Feast or famine

 

Egg salad on rye, garnished with heart of palm

Most nights I have company either for happy hour or supper, be it friends, neighbors, or family. Last night was a special treat. Longtime treasured friend Linda came in from Granbury (for non-Texans, it’s maybe forty miles from Fort Worth, so Linda doesn’t just casually drop in). Jordan joined us for a half glass of wine, and then Linda and I were off to meet three other friends for dinner.

The ladies we met, like ourselves, were former wives of osteopathic physicians. Linda and one other are widowed; three of us are divorcees though only one ex-husband survives. (No, I’m not rubbing my hands in glee—they were friends of mine too.) We meet for dinner only occasionally, but quarantine kept us apart longer than usual, and we were glad to share stories of old times, catch up on families (who got Covid and who didn’t), and share our outlooks on life now that the world seems to be opening up again. As usual, I was the only one who enjoyed quarantine, and Linda, who knows me better than the others, snapped, “Of course you did. You’re a nester.” I think she’s right.

It was lovely to have dinner on a patio surrounded by trees, at a table still socially distanced. Caesar salad, veal piccata, and a couple of glasses of wine. We came back to the cottage and sat on the patio with Jordan and Christian until the chill in the air drove us inside. Linda was to meet a friend this morning in the Stockyards district, so she spent the night on my couch rather than drive back to Granbury, and I kept her up later than she’s used to talking and working at my computer. Strange but nice when you’ve lived alone for so long to wake in the night and know there is someone else in the cottage. I have one light in the living area that stays on 24/7, but she turned it off to sleep. So I kept thinking, “Why is it so dark in here?”

This morning we lingered over tea and scones. Then she was off to the North Side, and I was left to play catch up and do some work. Somehow it slipped my mind that I was supposed to be reading page proofs, so I devoted time to that.

But if last night was a feast of company, tonight is a famine. Jordan has gone to Austin to visit older daughter Megan, and the Burton boys—Christian and Jacob—were helping someone move and would eat dinner thereafter. So I was on my own. When you have no inspiration for dinner, what do you fix? Usually with me, it’s tuna, but tonight I made egg salad.

I’ve been making egg salad all my adult life, always the same ordinary way. So I saved a recipe with ideas for variation, principally bacon and cream cheese. But when it came right down to it, I remembered the reason I quit buying Central Market egg salad was I didn’t like the bacon in it, and when I tried to put cream cheese in a dish a few days ago, it was hard to work with and clumped, even though I heated it. I decided on plain old-fashioned egg salad with mayonnaise, mustard, and dill relish. Made a great sandwich.

A thought in passing: Americans do and believe so many things these days that are, to me, beyond belief. But the current one that boggles my mind is all the people who panicked and began to hoard gasoline when the East Cost pipeline was hacked. I saw a couple loading the back of a Suburban with containers of gas. My first thought was that I didn’t want to ride anywhere with them. But looking further, I began to appreciate their use of proper gas containers, because I saw pictures of people putting gas in plastic bags, tying the tops, and putting them in their cars. Are they serious? What level of stupid are they?

Did you read about the man who loaded his Hummer (who knew they were still around) with gas (it did not say what kind of container), got in, and lit a cigarette? Within minutes, his Hummer was ashes. Fortunately, he escaped injury.

A post somewhere on the net skewered these hoarders, saying some people at a party hearing there might not be enough pizza to go around, take three or four pieces, while others, fearing not everybody would get some, limited themselves to one piece. It is, the poster aid, a perfect illustration of Americans today.

Which brought me back to the theme of so many sermons at my church today: do you always think of others first or do you think of yourself? A question that might make a lot of us do some deep introspection.

How to write a mystery

 

Now available in paperback, digital, and audio editions
You're bound to love Henny and laugh at Irene

The other night I started a blog on how to write a mystery, because I’d discovered a new and unorthodox method. Since it seems to be going well, I’ll try again and hope I don’t erase it. I well know that a whole bookstore could be stocked with nothing but “How to write books.” Too many would-be novelists read book after book as a way to dodge getting to the actual writing. But they need to search no more: I have come up with the formula.

