Writer's "Blog"

Let's call it writer's BLOG instead of block. I haven't blogged much this summer probably because I've been writing and editing--working on the revisions for IN THE PANTRY and also on assignment. It is exciting to have the book come together and now it is in the hands of the graphic designer, to be returned by Halloween. I can't wait to see what they come up with for font, book "look" and layout. So far the editorial process has been far from daunting. On my initial rewrite in June I was concerned that the concept was not being understood (it is by nature a history/design book with lots of quotes and footnotes) but I have not had that feeling at all in the pre-layout revisions. The editors have been a pleasure to work with--even though we are separated by thousands of miles. E-mail has been a salvation for remote accessibility--and for firing text and images back and forth. [I think Emily Dickinson might have published had she had e-mail and a computer--she certainly would have been an even more prolific letter writer! I am convinced she also would have avoided the phone, as I tend to do.]

Once over this odd-uneven transition time into the autumn I plan to blog more than I have been. It is still a week until our two boys return to school. Their private school, while lovely in so many ways, believes in late returns. I'm all for the day after Labor Day: late August is too early and mid-September is too late. This is about the time we get ready to ship our children off to the nearest bidder! [Or perhaps it is the time of year to plan on booking a long weekend somewhere, just the two of us.]

So I relish the time ahead when I will have at least six hours a day uninterrupted. But with our youngest child going off to first grade and his first full day, the time will indeed be bittersweet. Our oldest has already begun her senior year.

For all of us it will be a year of transitions in many ways. I have always regarded September as the beginning of the new year: even when we no longer have children in school, September begins a more inward journey, a more contemplative time. Even the earth has begun to pause and retreat into itself. The days have shortened considerably since mid-summer, the air is cooler and the leaves are beginning to change their color. The crickets are in a full-throttle 24-hour chorus, singing their lives to their conclusion. [There is nothing more fun than to have crickets come into the house, still chirping, holding on to what little life they have left--we always leave them to sing and find their way around.] Now I have begun to think of woodpiles, and filling the pantry, and being more domestic. I could have easily been a squirrel--scurrying about, bringing nuts back to the nest, organizing them and preparing for a long winter.

And there is nothing like donning a flannel night gown or pajamas and slipping into cold sheets piled high with blankets and the wind whistling around the loose old windows of an ancient draughty farmhouse. I miss that time when we heated with wood and you could warm yourself comfortably by the fires downstairs but know that you'd have the best sleep of your life in the chillier bedrooms. Old New England farmhouses were always like that: the kitchen or keeping room was the center of the home, providing warmth and light for working or sitting. Now as a culture we are separated by computers and remote pockets of media throughout households--some children are even allowed computers and televisions in their bedrooms. Houses, like people, are meant to converse and are meant to breathe: to expand and contract, to have some life in them. Like the rhythm of a year, a good house has its own dynamic and routine. It is the keeper of the flame, of the family spirit. And it really does all begin at home. I would not have made a very good pioneer woman or nomadic wanderer. I do enjoy travel, but less so than I used to. Mostly I'd just rather be at home.

Cricket Song

Yesterday I heard it--the first cricket of August and it is still July.

The cricket sound is mournful. It reminds me of the end of summer, when school or routine looms large, and the days are once again waning towards the inevitable shortest day.

Crickets are good luck--in the fall we allow them to come in the house and let them stay with us. They sing for several months in odd, unexpected places. And then they go away again--perhaps they sing because they know they only have a short time before dying.

Peepers herald the end of spring and the warmer days ahead. Fireflies are the silent beacon of midsummer, although we don't seem to have them around much anymore--not as when I was a child when they glimmered across the suburban lawns of Ohio and hovered over the new mown farm fields in New Hampshire.

Crickets announce that fall is near. Somehow this year it seems too early for crickets.

Keep Steppin'

I get the "urban word of the day" emailed from the Urban Dictionary and recently "keep steppin" arrived in my in-box. Its timing was pitch perfect. The term is defined as, "to move on from something bad" or, as used in their sentence, "Yo homie, don't worry '‘bout her, keep steppin!" It has become my new mantra as it helped provide clarity to a recent event and will now be my reaction to things that bother.

