My Laura Ingalls Moment

This is a photo from the summer of 1958, when our hometown celebrated its sesquicentennial. There were several days of parades and pageants celebrating our community's humble pioneer beginnings. Men grew beards and women dressed in sunbonnets and full-skirted dresses.

I'm the child on the left, waiting while my mother adjusts my outfit. I am holding hands with Kathy, who was a few years older and the oldest daughter of my mother's best friend. Kathy looks adorable. I am pouting.

I posted this photo on Facebook in response to cousins asking about another family sesquicentennial photo, one which I could also explain.

Margo pounced on my post immediately. She saw what I had not seen in all the decades I have had that picture:

Of course it was my friend Margo who responded immediately. Margo with whom I have had long discussions about the Little House books, ranging from "what about toilets?" (Caroline Fraser addressed that burning question in her new, absolutely sublime biography of Wilder: Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder) to shaking our head over Pa scarfing down pancakes and bacon with the Wilder boys while Ma and the girls starved during the long, hard winter. Margo, my Little House comrade in arms.

Clearly some things are just meant to be. 

Heat

It is a cold Saturday morning in Ohio, with the temperatures hovering in the low 20s and the sky gray. Warren is at rehearsal for tomorrow's holiday concerts. We left the house so fast and so early this morning for a community breakfast and last minute orchestra matters that neither of us nudged up the thermostat from its nighttime temperature of 61º.

The thermostat is still on 61º four hours later. I walked home from the concert hall, the 20 minute hike warming me up. Once here, I turned on the oven to bake a batch of biscotti and here I am an hour later, shuttling between the kitchen with the biscotti and the basement, where I am hanging laundry to dry.

As I sit here writing at the table in a cool kitchen and a chillier house, I am reminded of the homes I grew up in. I never lived in a house with central heating until long after I left home.

My lifetime-long friend Cindy and I emailed back and forth earlier this week about heat. She lives in a manufactured house, and there is always a worry about the water pipes running underneath freezing when there is a sudden cold snap. I wrote back that I remembered the first floor kitchen in my childhood house. (My grandparents and Aunt Ginger lived on the first floor; we lived on the second for most of the 14 years I lived there.) The sink was against an outside wall that I am pretty sure was just wallboard over stud frame and outside shingles. When it got really cold, someone would hang a lightbulb under the sink to warm the pipes all night (there may have been a fixture or a plug under there for this purpose; I don't remember). I told Cindy that the kitchen was unheated except for stove/oven activities. I went on to explain that there was no central heating: there were gas stoves (floor stoves) in a few rooms on each floor and that was it. She did not remember that, but I sure did. And when we moved to the house my parents still live in, there was only a coal furnace in the basement and floor grates on the first floor. Any heat beyond that was by virtue of hot air rising. All of us kids had bedrooms on the second floor. To this day, I remember the ice that formed on the inside of my bedroom windows in the dead of winter.

As a result of growing up with no central heating, I learned to prefer sleeping in cold air, a preference that is a great trial for Warren. Because I was a teenager (i.e., old enough to be reliable) when we moved, my dad taught me the basics of operating a coal furnace. I know how to bank a coal fire for the night and how to rekindle it for the morning. I understand how furnace flues work. I also know what it is like to shovel coal and stoke a furnace. (Relax: my parents switched to first oil and then natural gas to heat with, installing central heating. My dad is not shoveling coal at 84.)

As I look back, I realize that growing up without central heating made for family times in the winter that are less frequent in today's lifestyles. Think of the chapter "Winter Night" in Laura Ingall Wilder's book Farmer Boy. The Wilder family (her future husband's family) spent cold nights in the kitchen, where it was warmest, talking, doing needlework or greasing moccasins, eating popcorn, reading the paper aloud. My family likewise gathered in the winter after supper in our living room, near the gas stove, to watch television, read, work on homework, polish shoes, or play. I would sit crosslegged on the floor on Saturday nights while my mother put my hair up in curlers for church the next day. Dad would make popcorn. Even as my older brother and I aged and got moodier, we rarely retreated to a bedroom with a closed door in either house. It would be have been too cold! We needed those doors open for that heat to circulate.

