The summer doldrums

 

A place where I can lost the summer doldrums
Colin's lake in Tomball. Note Sophie next to me. 

It’s hot, and I’m in the doldrums. Or am I just lazy? Or is age creeping up on me? I have a friend, slightly younger than me, who says she no longer has the focus for long projects--like novels--and she is considering other ways to keep writing. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with me, but Missing Irene, the fifth adventure for my diva chef, is dragging along. For a while, it was going great, and I could see the road ahead for some distance. But now it’s ground to a crawl, and the road is murky. Oh, I know what’s going to happen, but I’m having trouble getting there. And I’ve only just begun.

I think if you’ve been writing long enough, you know when your writing sings—and you know when it doesn’t. Years ago, my then-agent asked me to do a proposal for a publisher who wanted a young-adult book about a girl in the American West. I wrote what I thought was an acceptable proposal and sent it off. It came back with one devastating comment from the publisher: “Frankly, we find Mrs. Alter’s writing pedestrian.” Pedestrian! What a devastating word! But it probably was spot on, and I was young and green enough not to recognize it. But now, with a long career behind me—forty-plus years and over a hundred books of various types, plus articles, reviews, columns, etc.—I am very aware when my writing “feels” pedestrian. And that’s where I’ve been the last couple of days.

Lately on a writing listserv I follow, there’s been a thread about how to tell a budding author what’s wrong with a manuscript, especially if everything’s wrong from syntax to plot to character. I remember once submitting a sixty-page manuscript, on assignment, to a pamphlet series about western authors. It came back with the first twelve pages so heavily edited I could hardly find my own words amidst the red pen notes. It was absolutely the best writing lesson I have ever had and much of it has stood me in good stead over the years. So maybe that’s what I need now—a heavy red pencil.

I know the best thing to do when a project seems stalled is walk away from it and let it sit for days, even weeks. Then go back to it with new eyes. But when I do that, I feel guilty for not writing, even though I set my own deadlines. No one else is telling me I must write a certain number of words a day or produce a finished manuscript by a certain date. It’s one of the big reasons I am an indie-published author.

I can put it aside because I have other interests and projects, principally cooking. With this hot weather, Jordan has challenged me to cook light meals, and I’ve been happy with my results. Like the open-faced sandwich (see last night’s “Gourmet on a Hot Plate”) or the old-fashioned layer salad I made last night and had for lunch today (probably see next Thursday’s “Gourmet on a Hot Plate”).

I so enjoy meal planning that my grocery bill is out of sight, but I have figured something out. I buy groceries for happy hour snacks (I limit happy hour these days to a few close friends who I know haven’t been traveling—call me cautious, but the cases of Covid I’ve known have almost all been people who’ve been traveling). And I buy groceries for dinner for the three of us—Jacob is now working at Joe T.s almost every night, so I don’t figure him in. That’s a lot of groceries, between Central Market and Albertson’s, but the thing I don’t do is go out to eat. I figure I save a whole bunch of money by cooking at home. Of course, because I experiment, I buy things I wouldn’t ordinarily, which increases my bill (I just ordered furikake—look it up if you’re puzzled).

I’ve been thinking, while my novel lingers in the doldrums, of doing another cookbook. I’ve learned a lot, found a lot of new dishes in the five years since Gourmet on a Hot Plate. And I have a thick file now of what I call “keepers.” I’d love any feedback on whether it would be a good idea or not to combine my food blogs into a book.

There’s one more thing that keeps me occupied, and that’s what I see as the state of our country and the need to speak out. I could blog about that every night, but I figure I’d begin to sound shrill and would become one of those with lots of indignation and no solutions. So I save such blogs for only occasionally, and only specific topics I consider crucial—hard to define that because so many are crucial.

And that’s where I am in the doldrums. I will appreciate any cheering words, advice, suggestions, jokes, and the like. This too shall pass, and I know it, but friends are gootd to have when you’re in the doldrums.

And now, I’m off to read an old Jessica Fletcher mystery set in my heart’s country, Scotland. I missed it the first time around. Stay cool.

Do you have a safe place?

 

Several days ago, I read a blog post by a writer show said that when she was stressed, she went for a drive on small country roads and found solace in familiar places. Easy enough for her to do—she lives in a small town in Maine. But for those of us who are city dwellers, such oases maybe hard to find. So, I close my eyes and go in my mind.

My longtime safe place is an outcrop about halfway up a tall dune in the Indiana States Dunes Park. When I was a child my family had a cabin at the top of that dune, up two very long flights of stairs from the beach. The cabin was primitive—no electricity, no running water. To the front of the living area, great windows looked out over Lake Michigan. The cabin was at the very foot of the lake, and I loved to watch storms roll down the lake and stir up the waters on our beach. My mom taught us to enjoy a storm, never to fear it, a habit I carry to this day (if there are no tornadoes). To the back of the house, windows looked out on a lovely, dense woods. The hitch was that the outhouse was down a small hill in those woods—a perilous journey in the night.