In July we went to a large family reunion in the Midwest. As my husband likes to say, "we drove almost 1,300 hundred miles for dinner," because the next day we turned around and came home. No sooner had we arrived when we discovered that our daughter, left back home with a friend so she could work at her summer job, got into a car accident and totaled her car. Speed and a cell phone were the cause. Fortunately the car did its job, the airbags deployed, and she only suffered a broken wrist. It could have been much worse as she just missed a large pine tree and had she gone over on the other side of the road she would have been airborne and launched into a pile of granite rocks—and more trees. The car was totaled but it was just a car and we are grateful to it. Our daughter is fine and her wrist will heal. (And I should have insisted that she come to the reunion with us.)

But the "push out the door" happened because, before the reunion had even begun, we were snubbed by a certain relation. We were to discover that this person had been informed about something to do with the other side of my family, not directly their own—a faction of the one back in New England. Ironically, this simple gesture from a person not even involved, and for whom I've always held in the highest regard, brought closure for me on a difficult few years. We realized that our family issues had morphed into more than the sum of their parts and that we were powerless to change that. "Keep steppin!"

A week after the reunion I attended a writing workshop sponsored by the New Hampshire Writer's Project. Its topic—Writing about Family—was as timely as that relevant word-of-the-day in my in-box. I learned that when one writes "creative non-fiction", or a memoir, that it shouldn't be motivated by revenge or self-serving purposes. Not that I have such intentions but I can imagine that nasty little "R" word all too easily creeping in if not left checked in the cloak room.

Annie Dillard wrote that "while literature is an art, it is not a martial art: no place to defend yourself from an attack, real or imagined, and no place to launch an attack." Contentious family issues are a simmering broth of emotion, upset, envy, and misunderstanding. To place all the blame on one person or event would be wrong. In our case, the unresolved issues from several generations, marriages, and unspoken expectations or wants all fell down in our laps. Did we contribute to the dysfunction of what likely can not be resolved or overcome? Of course we did—but that does not make us solely responsible.

It is not an easy thing to learn: to write with objectivity, perhaps with humor, but also personal experience and insight. All families are nuts in their own way and we all share our joys, our sorrows, and our battle scars. Perhaps that is why non-fiction out sells fiction now: people are fascinated by real lives. Memoirs by ordinary people are the literary equivalent to the "reality" television genre.

So now I'll just try to "keep steppin" over and around the stuff of life that tends to get in the way of really living it. And one day maybe I'll write about it: not dwelling on the bad but the good, the best of what resonates: what is clear, what is muddy, what was and what might have been.

Our Friend Dot

One of my best, most regular readers (that I know about!) is our dear friend Dot. I am writing about her today because she always reminds me when I haven't written something new. She reads every one of my blog entries and I think she checks daily. She is more in tune with it than I am sometimes. She keeps me honest and keeps me writing. So, today, and so I don't hear "Catherine, all I am reading lately is about Eleanor, Eleanor, Eleanor!" when I next see her, I am going to write about Dot.

Ironically, as I type this entry on a beautiful summer day with puffy white clouds wafting across the blue horizon, and with Dot's house in the corner of my eye through my office window (Dot lives across from us on Main Street), I have just received an email "ding". Incoming from Dot! She kindly wrote to thank us for some spaghetti dish we sent over yesterday. I've decided to do "Meals on Main Street" but from our own kitchen and without wheels. I make so much food that rather than have things rot in our refrigerator, I'll make an extra helping or two for Dot. Sometimes she can join us here, too, but she is a woman with a full life and a ready meal, taken out of her fridge or freezer when convenient, is just the thing for her. Dot, in her own way and without even needing to ask, will also keep me honest and inventive with my cooking that, frankly, could use a jump start. My kids might settle for Spaghetti O's or Annie's Shells & Cheese on a regular basis--an all too easy "out" in the game of "What's For Dinner, Mom?" but I would never think of sending those selections over to Dot.

