“Work is work,” Dad once said, sternly for him, when I grumbled about some now-forgotten chore. It was not like him to correct others and so it worried me: Did he sense an essential laziness in me?

Truthfully, I liked his call to arms. Mom warned me against taking on too much, to protect me from “going numb” like she did—words she used to describe several crippling depressions she experienced when we were small—but Dad’s words made me feel I could meet any challenge.

If I hunched against the Michigan winter chill, he’d laugh and say, “Open up to the weather! It’s just fresh air!” Sure enough, if I relaxed my shoulders, and faced the wind head on, I felt better.

For some reason, writing feels like the coldest of Michigan winters this year, like the weight of the medicine ball we tossed around in gym in elementary school. The verb “to work” means “to make” or “to do” but the definition that is giving me such trouble is: to set in motion.

When I sit down to write I resist…and resist… and call up news sites on my computer... and check the latest photos of Meghan Markle on Google images, and click and click until I find myself staring, inanely, at Markle's former Canadian chef boyfriend, who cooked a chicken the day after Meghan and Harry announced they cooked a chicken when they got engaged.

Instead of breezy quick takes on a topic, I am tapping into deeper themes this year. The memories I unearth are fodder for the process, and necessary, but also filled with emotional weight as I explore low and high points of childhood.

Maybe losing steam, feeling tired and discouraged, and all that procrastination, is actually a necessary stage of embarking on a new project.

As I recall the hollow melodious coo of the mourning dove in our back yard, and resurrect Mom in her garden, and reconstruct the red bud tree in full spring flower, and the moss roses along the drive, and my night terrors the summer before junior high, I feel yearning and joy and grief and regret.

Going back is painful. It reminds me I once lived in a house with moss roses along the drive. I once had a beautiful young mother who pulled weeds in a garden.

Some days I want to quit, go back to breezy quick takes, but then I hear Dad's voice say: “Work is work.”