It’s always something

 

This pictue of my beautiful boys popped up on my computer today.
Jacob with Scooby, the dog that taught him to love dogs.
Scooby was a sweetheart but wild at the core. 
He has a huge place in my heart still.

Today was one of those days. It began early, though I was blissfully unaware of the confusion in front of the house. A couple of days ago I emailed Jordan and Christian, reminding them the tree trimming guys would be here between eight and nine this morning and please have all cars out of the driveway—except my VW which has been dead for weeks and sits in the drive like a permanent piece of sculpture, albeit bad sculpture. Moving the cars was complicated because we live across from an elementary school that starts classes at eight—so the car moving, school dropoff, and arrival of the really big tree company equipment all collided. Sophie and I slept on.

I had fed Soph about seven and let her out, but I knew she would want to go again after her second breakfast. By then, however, the gates were all open—I learned my lesson about that yesterday. She was really good, and when Jordan came to give her a shot, she walked her on the leash. The rest of the day Sophie was good as gold, and the tree crew closed the gate for me when they went to lunch.

Meanwhile, the temperature was slowly rising. I checked throughout the morning, hoping it would get enough about freezing to defrost my tankless hot water heater. That may have thawed slowly, but the faucet on the deck of the main house thawed rapidly. I’m still not sure I got it right, but Jordan rushed out here about one o’clock and demanded I get on our neighborhood email and ask for someone to come turn off the water at the curb—it was, she said, gushing. I suggested she ask the tree guys who were eating lunch in their trucks. That didn’t please her, but she did—invading their lunch hour, she said—and they got it turned off. She was not exactly calm about the whole thing. Turned out there was something broken—never did find out for sure what—so she called the plumber, who said it would be Friday before they got here. I have to admit I paled at the thought of two days without water, because disregarding all advice, we hadn’t prepared for it. I had a bit of extra water in the teakettle, and I think there’s a gallon jug in my closet. And that’s it.

Action shifted to the spigot on the deck, where we’d had trouble before. A pipe below the deck burst. It dawned on me, not a happy thought, that if they turned water off at the curb, I wouldn’t have it either—somehow I had thought, “Well, that’s their problem. At least I have cold water, and the can use my water.” Fooling myself.

Next I knew neighbor Jay was on the deck with Jordan. They looked and fiddled and talked for a long time—and then went away, leaving me in suspense. Just before I napped, Jordan texted that all was okay for the time being. I tried the hot water faucet, and it had a trickle. I went to sleep,

When I woke, I had hot water! First thing I did was wash my hair. Next thing was to ask about the pipe, and it seems Jay is going to Home Depot tomorrow and will get the needed part. Good neighbors are priceless, and I wish the story ended there, but about six, Jay’s wife texted that she thought we should know that their yard was littered with dead branches and they were throwing them all into our yard. Jay had talked to the crew, and they assured him they would clean it up.

Finally, about 7:30 Jordan and I had a calm supper of crab cakes, salad with my favorite buttermilk dressing, and marinated cucumbers that I made today because I had cukes that needed to be used. A good end to a fretful day.

Tomorrow peace and calm. Fingers crossed. But another cold spell is due in a couple of days. It’s a thing called climate change.

 

Tree Trimming…a nostalgia trip

 

My memories of Christmas as a child are pretty rosy and happy, but trimming the tree? Not so much. My folks, my brother, and I would go pick out a tree. When we got it home, Dad and John would put it up and string the lights, and then they were out of there. It was left to Mom and me to hang the ornaments. Not an exercise in family togetherness.

Grown, I resolved to make a party out of tree trimming. I gave our first party the first year we were in Fort Worth—1965—because we were far from family and knew few people (as it turned out my brother and his family surprised us and arrived in a converted bus, but that’s another story). That party began a long tradition. With a couple of exceptions, I gave that party every year until about 2015.

Preparations began in November, and I was very organized about it. List upon list—the guest list, the food list, the supplies list. Pretty much the same people came year after year, but always there were new faces to add and some who, for various reasons, were absent, though I never deliberately cut anyone off the list. But among my friends, the party became sort of a ritual. Anywhere from sixty to eighty people or more would come and go from the house, sometimes on a Friday, occasionally a Sunday evening.

In the early years I mailed invitations, usually postcards, addressing them way before Thanksgiving. A good friend and neighbor who was a calligrapher often designed them for me. Later, I stole Christmas images off the net. Somewhere I have a file of invitations, some quite striking. Toward the later years, alas, invitations were by email.

The deal was that I put all the ornaments out on a coffee table, and each guest was to hang at least one ornament. Many brought ornaments as Christmas gifts, and after a few years I had an amazing collection of ornaments, most with a story that I remembered. They are all now packed away in a box in the attic, and I think someday I should get them out and go over them, just for memories’ sake. Pretty much, everyone cooperated, and by the end of the evening, the tree would be resplendent. Of course, there was the year it started to fall over, and a good friend caught it.

But the food was my big deal. I began cooking and freezing way ahead. The week of the party, I put all the serving dishes out on the table, each with a scrap of paper noting what would go into it, a practice that led Christian to say to Jordan, once he was safely married into the family, “You and your mother have a screw loose.” It worked for us, and by then she was my sous chef.