The backstory: way before pandemic and quarantine, I idly started a mystery about a second-tier TV chef in Chicago. Just playing with ideas, I told the story from the viewpoint of her assistant or “gofer,” a young transplant from Texas. Chicago is my hometown, and Henny, the narrator, settled in the Hyde Park neighborhood, where I grew up. Lots of fun to revisit the scenes of my childhood, but also fun to research the many changes in the long years since. But after about twenty thousand words, I was distracted by nonfiction assignments that actually came with advance money. I labeled the fragment “Saving Irene,” and put it aside.

Fast forward a year to the middle of quarantine. I had finished my nonfiction assignments and was at loose ends, so I reread “Saving Irene.” To my surprise I liked the tone, the story, the way it was headed. Long story short, it was an indie publication in September 2020 and got really good reader comments.

More nonfiction and then loose ends again. Several people wanted more of Henny and Irene, and I had committed to name a character for someone who contributed to MysteryLovesGeorgia. So I started, “Irene in Danger.” This time, I quit at sixteen thousand words. An early reader liked it, but I wasn’t sure.

During all this for at least a year, I was delving into the life and cooking of Helen Corbitt, leading light of food service at Neiman Marcus stores. Her fascinates me because she came to prominence in the late fifties—after Poppy Cannon advocated for convenience foods but before both Julia Child and Betty Freidan who exerted polar opposite influences on American cooks. I had hoped my nonfiction publisher would be equally enthralled, but the new editor wrote that she didn’t think a cook in an upscale department store was worth a book. Her loss. I have now sent a formal proposal to an academic publisher and been assured they would give it careful consideration. Which means I’m back at loose ends until I hear from them, which may be a while.

I wrote profiles for the Handbook of Texas Online, the most recent of a husband-and-wife team who were instrumental in saving the history of Fort Worth’s Stockyards district from Disney-like commercialization. A light dawned: I could bring Kelly O’Connell, heroine of eight mysteries, back in a Stockyards setting. The first ten pages went well and after that, crickets. Sound familiar?

I went back to “Irene in Danger,” decided l like the tone, the story, the characters. And this time around the dialog flowed naturally. I’m back to writing it. I make no promises, because as you can see I’ve abandoned manuscripts before. But I’m trying my old formula of a thousand words a day. Slow but steady going. Still not quite to twenty thousand. We’ll see what happens.

I have once again been distracted, this time for page proofs of The Most Land, the Best Cattle: The Waggoners of Texas. Due in September.

Retirement is such fun!

 

 

A really dumb mistake

 

No blog tonight. I was almost done with a brilliant (of course) blog on how to write a mystery. No joke—I knew exactly what I wanted to say, and the words flowed. Then I noticed a funny symbol by the second paragraph and tried to delete it—and deleted the entire rest of the blog. Then spent way too long searching for ways to recover it. Finally located the recycle bin, but it wasn’t there. None of Windows’ helpful hints were helpful. If you want my newfound take on how to write a mystery, you’ll have to wait for another night. I will say that in a long career of writing on computers, this is maybe only the second time I have lost copy. I’m really lucky. But now I’m burnt out and too frustrated—or angry with myself—to rewrite it.

I will content myself with some trivia: one is that my oak leaf hydrangea survived the snowmageddon and is flourishing with big, beautiful blooms. But it is another dark and stormy night in North Texas. Thunder rolling, but we are lucky—the hail all around missed us, and we got a nice rain. I’m grateful the hail didn’t batter those new blooms. Jacob moved the deck plants under the roof overhang, just in case. Now we’re sorry they didn’t get the blessing of the rain, but there’s a better chance tomorrow with a 90% chance of rain—a mixed blessing. I will have to get out in the late afternoon for a medical appointment, and it is the day the neighbors come for happy hour. I have said since we’re all well vaccinated, we can move happy hour indoors if need be.