Don't get me wrong. I like heat. I am grateful I don't have to struggle financially to keep the house warm in the winter. The biscotti is almost done and I will turn up the thermostat so Warren doesn't freeze when he gets home.

But I don't regret the childhood memories of family time in the evening, the wonderful way those stoves would warm mittens before going outside, or even the ice in my bedroom. That other time, those other memories.

Later note: After writing this out by longhand while the biscotti baked, I retreated to my second floor study to type. I confess: it's cold up here. Back to the first floor!

Inch One Hundred Ten: Another Look at Laura

There is a new Laura Ingalls Wilder book out just this month: The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

I read it last week.

Warren asked me after I had finished what I thought. As I suspect is so often the case, he asks a question hoping for a short answer or amusing anecdote, and instead unleashes a torrent of words.

What did I think? I think the book added little to my understanding of who Laura Ingalls Wilder was. I think it could have been condensed into a good, solid, scholarly article with a handful of representational letters. And I think it darkened the image of the little, smiling, white-haired "Laura Ingalls Wilder, American author."

Well, that's what I thought of the book.

William Anderson, a biographer of Laura, edited this collection. To his credit, he makes clear in the introduction that there are large gaps in the body of extant LIW letters. Almost none of Laura's letters to her family, especially her mother and her older sister Mary, exist, most of them thrown out in the 1920s when the family home in De Smet, South Dakota, was cleared out after Ma and Mary died. More disappeared after sisters Grace and Carrie died. Rose Wilder Lane, Laura's problematic daughter and only child, destroyed large numbers of letters from her mother. In fairness to Anderson, he worked with as much as he had available, but too much material, especially the letters that would show the personal side of Laura, is gone.

So what do I know about Laura after reading her letters? She was a tireless correspondent with her reading public and until she was well into her 80s (she lived to be 90), Laura pushed herself to answer personally every note that came her way. Even after her publishers took over answering the correspondence that came directly to their offices, she continued to answer those that ended up in her mailbox in Mansfield, Missouri. Given that she received hundreds of letters annually from children and adults reading the Little House books, her tenacity is admirable.

The collection also makes clear much more than any critical works published to date how much Rose collaborated with Laura on the Little House books, especially By the Shores of Silver Lake and The Long Winter. Rose was an accomplished author of the times (the 1930s) and brought a critical eye and a sense of narrative flow to Laura's writing. But make no mistake: the letters show that when it came to understanding both the story itself and what readers wanted, Laura reigned supreme. Rose has been characterized as a woman who was ashamed and resentful of her poverty laced childhood, ashamed and resentful of her parents for their humble backgrounds, and always sure in her conviction that she was superior in all ways to almost everyone else in the world. When she tried to put her attitude into the books and degrade the settlers of De Smet, Laura fought back tartly and precisely. Didn't Rose understand, she wrote, that the only way to survive the horrific winter was to hunker down into a stoic survival mode? Daily life was not the potboiler existence that was a feature of Rose's writing and Laura was not about to show the townspeople in unrealistic and unfair ways. Life that winter really was a matter of grinding wheat every day to survive. Laura also understood that the fictional Laura had to mature and that the story line had to mature with her, despite Rose's insistence that Laura continue to write only to young children.

In the end, of course, Laura was right. Her readers matured along with her storyline, a premise that J. K. Rowling understood well when she wrote the Harry Potter books decades later. The Little House books have never gone out of print, while much of the interest today in Rose Wilder Lane's books is to analyze how much she stole from her mother's history.

You cannot read even this small collection of Laura's letters without being aware of her politics, which were both conservative and harsh. Laura disliked Franklin Roosevelt and disliked the relief programs of the Great Depression. Better that children starve than give their lazy parents a helping hand (yes, she really did feel that way). She conveniently overlooks the great social welfare program of her youth, the Homestead Act, that allowed her parents finally to get settled and financially secure. As to her father, the immortal Pa Ingalls of the Little House series, she could be judgmental in assessing him: he was a dreamer, a ne'er do well until she was grown, and too quick to reach out and help his fellow man. Laura makes Pa larger than life in her books, but her real feelings were much more complicated. In those regards, she is not kind, she is not generous, she is not nice.