Mostly the same dishes appeared year after year. If I varied the menu much or left out a favorite, I heard about it. Standard were a caviar spread which I love to this day, bourbon hot dog chunks (a favorite of my children), chili-cheese dip, the cheeseball which was traditional in my family when I was a child. Some years I did a bacon/cheese spread that Megan really liked. Once I tried smoked salmon, but serving it was a problem; the same held true the year I splurged on a crab dip. In the early years, particularly when my ex was still around, I bought a large jar of pickled herring and served it in a bowl—today I don’t think many would eat it, except me and Mary Dulle. And there were desserts—chocolate Bundt cake, Toll House bars, chocolate chip brownies. One year I made some kind of cookie that required dipping half of each cookie in a chocolate sauce—really time consuming, but when I didn’t repeat it, Christian complained.

Usually by ten-thirty everyone was gone, and I was left with clean-up. Some years, after I wasn’t quite so financially desperate, I hired a wonderful couple, Dorothy and Fred Goodspeed. She manned the kitchen end, and he passed among the crowd (hard to do with all those people in several houses, none of them large). With Dorothy in the kitchen, I never had much to do. After Mr. Goodspeed died, Dorothy helped for a few years, sometimes with her son, and then I hired a service called Party Angels. Finally, Jordan was my party angel, and we managed fine.

I gave up the party, reluctantly, when I was having health problems. I can’t remember, but I think I the last one was in 2015, when my hip problems were getting worse. Now, with me in the cottage where I can entertain maybe six people, it’s not feasible. We have talked of a huge party in the main house, and I’d love to do that, but with my friends, Burton friends, and mutual friends—well, there just isn’t room. But all those years of parties have provided me with so many rich memories to drag out at the holiday season and reflect on how fortunate I have been—in friends, in life. Here a toast to Christmas with all its joy!

Trees, flowers, and memoirs

    

My flowers and Jordan's Little Red Riding Hood basket

The neighbors behind my cottage are adding a screened porch to their house, a pool, and a cabana/guest house. Behind me is close—the cabana will maybe be ten or twelve feet from the wall of my cottage. These neighbors are good, responsible citizens, and they have bent over backwards to assure I am not disturbed. I am not. The only time noise would bother me is when I want to sleep in the afternoon, and my bedroom is pretty much like a cave.

 But there is one noise that sounds worse than scratching on a blackboard to me, and that’s the saw that tree trimmers use. So this afternoon, just as I lay down to nap, someone started to take out a whole tree. Have you ever tried to sleep with that high-pitched whining? I closed the bedroom doors, confining Sophie with me. That worked for about two seconds, and then she protested. I think she must be claustrophobic, because when I opened the sliding door into the kitchen and told her she could do what she wanted, she settled down and slept next to my bed. Serendipitously, the whining noise stopped, and I did get a nap.

Jordan made up for my interrupted nap by bringing me flowers. She stopped at Central Market for the feta I need tomorrow. After declaring she didn’t want to run around looking for a lot of things, she confessed she overbought—including flowers, Cotswald cheddar, a new flavor of yogurt, and other delicacies.

She was cooking dinner tonight since I wanted to attend a six o’clock Zoom meeting, but all the ingredients for supper—chicken/pesto pasta—were in my fridge. So she loaded up a basket and announced, “I am Little Red Riding Hood.” The picture above combines her basket and the flowers she brought me.

The Zoom meeting tonight, sponsored by Story Circle Network, featured two authors—one a novelist, the other a memoirist, talking about the requirements, advantages, and drawbacks of each genre. I have, as I’ve mentioned, been interested in memoir in a sort of distant way. I always thought a memoir was the story of your life. My first novel, After Pa Was Shot, was fiction based on a memoir by the mother of a friend. The woman, probably in her eighties in the fifties or sixties, sat down at a typewriter, wrote “The Story of My Life,” and created a fascinating manuscript. But these days some people are writing several memoirs. The thought today is that memoir covers one episode, say three to five years. I can’t wrap my head about that. I want to look at the whole of my life put together. One author tonight said if you write about your life, as Michele Obama has done, it’s biography—I would correct that to autobiography. But the difference to me is that autobiography recites the facts; memoir invests those facts with emotion.

Both authors have written books about adoption, which should have hit home to me—but didn’t, because their experiences were so different. Julie McGue’s memoir, Twice a Daughter, is about her experience as an adoptee seeking information about her birth family so that she might have some family health history. The Sound Between the Notes, by Barbara Lynn Probst, is a novel based on her experiences with her adopted daughter and the daughter’s affinity for music and the health history that intervened. One great line: “You can’t create music when you are angry.”

But both are about searches for birth parents, and that’s foreign to me. My four children have never expressed any desire to search, even in the face of such health concerns as epilepsy, Crohn’s disease, and possible effects of maternal drug use. I suppose the two authors wouldn’t understand my feelings—Probst, for instance, knows her daughter’s birth mother. For me, I am more than content that my children are mine. I am grateful to their birth parents, aware of the sacrifice they made for the child’s sake, but I see no need to share them. We are an unusually close and happy family—no small trick with four adopted children and a mostly single mom.