I had planned to go to dinner at a patio restaurant with friends who live perhaps a mile from me, but we cancelled because of the prospect of rain. She emailed to say she was glad we weren’t there in the lightning, but I honestly did not see any lightning tonight. Sophie for sure heard the thunder though, and it didn’t please her.

The other thing is to post a picture of my second-oldest grandchild and her father (my second son). She was ready for her high school prom, and since graduation will be distanced and limited—we won’t get to go—I am grateful she had the prom experience and an all-night after-party that I am assured was well chaperoned. This is Eden, getting a kiss from her dad, Jamie. Needless to say, I love them both a lot.

G’night all. Maybe tomorrow I’ll share my new secret on how to write a mystery. It’s an untried theory at this point anyway, so you’re not missing much.

Mother's Day memories

 

Me, Jordan, Christian's sister Julie, and Christian's mom

Facebook was alive with pictures of mothers today, many of them vintage, taken when the mothers were young. I loved looking at them, but it made me sad that I have few such of my mom, and they are packed away because of my limited space. When she was very young, Mom’s father told her she took such a bad picture the only place he would hang it was in the barn. She avoided the camera the rest of her life, but at midlife, when my best memories are, she was lovely with wavy auburn hair and a quick smile.

That’s the first thing I think of when I recall Mom—laughter. She was always quick to find something to laugh, even giggle about. When we were young, she told my brother and me stories of our fathers (they were roommates) in their medical school days, and the tears would roll down her cheeks. She could recall her own foibles with equal glee, like the time she signed important legal papers Alice P. MacBread (the name was MacBain, but she was making toast).

Once secretary to Robert M. Hutchins, chancellor of the University of Chicago and founder of the Great Books program, she remained intellectually curious most of her life, reading everything from historians Will and Ariel Durant to nutrition theorist Adelle Davis. She was a strict believer in Davis’ theories, and healthy eating was important to her. She was equally comfortable fixing a full dinner each night for my meat-and-potatoes father or entertaining twenty or so friends and Dad’s colleagues. In summers, she carried clothes and groceries on her back in a duffel bag for a mile and fed us from a primitive kitchen that had no electricity, no running water, and only bottled gas. Mom taught me to cook by letting me experiment in the kitchen, and I bless her to this day for that.

She was tough. Born in 1900 (always easy to keep track of her age), she lived through the Spanish Flu and WWI, lost a husband to complications from a war wound, lived through WWII and married my father, saw us through the polio years (one of the stories she didn’t laugh about) and all the ups and downs of life in America until the early 1980s.

I lost Mom in 1987, but I really lost her much before—to dementia caused by a series of small strokes. It broke my heart, and I wanted to shake her and ask where the gracious lady, full of manners and good taste, had gone. As it was, I didn’t handle it well, but I did the best I could. To this day, I talk to her—about people from the past, about cooking, about her grands and greats—she never knew any of the greats though she adored the grands.

One other woman mothered me. In my sixties I met Bobbie Simms, bookseller and former English teacher, some thirteen years older than I. She was half mother, half sister, a great booster of almost anything I did but never shy about telling me when she thought I needed bringing up short, from having on too much perfume (I didn’t—she was sensitive) to being overly ambitious for my writing. She adopted my grown children because she said they still needed a grandmother, and they adored her. “Bobbie tells it like it is,” they used to say. For a few years, we had a grand time doing “literary” things and lunching and shopping. I lost Bobbie in 2000.

The two are buried in Greenwood Cemetery here in Fort Worth, and I used to drive by, wave, and shout, “Hi, ladies! Are you talking about me?”

We had a lovely Mother’s Day lunch today, joined by Christian’s parents, his sister, her husband and two daughters. Much laughter, many stories told, and memories shared. Christian fixed pulled pork sliders, I made potato salad, and Jordan made a huge fruit salad. So good. Julie and Aaron brought rich, rich desserts which did me in, and I had to nap for two hours after dinner. Just barely recovered now, at seven, but it was a wonderful day. And I am blessed.