I am not sorry I read the letters, but it is not a book I will add to my personal library. Unlike other letter collections that I have read (E. B. White, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, to name but a few), collections that left me with a fuller sense of the man or woman behind the name, the LIW collections puts distance between me and the author.

I own the entire Little House series, well worn paperbacks with the Garth Williams illustrations, and they are still occasionally go to books when I need comfort reading (skipping the wildly inaccurate for the era of the stories and wildly bigoted for our era portrayal of Native Americans, which is why I will probably never buy the series for Ramona). As for Laura Ingalls Wilder the person, though, I will let her go. The author and the story are not the same, and I don't need the one to read the other.

Inch One Hundred Two: Last Night's Meal

Last night's meal was salad, a small loaf of bread I'd bought on the markdown rack at the grocery and stored in the freezer, and homemade Great Northern beans and ham soup—the ham from the bone which had graced my brother Mark's Christmas spread and then made its way to our soup pot.

Estimated total cost? Maybe $2.50. Possibly less, but maybe not. There were, after all, five olives (on my salad only) from the olive bar at the grocery, and that's an indulgence.

The point is, it was cheap. Wonderfully filling and delicious, but cheap.

I am headed back to Rochester, Minnesota in under two weeks. I'll have a day of testing at the Mayo Clinic, then labs and my oncology appointment the next day. I am reacting to this upcoming visit the way I normally react to my Mayo visits: by hunkering down financially. For me, that means scaling back on our already intentionally lean grocery spending. In a typical month, we spend around $200 on groceries and household items; this month we are closer to $100. It also means reading or rereading books about frugality (think The Tightwad Gazette) or memoirs about hard economic times. My book this weekend is Made For You and Me, Caitlin Shetterly's account of her husband and her losing their financial way in the Great Recession of 2008.

And if I am feeling really anxious, I'll pull The Long Winter off the shelf and read the chapter where Laura braces herself and asks Ma if they are going to starve.

I'm not exactly sure why going to Mayo makes me feel the wolf is at our door, trying to thrust his great shaggy head into our home. I have excellent medical insurance which covers Mayo. We can afford the gas to get there and back and the lodging and meals while there. Our car is reliable. My bank account, while not plump, is stable. Compared to many of the people I come into contact with through my job and the Legal Clinic, I am financially secure.

So why the wolf? Why the stress?

I think the wolf appears because I don't want to think of who more appropriately is hanging around the front door. That would be Death, who I have come to personalize in my poetry. Death has a persona when I write about him, somewhat of a callous trickster, a Coyote without the grin. Unlike the wolf at the door, which I can shoo away by throwing rocks at, Death is inviting himself in for tea.

So, I am off to Mayo and feeling frugal. But don't worry: we're eating well. And yesterday afternoon, I tried out a new lemon bar recipe with a thick, rich curd calling for not only butter but also olive oil. We had the aforementioned delicious meal, an evening of plumbing work (Warren) and writing letters (me), and then sat down with the inaugural slices of the dessert.

We savored every sweet, tangy bite. And the wolf slunk off, gnashing his teeth.

Inch Seventy-Two: Whistling

I heard a sound this morning, early, that is so rarely heard anymore that I had to listen for a few seconds before placing it.

It was someone whistling.

In searching for the source, I soon saw and heard a tradesman across the street, working on the neighbor's driveway, whistling while he carried his brushes and buckets up and down the driveway. 

We are always surrounded by sound here. There are the birds, of course. The cicadas are back for the summer and today being a warmer day than we have had as of late, they set up their chatter early. There is street traffic and the occasional hum (more audible at night) of the nearby highway. If there is a light breeze, as there is while I type this, wind chimes start sounding. But there is never anyone whistling.

This guy sounded as if he were whistling for the pleasure of the sound. Or the pleasure of the morning. Or perhaps both.

Where did whistling go? It is rare (unheard of) that I hear anyone whistling anymore just for the heck of it.  Is it because so many are plugged into their iPods or other devices that whistling has fallen by the wayside? Have people forgotten how to whistle? 