How do we love Dot? Let me count the ways:

~ She has been like a mother to my husband for over 30 years when she and her dear husband Walt moved here in 1974
~ She has been like a grandmother to our three children
~ She makes a mean Martini (she is also a poster child for the ability to smoke and drink and how it can help longevity)
~ She makes a mean pile of Pennsylvania Dutch scrapple and the best corn meal mush (both suitable for slicing and frying)
~ She reads everything she can and volunteers her time at the town library
~ She sees and knows all from her kitchen window (and if you don't know about it, she'll tell you)
~ She lives in the cutest house in the village--just right for a Grandmother's House and it suits her well
~ She introduced us to two of our favorite people: Nancy and Barbara
~ She turns her lights off on Halloween so no one bothers her
~ She doesn't hesitate to speak her mind and she has a very sharp one
~ She is feisty and has a great sense of humor
~ She keeps my husband in line when I can't
~ She is exactly who I want to be when I grow up

We love Dot to pieces! So there, Dot: I've written another entry (well, my second since ELEANOR) and now YOU'VE been blogged! Like it or not! (Ok, well if you don't like anything, I'll take it out...)

The Bunny Diaries: R.I.P Sniffles the 1st

The other day two well-meaning friends, our son Henry's godparents, sent our daughter home with a cage, dried hay for bedding, some pellet food, and a water bottle--oh yes, and a baby bunny. He was the most serene rabbit, soft and angora-like, with dappled gray and tan coloring.

"Henry, what are you going to name him?" "Sniffles," he answered, "because he sniffs." That seemed like a perfect name, especially for an on-the-spot decision for an animal whose nose rarely stops twitching.

Several days later our son Eli came down early, as he often does, to check on things. I, too, was up early (a rare occurrence). He came inside and with a look of terror, his eyes wide, he cried: "there is blood in the cage!". I tried to be calm, fearing the worst. "Eli, come in the house and stay in the living room." I went to the cage--oh, phew, the bunny looked fine...at first glance. He wasn't and I can't possibly describe the state he was in because I don't have that in me to describe, but I knew he was suffering. I found a cloth, gathered him up and held him close, and found my husband. Henry was still asleep and Eli, having heard the sound of fear in my voice, had remained upstairs.

My first thought was, this animal is not going to make it, my next thought was deep empathy for the wee bunny, and my final one was that Henry will be devastated. My husband came down, we went to the mudroom, and I just lost it. I couldn't hold back the tears. I felt like Fern Arable at the prospect of losing Wilbur the runt to the hands of farm fate. My husband, who grew up with more farm animals than I ever did, knew what to do so the bunny would no longer suffer. I knew that calling a vet at that point was not an option. It was clear that the poor animal had been tortured by a cat who could reach his long arms through the thin cage rails. In our ignorance at the cage limitations, we had left Sniff on the porch at night. Big mistake, even for a country village bunny like ours. [By the way, my favorite all-time Easter bunny children's book? THE COUNTRY BUNNY and the Little Gold Shoes by Marjorie Flack]

Henry soon came downstairs and we brought him onto our laps and gave both he and Eli the news. As it was Henry's bunny, we knew he would take it the hardest. My husband had buried Sniff under the arborvitae hedge where he (or she--it was too soon to tell) liked to play and hide, and placed a rock over his spot. The boys brought flowers to Sniffles for several days and we even had a small memorial service for the bunny. I remembered the many gerbils, turtles, chameleons, dogs and cats that we lost as children. But there is nothing like your own child's first pet death--an important lesson in life and love. These small tragedies in the animal world make us the humans that we are.

POSTSCRIPT: A few days after Sniff died, my husband went back to our friends who had the bunny litter and brought home not one but two more: one for Henry and one for Eli. It was a huge surprise for everyone. "Sniffles II" and "Bunny" as Eli named his white and brown-spotted bunny. Sniffles looks just like the first. I'll post a photo soon. Now we realize they may be one girl and one boy so separate cages will be our next quest...or we might be finding ourselves with a litter of our own.