Memoir to me would involve what one author tonight called “working through stuff.” I would want to recall my life, to figure out its patterns. I’m not fooling myself that the world is waiting breathlessly for this story. If I write it, it would be for me—and perhaps for my children.

Enough. I’m going to read a mystery and forget the thornier problems of life in general or writing in particular.

Christmas spirit and a gleeful dog

When my ex-husband and I moved to Fort Worth in 1965, we had few friends by Christmas and the holiday loomed as a little bleak, though I think that my brother and his family came down from Missouri in a converted bus that year. Still, to make Christmas joyful, I threw a small tree trimming party. Our friends were then like us—physicians in training and pretty much broke. It was a modest party.

The tree trimming idea actually traces back to my childhood. We would go as a family to pick out a tree; my father and brother would put on the lights and retire; my mother and I were left to put on the ornaments. The process had none of the joy that I thought trimming the tree should have, so a party was my attempt to create that joy.

Over the years since then I have hosted a tree trimming party almost every year. Those parties grew until there were sometimes fifty or sixty people, and I began cooking and freezing in late November. The week of the party I’d lay out the serving dishes, each with a tiny slip of paper to remind what was to go in what dish. It was a lot of work, but the kind of work—and anticipation—that was fun for me.

Alas, those days are over. Last year, my first year in the cottage and the kids first year in the house, we were all too frazzled with moving and my health problems. This year, I couldn’t face all that cooking. I had neither the facilities for doing it nor the ambition, the latter an admission I hate to make.

Tonight, with the tree already trimmed, we had a small potluck gathering for neighbors, a group we’ve been close to. The beauty of potluck is that you get a wonderful array of treats, and we had a bountiful table. The downside is that Jordan wanted to use china and silver and got out all the good stuff, which now must be washed. Still, it was a lovely warm fun party, and I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. Who knows what next year will bring?

One of life’s joys, to me, is to be greeted by a joyous dog. Sophie got left in the cottage—she just gets too excited with even a small crowd of people, and with people coming and going I was afraid she’d slip out the door. The look on her face when I left was pure devastation. During the evening, which ended nicely early, someone let her into the back yard, so she greeted me when I came out the door. That little black dog wriggled all over with joy, jumping here and there, running to the cottage as if to lead the way, and then looking back to make sure Jordan and I were following.

Now, Sophie and I are settled in, and after a warm day, I’ve turned the heat back on because it turned chilly outside. I have happy memories of a lovely evening to keep me cozy. And I can look out on my backyard which Jordan has made bright with Christmas lights. Such joy!

See? I told you I’d be more cheerful than last night. Sweet holiday dreams, y’all.

s

No more shaggy

You know how good you feel when you get a fresh haircut? It makes you suddenly realize how shaggy you looked before. That’s what happened at the Alter/Burton compound today. We got the trees trimmed—and there are a lot of trees on the property, including some magnificent oaks, one that I’ve watched grow into maturity since I moved here. We also have a black walnut (that’s what I was told), a hackberry that probably isn’t long for this world, a big old elm out front that anchors the house and I worry and pray about a lot, and lots of trees that started life as bushes and, before my day, grew into trees.

After the trimming, light filtered down onto the driveway through the open trees. Jacob said it looked “weird,” but I thought it looked wonderful. Our neighbors, Jim and Katey Carmical, will be glad that now their crape myrtles will get enough sun that they might bloom next spring. Our neighbor on the other side had a specific limb he wanted trimmed off a tree that obviously started life as a volunteer—it’s in a strange place for a tree—and that’s done. The tree men even rescued the football that’s been on the roof, in the gutter, for two or three years.

The crew was polite, careful, and meticulous about cleaning up. A good experience all around. Maybe tomorrow in the daylight I’ll get some pictures.

Today I also finished the major revision of my new mystery, tentatively titled “Murder at the Bus Depot.” I really like “Dealing with Delia”—fits the story but not the pattern of titles for my Blue Plate Café mysteries. I’ll send it to my beta reader in a day or two and see how he votes on the titles. After his suggestions—he always has wonderful ones—I’ll go back and do another revision read-through. Amazing the typos you find each time. The book will be out sometime in the spring.

You may think if I just finished it, it should be out sooner, but there’s so much to be done between “The End” and publication—beta readers, editor, formatting, advance copies, guest blog posts, etc. If I were smart, I’d plan an entire marketing campaign, but I don’t seem to be good at that. I went all out with Pigface and the Perfect Dog—publicist, guest blogs and radio spots, advance copies, big signing party, etc., and it’s disappointed me. Only one review on Amazon, slow sales, though those who’ve read it assure me they liked it a lot. If you’ve read it, I’d be grateful for an Amazon review—two sentences is plenty (I think Amazon wants twenty words). Okay, enough whining.

Nice lunch today with my beta reader (and friend and advisor of over forty years plus—he shepherded me through graduate school), his wife, and a friend we only recently found we shared. Lunch at our favorite deli, good conversation a little about writing and a lot about travel. I am not an easy nor avid traveler, but I do have a bucket list. More about that another time.