Jo March famously "sat up, put her hands in her pockets, and began to whistle" just to annoy Amy in the opening chapter of Little Women. The Little House books are full of whistling: Pa whistles constantly, Laura whistles and even sings a song about whistling to Almanzo when they are courting. And I believe it is somewhere in that same canon that I came across the saying that "a whistling girl and a crowing hen always come to some bad end." 

As of late, I have been piecing my days together, more crazy quilt than carefully crafted pattern. Today is stitched together with whistling.

Inch Thirty-Six: Dark

The lights went out last night. Not just in our house, or just on our block, but all over town and out into the county. It was still dusk when the power quit, so there was more than enough time to gather candles and start lighting them. I set out a flashlight as well, but planned on relying on the candles to get me through the evening.

Warren headed off to a downtown meeting; I settled in at the kitchen table to use the last of the evening's light while I wrote up oncology notes and then started in on some letters to friends.

The first thing you notice when all the lights are out is how quiet it is. The house was silent: no refrigerator humming, no dehumidifier kicking on in the basement. The candles sputtered and hissed from time to time, but that was a quiet noise, a little noise. My pen moving across the surface of the note paper was the loudest sound in the kitchen.

After I finished the first letter, I took a flashlight and walked out onto our back deck, turning it off after I got outside. By now it was very dark. There was enough evening light in the sky—a little sliver of a new moon caught in some wispy clouds—that I could just make out the bulk of the house next door. I could see some dim, hulking shapes in the backyard: our large pines and, beyond that, more black mass than anything, what I knew to be the rear of our neighbor's mansard-roofed Italianate house.

But otherwise dark. No ambient light from the downtown, no streetlights. Just dark.

Deep darkness and night—true night—are lost pieces of the past for most of us. Unless we are out in a wilderness or other very remote area or are experiencing a power failure, there is always light somewhere, even out in the country. We gain the security—real or imagined—of artificial light, but we lose something in return. We lose the mysticism of night, seeing the stars and the moon gleaming brighter overhead. We lose the night sounds that we hear more acutely without the visual distractions.

And maybe we lose the sense of our place, accustomed as we are to electric lights and televisions and computers. I noticed that many of our neighbors, arriving home in the dark, immediately left and did not return until later. Maybe they were in search of a hot meal, but maybe they just didn't like being in the dark without the blink of a screen.

Roger Ekirch wrote a history of night,  At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, in which he explores the relationship of humans to night. Ekirch did an excellent job of charting the mysterious and often ominous roles night and darkness played in European and colonial America. Night was not all evil: Ekirch also wrote of the home and social conventions that grew out of gathering together to share a fire, a game of cards, a festival, a story.

Standing on the deck in the dark, sensing rather than seeing the shapes before me, I had a faint idea of Ekirch's fascination with night.

I had just noted in a second letter that I was writing by candlelight, not because I wanted to play at being Ma Ingalls but because of the power outage when the power came back on with a whoosh of appliances. Suddenly the house seemed impossibly bright. I went outside and saw lights dotting the neighborhood once again, from lamps burning brightly in windows to the Halloween decorations next door glowing bright orange. Warren came in shortly afterwards: his meeting was held by flashlight. Our City Council managed to meet in the dark as well. Friends reported children playing in the yards by the light of glow sticks.

After the lights came back on, the night went on without a hitch and our lights stayed on until we turned them off for bed. The dark, the mysterious and impenetrable dark, was gone.

Christmas By the Book

For all my love of reading, I did not receive a book as a Christmas present until 1965 (4th grade) and then only as a reward for refraining from biting my fingernails. That a child would crave books over toys was unfathomable to my young parents and I think they were taken aback when I would ask for them. Betting against my daily nibbling of my nails, my parents indeed rewarded me that year. While I no longer own the books, I still remember them well: Marguerite Henry's An Album of Horses and The Golden Stallion by Rutherford  Montgomery.