Mother's Day table

On kitchen duty

 

Today I spent far too long making potato salad for our Mother’s Day lunch. Which really means I spent far too long peeling potatoes. My plan was to use Yukon gold, because I like the texture and because I wouldn’t have to peel them. But when it came to it, I couldn’t put unpeeled potatoes in a salad. I remember Paul Simms, now long gone, who was infuriated when restaurants started serving mashed potatoes without peeling new red potatoes.

We are having Christian’s family—his parents and his sister, her husband, and their two daughters, ages something like eleven and thirteen. Let me tell you that making potato salad for this crew of ten is no simple matter. Two of them—Jacob and his grandfather—do not eat onions. The grandfather is so vehement about it that I’ve never heard what his objection is, but Jacob has said, more gently, its not the taste but the texture. That surprised me, because I turn down few foods because of texture. I can even eat tripe in pepper pot soup, a good tongue sandwich, or the chicken-fried lamb kidneys my mom used to fix. Yet I know texture is a thing—we have family members who will not touch a mushroom.

Christian admits to being a picky eater, and today I replayed the cause. His mom always said she fixed four separate meals for a family of four. I swore I would never do that, but right now there are two single-serving containers of potato salad without onions in my refrigerator.

I was following a recipe from daughter-in-law Lisa, which called for a good bit of pickle relish and then an astounding amount of salt, which I reduced. I also cut back the mayonnaise, but the salad is still soupy. I’m hoping the potatoes will absorb some by tomorrow. There’s a reason you do best making these things ahead.

And then there’s the matter of eggs—the recipe calls for four hard-boiled. Christian doesn’t eat hard-boiled eggs. I’ve left them out, but I’m wondering if that’s not the reason there’s a bit too much dressing for the number of potatoes. I did add celery just to have something besides potatoes to justify the term salad. But truth is neither Jacob nor Christian like celery.

What happened to three bites for politeness? Or even, “Sit there until you eat it or go to bed”? One of my children didn’t like lamb, but he ate everything else in sight, sometimes ravenously. Instead of picky, he was sort of all-embracing, so I respected the one thing he really didn’t like, just as I ask people to respect my aversion to bell peppers.

Making potato salad for ten just wore me out. Maybe it was all the figuring of who eats what. Let’s see, what was I supposed to be doing today? Oh yes, writing a mystery. I did a big 300 words today—at that rate, I’m sure I’ll leave an unfinished novel. Maybe someone will turn it into a posthumous publication for me!

A truth about me: left alone, I would turn into slob. I’m eating dinner alone tonight. Jacob wants to order in, so we just ordered hamburgers from Shake Shack, which he tells me are the best. I shall eat in the pajamas I’ve been in all day. And I sort of haphazardly pulled the covers up on my bed.

Usually, I nap in the afternoon and then make my bed, so when the family comes for supper, it’s neat and I look disciplined. The physical therapist I just worked with was adamant that making your bed is a sign of a disciplined mind—he makes his kids do it every morning. So when he was coming, I made mine in the morning. Several years ago, the same therapist worked with me before I had surgery and when I was having a lot of problems. I remember I felt guilty or inadequate because my bed was always a rumpled mess. I simply didn’t have the energy to make it—just getting through the day took all I had. Somehow the fact that I make my bed every day is an indicator of how far I’ve come from those days. But today I give in to laziness.

It’s good to be lazy every once in a while. Try it. Tomorrow will be a busy, full day. I’m storing energy.

Up, down, and sideways

 

Probably most writers agree, but that’s how I felt about my writing today. At the beginning of the week, a good friend came by for a glass of wine, and I waxed eloquent to her about my progress, the proposal I’d submitted to an interested editor, the new mystery I was just beginning to think about. “I’ve got my groove back,” I announced, perhaps prematurely.

