Squinchy, Tasty Words

I’m slow in making decisions. I’m not afraid to make them, I simply just like to mull over all ways they might affect life. One of my friends say I tend to over analyze things, and she’s probably right, but I love the let them roll around like a lovely word to feel the way it moves and feels in my mouth. Yup, I word crazy too.

If you can taste food, you can taste a word. It can taste sweet or sour…or feel prickly, or smooth. Let me give an example. Take a word that sounds good to you – for me that might be a word that tantalizes the mind and the tongue. It might be a word like bamboozle or extraordinary. It’s not only that they can have a rhythm, but my tongue actually tingles with an excitement to find ways to use them. New words I’ve learned have a grand way of exciting my mind and take me to a place where those words stand alone like buildings in some huge elongated city.

Words can sometimes have faces, and smiles - and even personalities too! They can take you on imaginary journeys that roll down a huge chain and rail hill, or deep within a faeirie’s mind. They can stand alone simply by saying them out loud or slowly, or with different kind of cadence that marches around the room. The most wonderful way words creates a specific flavor for me is through poetry. There the words can create an image and a taste.

One such poem that really makes my mouth water is an easy one to taste by Galway Kinnell called

Blackberry Eating.

I love the squinch and picture of those icy, black blackberries that he invokes with each line. If you listen, and close your eyes you can begin to almost taste those magnificent berries.

What words can create memories for us, or can vividly take us to a place both real and imaginary? Some come in the form of a well told story, when words fall off the page and become cities and houses and people. A good writer can take us somewhere we’ve never been, and create a village or home that we can experience to the point of reaching through that created reality to touch the cheek of an elf or mediaeval farmer in the warmth of a newly plowed spring field.

That is why words – or a simple turn of a phrase can create worlds, and all manner of creatures to haunt my thoughts daily. Tomorrow I may be off to ancient Britain or into the unknown future. I may find myself standing next to Sherlock Holmes on Baker Street as the mists of a London evening cloak the world and I must be bundled against that damp, cold story.

You know, I really love the journeys that words can create, and the paths they can take me down. They are my flying ships of dreams and imaginings that can give a scrumptious and quite satisfying meal for my imagination when life needs a little push to make it enjoyable.