That is the only thing I remember about that Christmas: I finally received books that belonged to me and me alone. By sheer fate, that Christmas turned into a hat trick of sorts when it came to books as I also received a children's abridged and illustrated Little Women. (I still own that book.)

With Christmas just hours away, I have been recently revisiting my memories of Christmas stories and tales. My earliest are oral: singing "Away in the Manger" in church toddler class or listening to Grandma Skatzes recite the nursery rhyme beginning "Christmas is coming."

Once I learned to read, I discovered Christmas in books and learned I could experience the holiday anytime I felt like it. I heard and read the lilt of Clement Moore's "The Night Before Christmas" and set about memorizing it, starting with the names of the reindeers.

There was The Grinch Who Stole Christmas (Dr. Seuss) and the wonders of Whoville and Mr. Willoughby's Christmas Tree (Robert Barry) and my satisfaction over the mouse family getting the last tip of the too big tree. There was Laura cuddling Charlotte in Little House in the Big Woods, the first book of the series I had yet to discover. When I did discover and devour the series, I found that Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote a Christmas scene into every single book in the series. My favorite was and remains the time that Mr. Edwards swam the Verdigris River to bring Christmas to Laura and Mary way out on the big prairie.

Wilder had a knack for Christmas scenes: the rag doll, Mr. Edwards, the church gift trees in Plum Creek (the muff) and De Smet (the secret gift from Almanzo), the store bought cap Almanzo received as a boy, the hard winter where the Ingalls family read stories until the kerosene lamp went out.

As my world of books expanded, so did the Christmases I experienced. I joined Sam Gribley and Bando for Christmas day in My Side of the Mountain. I followed the fate of the Christmas tree in Hans Christian Andersen's story"The Fir Tree."

I can never think of Little Women without hearing Jo grumble "Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents." And even having read that book hundreds of times, I still thrill when during a later Christmas when Laurie  "popped his head in very quietly. He might just as well have turned a somersault and uttered an Indian war whoop, for his face was so full of suppressed excitement and his voice so treacherously joyful that everyone jumped up, though he only said, in a queer, breathless voice, Here's another Christmas present for the March family."

By the time I was in junior high, I'd added the Christmas chapter from Sally Benson's Junior Miss, Abby Deal's Christmas efforts in A Lantern in Her Hand (which introduced me to the writings of Bess Streeter Aldrich, who was no slouch herself when it came to Christmas stories), and the Christmas celebrations woven though the Betsy-Tacy novels of Maude Hart Lovelace. At about the same time, I first read Dylan Thomas's "Conversation About Christmas"and Truman Capote's evocative story, "A Christmas Memory."

Interestingly enough, there are no celebrations of Christmas in any of the Oz books. Santa Claus makes a cameo appearance at Ozma's birthday party in The Road to Oz.

In my children's young years, I added a few more Christmas tales to the list: Jingle Bugs, a marvelous pop-up book by David Carter, Carl's Christmas by Alexandra Day, and, a little later, Beverly Cleary's Ramona and Her Father, in which she plays a sheep in the church pageant.

There are two other books I would be remiss to skip. The first is Gregory Maguire's Matchless, a retelling and reworking of Andersen's story "The Little Match Girl." Told simply and starkly, it contains a favorite line of mine: "The family was still hard-pressed for money, and dreamed of savory treats to eat, but they had the warmth of one another, and enough on which to live, and in most parts of the world that is called plenty."

The second is, of course, my beloved A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. I confess: I do not remember reading it as a child, learning my Dickens from the early broadcasts of "Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol" instead. I have long since made up for my lapse by reading the book some fifty or more times as an adult.

It is the afternoon of Christmas Eve as I finish this. Somewhere Jo is grumbling about the lack of presents, somewhere a lonely boy is searching the sky for a "lost pair of kites hurrying towards heaven." Somewhere Ramona is wiggling her bottom to make her tail wag, and somewhere Sam and Bando are trying out Christmas tunes on the willow reed whistles.

Somewhere it is always Christmas.

Pie Memories

Let me make one thing clear before we start. I am not talking about my pie memories.