I will have to wait however long for word on the proposal. But meantime, I can work on the new mystery. I wrote 3000 words. Then I decided they were trash, discarded them, and spent a couple of days starting over—some 700 words that first day. If you realize that a mystery is at bare minimum 60K words, you know that 700 words is hardly worth talking about. Yesterday I added 1300 words, but I didn’t feel good about them. That’s not unusual. Authors generally write, think it’s a bunch of trash, let it sit, and go back to it.

So that’s what I did today, and re-reading, I plugged in facts and dialog and things that came to my mind, and before I knew it, I was at 2700 words. Not much new copy, just expanding and polishing what I’d written. But this time I felt good about it. Who knows what tomorrow will bring, except that I know I have to make enough potato salad for ten people for Sunday’s Mother’s Day lunch. Still, maybe I’ll get a few words in. And maybe, sooner or later, I’ll hit my stride with this book, and the words will flow. At this point I think I can tell you who is murdered and who is the prime suspect (but innocent)—but you never know. These things change.

Things I figured out today: a mystery author on a writing thread I follow talked about how different it was to compile a guest list for her son’s upcoming virtual wedding, rather than the lavish affair she’d always thought he would have. That sparked my memory, and I realized I’ve been to one virtual wedding and a funeral since pandemic started. At both of them, I sat silently as a spectator, feeling that everyone else knew each other and I was kind of an outsider. The wedding was my New York niece’s, replacing the wonderful blowout she had planned for the Caribbean, but I felt that the guests were all the people she had grown up with. My two daughters and I were silent spectators.

I knew even fewer people at the funeral which was for a neighbor I’d gotten to know when her grandson and Jacob were in kindergarten together. The boys were great pals briefly, but when the grandparents moved away, the boys grew apart. Still the neighbor lady, Mary, and I had a common background—she had gone to osteopathic medical school at the college where my dad was president, though after his time. Still, to this day anyone from the Chicago College of Osteopathic Medicine, seems like family to me.

Tonight, Christian cooked dinner, and I was grateful for the break in cooking chores. Let me amend—he cooked the entrée. Chicken Francese, which he aptly described as chicken piccata without the capers. Jordan fixed Louella’s rice, a family favorite, and a terrific salad. It was a wonderful dinner, and I’m full and sleepy.

Jordan and I did one of our frequent calendar reviews tonight and figured out that, except for Sunday’s Mother’s Day lunch, we will not have dinner together again for over a week. I have plans Monday and Thursday, she and Christian will be out Tuesday and Wednesday, and she leaves Friday for a weekend in Austin. We are definitely getting back to normal after quarantine.

I’m not sure getting back to life as it was is reassuring. I read today that Tarrant County new virus cases are up—110 today, over 200 a couple of days ago—and so are deaths. And here’s a statistic that should alarm and inform all of us: U. S. deaths of unvaccinated people, 577,000; deaths of vaccinated people, 74. From what I read that figure is for the entire duration of the pandemic to date. It makes you want to shake the anti-vaxxers who endanger all of us by encouraging the growth and spread of variants. Why oh why can’t they see what they’re doing to the rest of us?

Maybe for the same reasons I can’t see the road ahead in my mystery. We each have our own fixed ideas. What’s a problem is reconciling those with the good of the community at large. Having said that, it seems futile to say, “Happy dreams.” But nonetheless, that’s my wish for each of you.

Another day, but not another dollar

 

That phrase, in its proper form—another day, another dollar—is one of resignation, an acceptance that tomorrow is going to be just as unrewarding as today. Not at all a reflection of my feelings, except about today. The phrase comes from the nineteenth century when sailors were paid a dollar a day. Joseph Conrad publicized it in his seafaring novel, Narcissus.

And as long as I’m adding to your trivial knowledge, thanks to Prudence Zavala for a word that is totally new to me: drupes. It means a fruit with a large pit or stone, like an apricot or a peach. Good thing Jordan went grocery shopping with Pru this morning or I never would have known it.

