Brad Paisley, a 46-year-old country music singer, apparently said “Tomorrow is the first blank page of a 365 page book.  Write a good one.”

The quote is oft-circulated at this time of year on social media.  Who doesn’t want to write a good book?  Damn, I just want to write a good blog post once a week.

Since October, I’ve been running some heavy fuel in my personal tank.  I haven’t been writing much.  Driving back and forth to the Franco Center, volunteering for more events than I can count on two hands.  Doing preliminary strategy work for the 2019 Moxie Festival.  Working at the polls.  Funerals.  Experiencing joy and sadness.  Inviting people to my house over the holidays and seeing every invitation accepted.  Cooking and cleaning like it’s 1949.  Entertaining for almost 48 hours straight over the New Year break and loving every minute of it.

Yes, I have burned some heavy fuel in the final quarter of 2018.

Heavy fuel, what’s that?  For Mark Knopfler, who wrote a song about it, heavy fuel was hamburgers, scotch, and cigarettes.  As Knopfler says, “if you want to run cool, you’ve got to run on heavy, heavy fuel.”  His fuel is not politically correct, is it?  He wrote some great rock and roll songs, though.  My fuel is a little different from Knopfler’s and hopefully a little more ladylike, but similarly post-modern.  Big salads, baked chicken, and Isagenix protein shakes.  Throw in a daily dose of anxiety and thirty trips up and down the stairs to my home office.  Oh, and a few Jeep trips to Market Basket in Biddeford with my pal Shelley to sort out the problems of the world and move faster than our feet can carry us.

Fellow writer and friend Karen Schneider brought me some orange flowers.  They are a good additive to the heavy fuel mix.

I have been unbelievably busy.  That’s how it is.  And while I do wish I had been born at a different time, it feels good to be alive here and now, writing the pages of this particular book and burning this heavy fuel.

Or maybe it’s heavenly fuel.

I got a card from one of my Junior League of Boston friends the other day.  She’s part of the JLB’s Garden Club and will be doing a flower arrangement for the “Art in Bloom” tour at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in April.  She is so talented and excellence-oriented I know it will be magnificent.  She said “I hope they assign us a good piece of art.  So much easier to make an arrangement that compliments a rich oil painting than an austere piece of Art Deco furniture.”  I hope I have enough heavy fuel in my tank to see it.  And I do hope there are a few orange flowers in her arrangement.

2019 will be all about orange here in Lisbon Falls.  Orange flowers, orange t-shirts, orange envelopes, and orange aprons.  Orange books and blog posts.  If I follow the advice of Brad Paisley and Mark Knopfler, how can it be anything but good?

We are living under an orange colored sky.

I am making this song my theme song for 2019.  I love Moxie, my hometown, and my life in the here and now.   We’ve got a great committee of people working on this project and I think it just might be a “good book” albeit an orange colored one.

Thank you in advance for your orange colored prayers and thoughts.  Flash!  Bam!  Alakazam!