I don't have a lot of pie memories. My strongest memories of homemade pie are of the pumpkin pies that graced every Thanksgiving meal. My grandmothers did not bake many pies that I recall. Grandma Nelson, who was an amazing cook, had a serious fondness for those frozen cream pies that were a novelty back in the 1960s. Grandma Skatzes did not bake pies that I knew of, although two of her daughters did. My mom baked some pies during my youth, but that was not her dessert of first resort. I know at one point she made her own crusts, because I remember that when pre-made and frozen crusts came on the market, she was in seventh heaven. I don't think I made my first pie until I was in high school.

Memories of cakes and cookies, yes. But pies? Not really.

"Pie memories" is a revelation I had Saturday morning while baking a pie and prepping apples for the freezer.  We were having supper with our good friends Margo and Gerald that evening, and I had promised a pie. Apple was my initial choice and I was ready to peel and slice the apples. But as we were having a typical early November day with sunshine alternating with gray skies and the air flipping between brisk and raw, something said "pumpkin."

I make my pumpkin pies dense and dark, loaded with spices, and while I rolled out and pinched the crust, I thought of pies in literature. There is the Deeper'n Ever pie in the Redwall series and the hot turnovers that Meg and Jo called their "muffs" in Little Women. Dorothy found a "small custard pie" in her dinner bucket that she picked from the tree in Ozma of Oz. Jamie and Claudia, the children who ran away to the Metropolitan Art Museum in E. L. Konigsberg's From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, surely spent some of their nickels on pie at the automat they frequented.

And let's face it: you cannot read The Little House series without being immersed in pies, including Ma's green pumpkin pie (The Long Winter) and the dried apple pie shared between the Boasts and the Ingalls (On the Shores of Silver Lake). Farmer Boy, the story of Almanzo Wilder's childhood, is one long paean to pie, including this wonderful passage after Almannzo had eaten most of his dinner at the county fair:

Then he drew a long breath, and he ate pie.

When he began to eat pie, he wished he had eaten nothing else. He ate a piece of pumpkin pie and a piece of custard pie, and he almost ate a piece of vinegar pie. He tried a piece of mince pie, but could not finish it. He just couldn't do it. There were berry pies and cream pies and vinegar pies and raisin pies, but he could not eat any more. 

While the pumpkin pie baked, I turned to peeling and slice apples for a future pie. It was while my hands were busy at that task that I had my pie epiphany: When I bake a pie, I want to bake the pie that we know and remember deep in our hearts.

I want to reach in and bring out those pie memories, even for those of us who may not have them.

What does memory taste like? What does that memory taste like when we have no distinct memory of pie from our youth?

How do I bake a memory?

I don't know, but I finally realized that thoughts like these are what guide my hands as I roll the crust and fill it. I fill it with apples, or pumpkin, or sauteed vegetables, but what I am really filling it with is memories.

I have a card about pie. I keep it on the bookshelf (having not gotten around to framing it yet) so I can see it constantly. It reads: There are many types of food, some of which are pies and the rest of which should be pies. 

It is a sentiment I share.

Saturday night, Margo, Gerald, Warren and I all ate a slice of pumpkin pie, thick and dense, topped with whipped cream laced with cinnamon. We had just finished a good and savory meal, then, like Almanzo, drew deep breaths and began to eat pie.

Saturday Afternoon

"That's almost two quarts of green tomato pickle. Even if it's only our first garden on the sod and nothing could grow well, these pickles will be a treat with baked beans in the winter," Ma gloated. (The Long Winter, Laura Ingalls Wilder)

Well, it was salsa and it was ten pints (five quarts), but I know just what Ma Ingalls meant.

Read, Write, Repeat

I recently read On Writing by Stephen King. It is part memoir, part "here are my thoughts about the craft of writing." I am not a reader of King or his genre, so I entered the book with some trepidation.

It was excellent.

One of King's basic observations is that writers (a) read a lot of books, always, and (b) write a lot, preferably every day. He himself writes daily ("365 days a year") and advises would-be writers to set aside time daily (preferably the same time) and just write until you at least reach a set quota of words.

Well, I am one for two, which in baseball means I am batting .500. In writing, I am a weak hitter at best.