Moving on, this was an absolutely gorgeous day but, for me, otherwise unremarkable. I started the day with 3000 words on my current WIP, decided they were all wrong, and started over again. So now I have 650 words on the new version, and I’m still not sure where I’m going, though I think this new version is more promising. For mystery readers, here’s a puzzle: how soon into a book do you expect a murder to happen? The old wisdom was that it had to be in the first chapter, preferably on the first page. I think that’s a bit extreme, because I think a reader often needs to know the background and surrounding circumstances to appreciate the full impact of a murder. But I once got a murder into the first sentence. Here’s the opening paragraph from The Perfect Coed:

Susan Hogan drove around Oak Grove, Texas, for two days before she realized there was a dead body in the trunk of her car. And it was another three days before she knew that someone was trying to kill her.

Sorry to say such lines don’t often spring to mind, and I am struggling with this new manuscript. Since I declare myself a pantser, I should be able to jump in and just begin telling the story. I sort of know who’s going to be murdered, but I’m not sure. And I’m not sure how to get there. Thoughts about a cold case are flitting through my mind. I think the advice I offer others in a lot of situations is apropos here, and I should take it: quit over-thinking, and just jump in and do it. Maybe tomorrow (hear that procrastination?).

The young man who I supported in the city council race came by this morning. I had written to sympathize and tell him I thought he was gracious in defeat—with emails and Facebook postings. Told him I’d be interested in his future plans. So we had a pleasant visit, some about politics, some about everything from mutual acquaintances and what a small town Fort Worth basically is to discussions of children and puppies. A pleasant interlude in my morning, and I hope he’ll continue to come back occasionally.

I did laugh. He referred to another candidate as “so very young” and I wondered how young someone had to be to be young from his point of view. He’s late thirties; the candidate he referred to, who made the runoff, is late twenties. It all sounds long ago and far away to me.

 We are waiting for the city to come take down the tree. They said this week, though Christian doubts we can count on that. He once watched a tree that had the X of doom marked on it for months before it was finally cut down. I hope that doesn’t happen, because every spring storm that comes along is going to make me nervous now. A domestic problem of less severity but more immediate annoyance has popped up: my kitchen faucet emits a high-pitched whine when in use. Annoying is probably too mild a word. Jordan has threatened to stop doing dinner dishes as long as this continues. I will call the plumber tomorrow but hope they can counsel over the phone, and I can avoid a high-priced house call.

And so ends another day. Tomorrow should be brighter and better. Maybe a bit warmer, but it couldn’t be much sunnier. And that is always cheering.

 

Farewell to a tree

 

Not my tree but close
I couldn't find an image of my tree. 

Almost thirty years ago I bought our house because I loved the spacious front porch and had visions of entertaining on it. And entertain I did—from dinner for one or two to pot-luck Mexican parties for Jordan and a whole crowd of her friends. In fact, the front porch is where I watched the romance between Jordan and Christian blossom. But always, what anchored the house and the porch to the neighborhood, indeed to the earth, was the huge old elm at the curb next to the driveway.

We treasured that tree, watched birds nest in it and squirrels chase each other. Once when someone told me vines would kill it, I tore down all the vines that were creeping up the trunk—not an easy job and hard on my hands. Periodically, it lost branches—large branches. Once a neighbor charged me sixty dollars to rush down and trim a branch which he declared was a hazard to children coming and going to the school across the street. Another time, I came home from my oldest son’s wedding in the Caymans to find tree branches covering the whole front yard.

It took me years to figure out that because it was in the boulevard it was the city’s responsibility not mine. When I finally realized that I could save a whole lot of money by calling the city when the tree had a problem, I had a new worry: would they cut it down? I had friends who went on vacation and came home to find a huge tree that had been in front of their house gone. Such is the stuff of nightmares when you live in an older neighborhood with huge trees that arch across the street to form a canopy. It’s one of the things I love about my neighborhood. Finally, one city arborist said to me, “Lady, we are in the business of saving trees, not tearing them down.” Still I knew that the tree was old and would become a danger. Today, I suspect that it’s almost a hundred years old—that’s how old the house will be next year, and I imagine the tree was planted when the house was built.

