These are wish pods. I have absolutely no idea what other purpose they serve than to grow and produce pods of more wishes that go off, germinate, sprout and grow more wish pods; they have no flower, they are not edible.

If they have another name than wish pods?please don?t tell me.

Right now you can find them on back roads, along split-rail fences, or in clusters around the edges of a field. This past weekend was the end of wish season as most of the pods had already broken open and sent out their silk messengers.

It?s hard for me to see them. I used to revel in them and collect them at this time of year. For me, they carried magic and hope and the possibility of new beginnings. Once, a dear friend made a Christmas ornament for me that was a clear plastic ball filled with wishes--- at the top was a red and gold ribbon to tie it to the tree.

Now they?re just bits of fluff. I don?t stop and collect them. I wonder at their purposelessness.

A long time ago, when I still wrote screenplays after being ?taken on? by an academy award-winning prick (egoinflamus assholeextremitis, is the Latin name) because I had the self-confidence of unbaked waterfowl and overrode all the warning messages screaming from my intuition that said ?RUN AWAY, RUN AWAY? but I didn?t because he was a WRITER and I wanted to be a writer?and no, this is not a sentence.

Let me try again.

PFFFBBBTtttttt.

There?s a scene in a screenplay I wrote where these pods are cracked open and blown up into the blue November sky. It?s the last happy, beautiful scene in the film cause after that there?s lots of burning and torturing and killing. The end. Tra la lah!

And I guess I can?t let the story go?no matter how many years pass. And I guess the wish pods always bring it back to me? there was even a time when Mira Nair wrote me an email that she was very excited about the story and carrying the script with her. Mira Nair. This was before Monsoon Wedding. Unfortunately, it was just as she was moving from Uganda to NYC and I never heard from her again, which is to say, obvs, she passed on the script.

And no, I can?t just rewrite the story as fiction?don?t ask me why not. I have tried. My annoying analogy is if you had already fired a plate but decided the clay would have been better as a bowl. It?s too late. It?s been fired. It exists as it is. Make a new bowl with some other clay.

The good news is I don?t write screenplays anymore. Thank god. Most misguided waste of time ever. Yet, I loved that story?and I loved that scene of the wishes tumbling and floating over a meadow of tall grasses, buoyed up by the cold Autumn air.

Kill your darlings! Wasn?t that Hemingway? Gah. I hate Hemingway?please keep me from quoting Hemingway. (If that isn?t from Hemingway?do let me know, I?d feel so much better).

I know people everywhere have closets full of creative deaths. I understand completely that if we took all the screenplays in existence today that will never be made into films and we built shelters from them to house the millions of people with no homes around the world, we could do it.

It?s just something I need to let go of--- and maybe this was my way.

got 2 cents?