For refrigeration, we had a cold box on a pulley. Once a week, the iceman cometh—bringing a great block of ice which went down the hole first and then the box was lowered on top of it. Mom knew to put milk on the bottom shelf, closest to the ice. I can’t even remember what Mom cooked on before we got bottled gas. I do remember that she washed dishes in cistern water and then rinsed them in scalding water she’d boiled on some sort of stove. There was a pot-bellied stove in the living area for warmth. At night, we read by kerosene lamps, with Dad always warning us to turn the light down lest we burn the mantel. The dim light was hard to read by, and we went to bed early. I should also mention that the closest we could drive to the cabin was about a mile. We had to pack food and groceries in on our backs, often in old army duffle bags. You could go down the beach—and for the first trip when we arrived each summer, we sometimes had so much to carry we hired the park Jeep to drive that mile. But we preferred the woods—we parked at a shelter house, under a tree, and hiked in over a long bridge across the swamp and then up and down sandy paths. The woods were always cool.  That hike was also perilous at night, and at least once Dad stopped us while a skunk made its leisurely way across the path.

I usually took a friend with me when we went there. We thought it was heaven—days spent on the beach, hiking through the woods, playing Monopoly. Food tasted better there than anywhere else. We came back to Chicago tanned and healthy and happy.

My safe place, where I go now, was a crop-out on the path to friends’ cabin, below the second set of stairs. I can remember sitting there, staring out over the lake, my dog—a wild collie mix named Timmy—by my side. I could pull up a blade of dune grass and pull it through my teeth. There was usually at least a small breeze, though I always enjoyed the strong wind of a storm. I could angle my vision to the right and look across the lake at sunset to see Chicago with the setting sun behind it. The sun would be a bright orange globe, and the tall buildings of Chicago, not even toothpick size. Behind me, sometimes, my dad would be taking sunset pictures. When he died, he had a closet full of those old-fashioned slides, mostly sunsets or flowers from his gardens.

I have a new safe place, and it’s a fine one, though it doesn’t come with the same memories. My son Colin and his family live on either the smallest lake or biggest tank in Tomball, Texas. There is a patio, with benches and chairs looking out over the water and an arboretum overhead (that could easily drop bugs in your wine). We go there sometimes in the evening, with an after-dinner wine and sit in quiet peace.

So maybe it’s water that makes a safe place for me. I am not a swimmer, though I swam when young. Still I was never completely comfortable in the water. I’ve always said I do not want to be in it or on it, but I love to look at it.

How about your safe place?

Ho, hum, and it’s not even summer yet

I was astonished to realize today that is isn’t officially summer yet. Not until Thursday, but yet it’s been hot for, well, it seems like forever. Today in the late afternoon we got some rain—not much. I looked at the walkway from the cottage to the house and could see a clear line of demarcation where the rain stopped. Odd, I thought, that it rained in the back half of our tiny yard but not the front. The driveway though was wet all the way to the street, and I figured that it was such a light, gentle, brief rain that it didn’t make it through the leaves of the tree that hangs over house and deck. Megan reported it was raining harder at Montgomery Mall when she took the boys for a treat after camp, and a friend in a different direction reported that it rained briefly at her house. We’ll take whatever.

A second day, for me, of sorting files, doing long overdue office chores. Spent a bit of time going through recipe files and discarding ones that, though intriguing, I knew I would never try. Dishes that feed ten or twelve, or things the kids won’t eat but I discarded the recipes—and the days of big cooking—farewell with some regret. Then I sorted my out-of-pocket medical expenses since January to submit them to my supplementary insurance program. All that kind of stuff that you put off forever and then feel so righteous when you get it done. It’s also part of my reassessment program—I’m putting my writing on the back burner, where I hope to heaven it’s simmering but I’m not actively thinking about it.

Maybe the most interesting thing I saw today was a squirrel trying desperately to get into the chicken yard. He darted back and forth, scratched, and obviously worried about the chicken wire keeping him from whatever food he thought lay on the ground. Until on of the chickens got tired of him and one headed his way flapping her wings. The squirrel scooted away as fast as he could. I’m sure the chicken, envying his freedom, thought some critters don’t know when they have it well off. I think that about people, myself included, frequently. I haven’t seen the predator in the tree for some time now—I think it decimated the baby squirrel population and moved on. But I do enjoy watching the chickens. The other morning, I was alarmed to see two of them on top of their large cage instead of in it, but they were soon back in place, and I decided all was well. My neighbors might get weary of my chicken alerts when I don’t really know what’s going on.