So today a forestry crew from the city parks and recreation department came to clear away the fallen branch. And they delivered bad news: the tree is rotten and a danger. They will come back this week to take it totally down. So we are left with dilemmas. Will they plant a new tree? Even so, it won’t grow appreciably in my lifetime. Will they take away the stump? Christian thinks probably not. What about the roots that extend gosh knows how far? Today I assured a neighbor who lives a block away that the roots probably reach to her house—they certainly reach nearly to our house on the far side of our yard.

I am heartbroken, but I know I would be more so if the tree fell and hurt someone. We were lucky yesterday that the branch fell at two o’clock and not three, when children were on their way home from school. And there’s that old possibility that I always worried about—the tree could fall on the house. It’s spring, the season of violent storms in North Texas, and it could happen any day.

I wish now they would come take it away first thing in the morning. It has begun to seem to me like anticipating surgery—you just really want to get it over with. I have not gone out to the curb—not easy for me to do—but a part of me thinks I should go thank the tree for shading us, for giving us a sense of place and stability all these years. I don’t want it to go without a grateful farewell.

And there’s that nakedness that the house will feel. The kids sit out on the porch a lot, especially late at night, with a glass of wine when they can talk about the day. I am selfishly glad that I am back in my cottage, where I sit on the patio and don’t go to the front of the house that often. I can put it out of my mind. But then again, that doesn’t seem quite fair to the tree.

Maybe I need to call up the spirit of Joyce Kilmer.

Of storms, trees, and happy hour

 

We just had a lovely storm come through my little corner of the world, the kind with no hail, no wind, little lightning, but dark skies, lots of thunder, and a gentle rain. I have the patio doors open and thoroughly enjoyed that fresh, wet smell. And the temperature, which had been in the low nineties, cooled down about twenty degrees. A neighbor emailed that she’s like Sophie—nervous about the thunder.

And that triggered a memory for me. When I was a kid, we had a cabin, really primitive, in the Indiana dunes. No electricity, no plumbing—we carried drinking water up three flights from the beach, used cistern water from a pump to wash dishes and then scalded them (probably not as sanitary as my mom thought at the time), and used an outhouse for private needs.

The cabin sat on a high dune at the very foot of Lake Michigan, and one of the joys of our summer times there was to watch a storm roll down the length of the lake, stirring up giant whitecaps in the water and turning the sky black. Bless my mom, for she taught us way back then to relish a storm and never be afraid. To this day I love a good storm, though I admit in Texas the possibility of tornados and hail make me nervous. And I have lived through a few storms that caused major damage, like one that took out my entire cookbook collection because the roof leaked.

After the storm passed tonight, the sky lightened, and for a while it had that eerie glow, a sort of greenish cast, that the atmosphere sometimes gets after a storm. I do understand that once again there was damage to the north of us, and I pray there were no injuries.

Most people worry about trees being damaged in our Texas spring storm. No such worries for us, because a huge branch—I mean huge!—fell off the old elm tree in front of the house this afternoon, well before the storm. No reason, except maybe age. It just fell. Since it is in the boulevard—the strip between sidewalk and street—it is the city’s tree, so I called the forestry department of Parks and Recreation. They made sure it isn’t blocking a sidewalk or a street (it isn’t) and said they will come look. We’ve lost big branches from that tree before, and each time I call the city I am afraid they’ll just take the whole tree down. It is probably a hundred years old—the age my house will be next year. I’m sure the house—and my daughter and her family who live in it now—would feel naked and exposed without that big tree which somehow seems to anchor us to our world. Then again, it does cross my mind that the whole tree could fall in the direction of the house. An arborist once explained to me that they are in the business of saving trees, not cutting them down, so I will wait to see what happens with this one.