I read all the time. Just last night, I "power read" the last four books of the Little House series because I was out of fresh (unread) books and wanted to read something. As I pen these words, I am waiting for Warren to come home. I am eager not only because I always look forward to seeing Warren but also because I stopped at the library this morning and then dumped an armload of books in the car (conveniently parked nearby) rather than lug them along to coffee and lunch.

But writing every day? Setting aside time in which to write and then holding that time sacred?

I have no excuse but a lame "haven't done it."

I know someone who has committed to getting up and going to her study every single day to work on a novella. She doesn't know if she "has" something yet, but every day she sits down in front of her computer and starts typing. After two hours, she emerges for breakfast with her husband and then goes off to her day job.

And I had coffee with morning with a friend, a young woman who also works at the craft of writing. Today we talked about what, how, and why she does it.

I admire both women for recognizing that writing is work and deserves the same focus as any other job.

I shared with my friend this morning that I kept getting stuck on the time issue. It is a hurdle on the track which I  come up to and then stop short of throwing a leg over to clear it. She was very sweet in saying that it was okay to have writing as a hobby and not to beat myself up over what I am not doing.

Writing as a hobby? I can see Stephen King lobbing a brick at me to catch my attention. "Hey, you. Yeah, you. Stop sitting on the fence."

I don't know what I am afraid of. I don't know what is holding me back. Not being any good? Not having anything to say? Do I think that spending time writing is a selfish pursuit? Not enough time? Too many other commitments? They are all sham excuses. The real question is why do I not value my time enough to set a portion of it aside every day to pursue something I love so deeply?

My friend spent some of the past summer in  Turkey, her husband's homeland, staying at a family cottage near the coast. "I wrote a lot," she said, and we both smiled.

I would love to have a writing vacation at a coastal cottage. Heck, I would settle for a small shed or tent by a lake. Just try me.

But that is not why I am not writing and I know it.

We also talked about writing "at home" versus writing "somewhere else." She does her work primarily somewhere else, as she finds her home calls to her when she is there. The laundry, the dishes, the cats, what to cook for supper—they all tug at her concentration. So she uses home to outline and do research, then heads to an out of town coffee shop to burrow into her words.

As I write this post, sitting at our kitchen table, I wonder if the towels on the line are dry yet. And then get up to check them, fold them, and bring them inside.

But the towels are not why I am not writing and I know that too.

I have written before about the writer Bess Streeter Aldrich, who gave an interview in which she spoke on writing with one hand and ironing with the other. She also commented that people managed to find time for the things they loved, and if you claimed you wanted to write but couldn't find time, then maybe you didn't really want to write.

I need to teach myself the skill of writing with one hand and ironing with the other. I move closer to it; I have learned to always have a pen and notebook with me and sometimes even remember to use it. I have learned not to make excuses of "I'm just writing" when Warren (busy with his own projects) walks through the kitchen on his way to the workshop.

I need to face the hurdle on the track. Even if I am not yet able to leap it smoothly and fluidly, I can still walk up to it and straddle it, one leg on each side, until I get the courage to bring the other leg over too.

And then do it again, a little smoother. And again, a little smoother yet.

And then trust my feet (and my pen) to leap it and keep going.

Grateful to the Dead

We just finished a 4600+ mile trip out to Helena, Montana, to see Ben and Alise get married. I will be writing about the wedding as well as the trip. Really.

It was a wonderful wedding. It was a great trip. I really will write about what we saw and experienced. But my first post-trip blog is about the dead. More specifically, it is about the dead I carried home with me on this trip.

The return portion of our trip was a chance for me and Warren to explore, as we are often wont to do. We had some Big stops on the way home: Little Bighorn, Devils Tower, Mount Rushmore. We also had a number of Little stops on the way home, including the Blue Bunny ice cream parlor in Le Mars, Iowa, and the Dvorak rooms in Spillville, Iowa.

It was a lot of fun sharing that part of the country (which I knew somewhat) with Warren, who had never been there. It was a wonderful opportunity for Warren and me to talk, explore, and connect.