Happy hour tonight with a woman I met because she wanted to write. As we talked, we discovered that she was a sorority sister of Megan’s at TCU, although a year or two older. Then she and Jordan met through an entirely different connection. There definitely is not two degrees of separation in our part of Fort Worth. Her first book, a children’s book, is coming out tomorrow—more about that in a future installment.

We had salmon for dinner, not an unusual menu these days. But this was special salmon—Megan and/or Ford caught it on a trip to Alaska a year ago. It was flash frozen, shipped home, and has been vacuum sealed in their freezer ever since. She brought it frozen, and last night put it in my fridge to defrost. At 10:45, I opened the refrigerator and was attacked by a solidly frozen hunk of salmon—quite a start. She and Ford got to telling tales of their adventure with good friends who live in Alaska—it included an encounter with a bear on a residential street. I gather in Anchorage that’s as common as deer are in some Central Texas communities. And we get excited if we see a coyote or fox in our Fort Worth neighborhood.

Where Has Summer Gone?

Is it Indian summer yet? Somehow I can’t shed my summer afternoon sleepiness. The last two days, Jacob went home with buddies, and I came home, fresh from a nap, and promptly went back to bed. Today I slept at least another hour.

Somehow this summer I seem to have forgotten how to do Texas summers. Now that it’s almost over—Labor Day marks the unofficial end for most of us—I’m back in the swing of things. I’ve always, every summer, watered my porch plants first thing. This year, my coleus (I have a shady porch) spoke to me in no uncertain terms about its need for water. Jordan would come by in the late afternoon and stop to water before she came in the house. Finally, about the first of August, I got in the swing of things and watered every morning. Yesterday because of an appt. that required an early departure, I forgot. By evening one coleus in particular looked pitiful—though this morning when I went out to water it had perked up a bit.

Usually in summer, my front porch and the windows in the family room are alive with geckos. This summer, my theme song is “Where have all the geckos gone?” I did finally see on fat little translucent fellow on the window in the family room. When it’s dark and the outdoor lights are on, their little bodies are translucent. Once I had a gecko in my bathroom—every morning when I sat on the commode, he’d come out to visit. I miss him, and I can’t help wondering if the disappearance of geckos is like the threat to bees—due to all those pesticides we use.

Another summer thing I forgot—fruit salads, with all the wonderful summer fruits. I’m not much on watermelon but I love a good, sweet cantaloupe, with halved strawberries, sliced peaches, blueberries, and sliced bananas. Yet, it’s only been the last two or three weeks that I’ve made fruit salads, and I noticed this weekend that the blueberries were sometimes a little tart. I never put raspberries in salads because they’re fragile and tend to get overwhelmed—besides I hide them in the back of the fridge for myself. I don’t buy mango either, as it’s so hard to cut up and the already cut-up fruit in the grocery tends to be under-ripe. But I’ve let the best pf summer foods slip by except for corn on the cob.

In the spring it was usually too wet to be on the deck; then it was too hot. We’ve gotten no use out of it since early spring, and I’m hoping fall will bring deck weather. Jacob suggested tonight he’d like to get rid of the table and chairs so it could be a play deck. Not likely. Weather had also prevented me from putting the top down on my convertible, though that’s no unusual for Texas summers. Lately, I can tell summer is beginning to leave because if I have to go somewhere early, I drive with the top down—it has a lovely, soothing effect.

Will I miss summer? Not the heat, nor the drought that is back upon us. But the fruits and vegetables and the light summer meals? Those long afternoon naps and lazy days in which I still got a lot done? Yes, I’ll miss those.

But the October’s bright blue skies are pretty neat. And I have some fall flowers about to bloom in my front yard.

 

 

Measuring Life by Meals

No blog last night—first night I missed since my July 22 announcement that I was collecting a year of blogs—from birthday to birthday. Last night I just had too good a time, company stayed later than usual (though Jordan, bless her, cleaned the kitchen), and I probably had an extra glass of wine. We were sending Jacob off to camp, though he decamped from the adult company rather quickly. Jordan, our friend Chandry, Jay, and I had another salad supper—we’re really enjoying those.

Today, Jordan and Christian took Jacob to camp. She emailed to ask if I had her lemon oil (no), then it was her sunglasses (no, but I offered the Baylor water glass she’d left behind). Eventually she found what she was missing, and when I suggested she was a mess, she said of course she was: she was getting ready to drop her boy off for a week. I can just hear the talks he’s getting about being a good camper, etc.

I’m sad that summer is winding down—school starts two weeks from tomorrow, and no matter the temperature—it will be hot—that signals the end of summer to me, the end of lazy days and long naps, the start again of responsibility. Makes me feel like a kid. Besides, it was August before I really got into the hang of summer—watering plants every morning, closing shades against afternoon sun. Temperature here? 104.