A friend whose company I much enjoy came for happy hour tonight, and we timed it just perfectly. It was pleasant and lovely, and we caught up on each other—it had been too long. First we were waiting for vaccines, and then the weather was not patio weather, and then once we could be inside, she was sick, so tonight was a treat even though she had to leave for a meeting and I had a Zoom event, which it turned out I couldn’t log into because I had an invalid i.d. But just as we decided we had to go inside, I felt the first drops of rain hit my face. Good timing.

A good day. I wrote 1200 words and felt like I still have some momentum on my new project. And I heard from the editor to whom I sent my Helen Corbitt project—he assured me they would give it serious consideration and said nice things about my stature as a Texas writer. Everybody loves ego strokes, and I’m no exception.

Storm watch until eleven, so I’m going to lock up for the night, get in my jammies, and read the mystery I’m enjoying—Susan Van Kirk’s Death Takes No Bribes. Stay safe, everyone.

Here's Kelly--again!

 

Kelly O'Connell's debut

As I write, my eyes are on the TV, watching the Kentucky Derby. All I need is a mint julep, which would send me to my bed almost instantly. I do love them, but I am sensible and have a glass of white wine. I’m not much of a racing fan and I often think racing is cruel to the horses, but I love the pageantry and I always feel the suspense. The actual race is over so quickly, it’s almost incidental to the whole event.

It’s been a long, sort of lonely day. A brief visit from Jordan this morning has been my only contact with a human, and Sophie has slept away most of the day. It’s still cloudy and damp, though I think it’s finally beginning to clear up. But it’s been blessedly quiet. Yesterday I was barely aware of construction noise if I was busy, working, moving around the cottage. But when I settled down for a nap it suddenly became the loudest sound ever—an irregular deep beeping sound. Maybe a sump pump? I heard it again this morning with dread and wondered if the workermens (as one granddaughter used to call them) didn’t know it was Saturday. But they must have known and only worked half a day, because it got quiet around noon.

And I’ve been busy re-creating Kelly O’Connell’s world. For those who don’t know (really, you don’t know? I’m astounded), Kelly O’Connell is the character at the center of my longest mystery series—seven books and a novella. She’s a realtor in Fairmount, a historic neighborhood in Fort Worth where she specializes in renovating original Craftsman homes. Kelly stars in a cozy series bearing her name, and in many ways she’s a typical cozy heroine—amateur sleuth who can’t keep her nose out of police business, specifically murder. Not unusual for a cozy heroine to be partnered with a police officer, but in Kelly’s case she’s married to the chief of police, and they have her two daughters from her first marriage; their daughter completes the family.

Yesterday a chance comment made me think I might do another Kelly O’Connell book. It’s been three years since I was in Kelly’s neighborhood, so I did need to do some refreshing. And as I did a character list, it really was like meeting old friends. I’d forgotten some of them, needed to remind myself what happened to others and decide what had happened to them in the hiatus. They were very real people to me, and I remembered the good thing one reviewer said about my characters—they are like people you’d meet in the grocery store. I thought that a great compliment.

This time Kelly will get herself involved in saving the iconic Cowtown Coliseum in Fort Worth’s Stockyards Historic District—a bit out of her territory, but it springs from some nonfiction work I’d been doing on people involved in preserving the historic aspect of Fort Worth Stockyards district. Lots of opportunity to work in fascinating local history.

I’ve been known before to have these flashes of brilliant ideas and not follow through on them. A sequel to Saving Irene languishes in my computer even now, and indeed the first 20K words of Saving Irene sat untouched for a year until on a whim I went back to them. So I’m not making any hard commitment on this one—I find that often gets you in trouble. But I am enthusiastic about the work I did today. Who knows?

If you haven’t met Kelly yet, the first book is Skeleton in a Dead Space, available in ebook or paperback.

Meanwhile I have fixed myself a good dinner of leftovers and am ready to settle down with a mystery while I keep one eye on the results of the local elections.