paper, quotes, sayings, musings, ramblings, snapshots of notable (and not so notable) memories. Most were handwritten, some typed (on a typewriter). As with the photos, there were good moments _ my first poem ever, about the Easter Bunny; a descriptive paragraph about crabapple blossoms (inspired by the writing of L.M. Montgomery) that I wrote in grade school and which won district honors. There were also several college poems and stories, along with the positive professor and peer reviews that I keep to stoke my confidence _ which, as any writer knows, can be feeble.

It was fun to come across the bits of incomplete thoughts I often wrote when they popped into my head out of nowhere, and which I liked for the words themselves strung together _ “I want to be on the banks of a Minnesota river, where the whispers of willows swim to my ears.” I can imagine my little self writing it after reading Laura Ingalls Wilder, which I did often. It’s not Frost, but it’s not completely embarrassing.

Then there was this: “To you I give a heavy heart, Dejected and untrue, In the middle torn apart, Its owner was a fool.”

This: “If I could give you anything, and everything, I would. I’d buy the world, the universe, only if I could. I’d give you a piece of the ivory moon, And an ounce of the stars would do, I’d take the sun’s smile and give it to you, And maybe a rose or two.” Apparently rhyming was more important to me than content.

And this: “You hold the key to open the lock that’s secured around my heart. You have seen inside my soul. I know we’ll never part.”

Oh, can you stand it?

But when my gag reflex simmered down, I settled into the knowledge that I have always been a writer. Of course, I’ve known this, but here it was staring at me, all wet and soggy. Writing has been my constant companion. It is just as much a part of me as the chicken pox scar on my cheek. When I was a girl, I felt the intense urge to put things down on paper, and I still do _ to observe, describe, to get the mechanics and the feeling of a thought just right _ it is science and romance combined. Each word within a sentence within a paragraph within a story is a puzzle to figure out and solving it is intensely gratifying. Not only that, there is no one way to solve the puzzle. Your voice can come through any way you choose.

On top of it all (and really, isn’t that enough?), once in a while you reach someone with your words and move them in some way. That is sublime, and worth all the melodramatic “We could fly on the wings of an eagle, over oceans forever blue” that vomits from your pen.