Today is a long day at home, though not without work to do. Still I like to enliven my long days with varied menus. I plan what I’ll eat. So today I had leftover layered salad for lunch—love finding chunks of egg white in that dressing. Tonight I’ll pile crab salad on toast, cover with a bit of grated cheese, lay asparagus across it and top with thin sliced Monterrey Jack, and broil. Rich but good. To me, such planning ahead beats standing with the refrigerator door open, staring blankly at the contents, and wondering what to eat. I admit I anticipate meals, especially good ones.

Finished reading Leslie Budewitz’s Butter Off Dead and will write a review later. I liked the novel a lot and was particularly struck by how climate—i.e. hard Montana winters—controlled much of the action. Then first edits came back on “Murder at Peacock Mansion” so that will also be a today project. Lazy days aren’t always lazy.

Postscript: The laugh’s on me. I had balked at buying $8.50 canned crab at Central Market and was delighted to find Chicken of the Sea at Albertson’s for $3.49. Only tonight, luckily before I opened it, I discovered I bought canned tiny shrimp. Not what I wanted. In fact I’m allergic to shrimp. So there went the dinner I’d been anticipating all day. Cooked some of the asparagus—tiny, tender stalks that cook in three minutes—and defrosted a salmon pasty from the freezer (homemade). Delicious dinner—just not what my anticipation dial had been set at.

One good deed begets another

Jacob has a new hero...and it all falls under the heading of paying it forward. Christian found a wallet in the Walmart parking lot last Saturday and rather than leave it for some less honest person he brought it home and called the owner, who turned out to be TCU football player Ju'juan Story. They met to return the wallet Monday afternoon, and Christian arranged to take Jacob with him. Ju'juan brought him an autographed TCU hat and his gloves from last year plus said he might come to Jacob's pool party Saturday--Jacob realizes that is a long shot, but I can tell he's still hoping.
And then his aunt and uncle presented with an NFL autograph football signed by one of the Dallas Cowboys. I do NOT want him to play football, but he is so excited about all this.
Earlier, he went to TCU Baseball camp and loved every minute, said he was liking TCU better all the time. Watch out Baylor, I some divided loyalties at the least, an outright switch as a possibility.
This has been a Jacob-centric week, since I've taken him to a

private swim lesson each morning from ten-thirty to eleven. Hope I'm not repeating myself, but the first day he sat on the end of the diving board, told the instructor which way he was going. She gave him a gentle shove, and he swam to the edge. The very next day he stood on the end of the dividing board, went in (okay it was a belly flop and he said it hurt) and swam the length of the pool. I was astounded. Today he learned the breast stroke which she says is hard to master (I do it on a yoga mat!) He' made progress and had a wonderful week.

I've found the swim lessons took a chunk out of my day but enjoyed sitting under the trees reading, and I've had Jacob for company Tuesday afternoon and all day today. Tuesday, just after his swimming, the summer program at school was going on a swim field trip. Today they went to the zoo all day--he hasn't mentioned missing the zoo, so I guess it's okay.
Things can only get better. Tomorrow his eighth birthday. He's already close to wheedling me out of his present tonight.

Little Boys and Puppy Dog Tales

What a time the last week of school has been. The other day, four second-grade boys played tag football and then dodgeball in my front yard. It was in the 90s and I sat on the porch in the shade, but it was still hot. One of the boys' grandfathers sat with me, as he often does, but every time the ball went in the street, he had to go get it. Even though I just sat there, I was exhausted when we went in the house after an hour. The soccer ball or whatever it was remained stuck high up in a  youpon where it stayed until today when I showed Jacob and Collin how to poke it down without beating the tree to death. Today I just have the two boys and it's much more peaceful--they threw the ball in the back driveway (securely fenced) where I didn't have to watch them all the time. Maybe it's my age but I don't seem to have the energy for four as I did when I was raising my four--except two of mine were girls.
But Jacob proves my three-stages of Jacob theory: with a friend here he's a bit of a smart-aleck with an attitude. Tonight, when he and I build poor boy sandwiches, I'll bet he'll be fun. And when he sleeps he still looks like an innocent baby.
Not only did I have to worry about boys this week, I worried about Sophie. She ignored her food Monday night and Tuesday night--she'd drink and take tiny bits of cheese from me, but no dog food. And I began to watch her neurotically--was she lethargic or was that normal quiet when nothing was going on? By ten o'clock Tuesday I was planning a vet visit the next morning, when she suddenly ate every bit of food and wanted to go out. She's been lively and energetic ever since, so I guess her stomach was upset or maybe the sudden onset of heat got her.
Today all is well, Sophie is ecstatic to have the boys here, and I am ecstatic that we only have two more days of school. Of course then comes baseball camp--pick him up at three--and then swimming lessons right in the middle of the day. Then, I think, a peaceful spell.. I'm ready.