Well, I'm a day late with my new feature, "Secret Saturday," because the Internet Squirrels quit running at the farm yesterday. But, now that I'm back in the virtual world again, here we go:
I love secrets. I love to hear them, and love to tell them . . . to the right people. I see secrets as tidibits, juicy morsels of information that bring us closer to each other.
So, I decided to start a new feature, "Secret Saturday," where we can all share a little secret. It doesn't have to be a big secret, just anything we might not already know--about you, about history, about the world. Share a secret from your childhood, if that feels safer. Or a secret recipe. Or, what the heck . . . give us a whopper.
In Broken Dolls, when my character, Sachiko, finally reveals who she "really is," she writes this haiku:
A porcelain mask
Once broken, but now removed
My true face revealed
We can all remove our masks, even in tiny ways. It can be fun, but it can also be freeing. Share something with us . . . anything. And feel free to share a link to your own website or blog, too.
By the way, did you know that on average, a woman can only keep a secret for 32 minutes? Read about it on the Huffington Post. Click here.
By the way, did you know that on average, a woman can only keep a secret for 32 minutes? Read about it on the Huffington Post. Click here.
THIS WEEK'S SECRET:
When I was a young teenager, I had a secret place where I went to write things that I didn't want anybody else to know. But today, I'll take you with me, back to my house on Coolidge Street in California . . . to my bedroom . . . into my closet. There, behind my hanging clothes, I would write on the wall. Yes, the wall, where I wasn't supposed to write, which made my secret place all the more delightful, all the more mine.
Of course, as a young teen girl, most of what I wrote was who I had a crush on:
J.M.
+
R.R.
But I also wrote down my dreams, wishes and other things I thought people would think silly if they knew. I wished my parents would not argue. I wished we didn't have to move to Japan. (That wish came true, but now I wish we had moved there -- an experience lost.)
I wrote down my anger about things I couldn't outwardly be angry about, like every time I wanted to scream at my mom for grounding me.
After I'd written what I held inside, I moved the clothes back in place, and my closet held my secrets safe. When it was time for me to leave home, I took a big, pink eraser, shoved the hanging clothes aside, and erased what I'd shared in my secret world.
I don't know if anyone ever knew about that tiny place where I spilled my heart, but I suspect not. I was a typical teenager with sisters and a brother, and that information was too valuable not to use as ammunition against me in sibling battles. None of my co-combatants ever used it against me. So, either they never found it, or they had bigger hearts than I gave them credit for.
