Japanese Cherry Blossoms

When I was a kid living in California, we had one of these trees around the side of our house leading to the back yard. It's a Japanese cherry blossom, I believe, and I have always associated the flowers with those formative memories I have of living with my mom in the suburbs.
I remember how every spring the hardy, but delicate, tree would bloom fantastically; its flowers always carpeted the ground beneath it. It provided a dappled shade in the side yard, and the sun danced between the leaves when a chilly, seasonal breeze would blow through. I have the most vivid memories of that tree; the most resplendent of these is a visual I have of looking up at the branches of the tree as a small child, perhaps of eight or nine years old. The branches were full with flowers, and I gazed at them from below. The sun gently back lit the blossoms, shining through their thin, gossamer petals and highlighting the bright yellow pollen on the tips of each slender stamen. The flowers shivered slightly in a crisp current, casting fluttering shadows across my face. I remember the pale, late winter sun warmed me slightly; some of the first warm sunlight I had felt since the winter months had come. The blossoms always arrived so quickly and thickly that the air hung with their intoxicating smell. The tree's perfume permeated the wind, so that for each quick moment that the air was still, the faint, wind-born aroma descended into a warm fragrance that covered my senses like a blanket. The scent, along with the ever-so-slight, wan warmth that the sun provided, caused me to revel in the moments when the wind would stop, creating such a silence. It was the kind of total, afternoon, sunlit stillness that makes you sleepy. Then, the breeze would begin to blow again; the heady, soporific calm suddenly becoming accompanied by the soft, tinkling sound of wind chimes. The gentle, melodious lullaby drifted on the breeze as flurries of petals floated down through the air, landed on my nose and cheeks, then flitted away again in the wind. The moment was fleeting, and then the sun would disappear behind our neighbor's house in its descent toward the horizon, plunging me into chilly, late afternoon shadow.
I recall this happening on more than one occasion. Oftentimes, I would stand, transfixed in this languid scene until the sun was gone, then I would hurry into my warm house to escape from the chill.

Why I Always Sucked in Creative Writing Class

I hate the feeling of wanting to create so badly, but not having any inspiration or creative juices left. It sucks. I feel like I have a huge creature made of ideas just bursting at the seams to escape its imprisonment in my mind, and I've lost the key to its cage. This happens way too frequently for my liking. To my chagrin and deepest irritation, I find more often than not that no matter how stoked and enthusiastic I am to sit down and create something, I can never actually pull it off unless I am in the exact right mood. Usually if I sit down and try to produce something, even if I have a definite idea and concept in my mind, I just can't do it. I'll sit there for hours, staring at the one or two lines I've written down, desperately trying to come up with something to follow. No, in those rare occasions where I succeed at creating something, even if it's of questionable quality, it's because I was struck with the sudden desire to write, play, or record something I didn't want to forget. The inspiration hits me like a tidal wave, and I am washed over with words that I feel I have to scramble to capture before they drift away. 

This is why I wasn't always good in the various creative writing classes I've taken. My teacher would give us a warm-up prompt with a time limit on it, and I was never sure what degree of success I would have with it. Depending on the prompt, I would either be wildly victorious and be confident enough to read my creation out loud to the class, or I would sit there, staring at the words, questions or photograph or whatever it was that was on the board, determinedly trying to think of something innovative. I would ultimately end up scribbling down something mediocre near the end of the allotted time, often times crossing it out later because of how atrociously impossible it was to expound upon. I was generally relieved to receive assignments, because that meant that instead of having to pounce on a subject and furiously and frenziedly produce a piece, I could have time to write, and hope that the aforementioned wave of inspiration would hit me at some point before my work was due. Sometimes it would, sometimes it wouldn't, but usually if it was a prose-based assignment, I could crank out something moderately above-average if I really set my mind to it. 

It's interesting, because when I was younger, I never used to write prose. I've always had an affinity for writing; when I was really little, I used to keep a diary. It was purple, argyle-patterned leather, with Pocahontas and her raccoon friend on the front. I started writing in it pretty much as soon as I could write, and kept it solidly until I was about 12 years old. At that point, the entries became few and far between, sometimes stretching over a whole year before I would write something new. Once I was a teen, I started unintentionally accumulating stacks of notebooks, most of them relating to school in some way, in which I would write short, rhyming poems. They mostly consisted of simple a, b, a, b schemes, or sometimes a, b, c, b or whatever. If I was feeling particularly adventurous I would meddle with other rhyme schemes, but all of my poems always rhymed. I didn't dabble in prose too much at that point. I was like, 14, and I was primarily writing about boys and other such topics, and what better way to do it than nursery rhyme style? It wasn't until I got older and really interested in reading that I decided I wanted to try writing short stories and other prose pieces. Before that though, in my rhyme phase, it was easy for me to just sit down and write about anything. As I've gotten older, I've grown out of the poems and have discovered that it's much easier for me to write prose most of the time. When the wave hits, however, I still like to compose poems if the mood allows me to. It's an interesting switch, but I guess it probably says something about my life or my personal growth and development or something. I've grown out of the fantastical nursery rhymes and grown into more realistic compositions. I'll always be a bit of a dreamer though.