The dead, though, were always with me on the return trip. Maybe it was the talk that Father Joe (literally and figuratively: he is both Alise's father and an ordained Episcopalian priest who performed the service) gave in which he referred to the ancestors on "the other side of the veil." Maybe it was the Shehecheyanu, the Jewish prayer for celebrating special occasions. The prayer thanks God, "who has granted us life, sustained us and enabled us to reach this occasion." It kept chasing through my head as I watched Ben and Alise say their vows - five years earlier that day, I was about to undergo a second stem cell transplant. At the time, I didn't know if I would live long enough to see my older son graduate from college. And now I was sitting at his wedding, my hand in Warren's as we watched the joy light on our children's faces.

Whatever it was, I felt the dead - some nameless, some known - with me for the duration of the return trip.

One of our stops was Clear Lake, Iowa. Clear Lake is a small town in northeastern Iowa that gained posterity on February 3, 1959, when a small plane carrying Buddy Holly, J. P. Richardson (the Big Bopper), and Ritchie Valens, crashed into a cornfield shortly after takeoff. The crash site, located in a farm field about a half mile off a gravel road, contains a memorial marker to the musicians, and may be visited, provided you stay on the mowed access strip and do not harm the field crops.

The field crop this year is corn, which in this part of Iowa this year is growing particular thick and tall. Even though Warren and I were there in the early morning, the sun was already hot and the air was heavy and hot as well.

We walked slowly back towards the site. The corn formed a deep channel on either side of the strip of grass. You could smell the fields baking beneath the sun and hear the corn rustling. About halfway down the access strip, I commented to Warren that these were perfect "Field of Dreams" cornfields and I expected to see Shoeless Joe Jackson emerge any moment.

Warren quickly commented, "well, if Buddy Holly walks out, I'm out of here."

Buddy Holly didn't walk out. But by the time we reached the memorial marker, it was clear many, many people had walked in. The ground around the small marker was covered with offerings - coins, glasses, CDs, music, jewelry, pictures. Some articles of clothing were tied to a nearby stake, much like Indian prayer bundles. There was a second marker for the pilot of the plane, at which there were more coins, these all neatly stacked on the crossbar of the marker.

Fifty years after the crash, people still make pilgrimages and leave tokens to show they were there and that the musicians are not forgotten.

The day before we had been in De Smet, South Dakota. De Smet became immortal as the Little Town on the Prairie after Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about her youth on the great South Dakota plains. De Smet, even on a day when the thermometer was reaching 100 degrees, has a high density of small girls and frazzled mothers trekking from location to location.

One of the stops in De Smet, at which we found ourselves the only visitors, was the cemetery in which Ma, Pa, and all of Laura's sisters are buried, as well as a number of other townsfolk whose names and personalities appear in the books. In contrast to the crash site, the Ingalls plot is pin-neat. That surprised me. I thought that some of those mothers and daughters, making their trek to and through De Smet, might have left a flower, a drawing, or even a clothespin doll. But there was no sign of anything, and no indication that memorials of any type, even a rock placed on the headstone to show someone was there, were ever left.

The cemetery was quiet and empty, except for the two of us.

Two days before De Smet, we had gone to the battlefield at Little Bighorn. In the last decade, the National Park Service (and this country) finally recognized that Little Bighorn means different things to different people, especially those coming from the Lakota Sioux, Arapaho, and Cheyenne tribes. Those tribes were the victors at that battle and there is now a memorial to the Indian warriors who fought and died that day. The memorial is an enclosed circle; visitors enter through openings in the wall. There is an additional opening in the wall that lines up with the memorial to the US Calvary soldiers who fell that same day. This is a spirit gate, placed there to welcome the spirits of the Calvary dead into the circle.

Little Bighorn is a haunting place.

Our ways of marking death are so varied. At the site of a long ago plane crash, people still walk a long fencerow to leave mementoes. In a windswept prairie town, the graves of those immortalized in the Little House series are painfully clean, almost as if Ma had her broom out on a daily basis. And in a remote battlefield where the battle began and ended 134 years ago in one bloody, desperate day, there is a gate for the spirits of all the soldiers - Indian and Army - to be at peace with one another.

As we walked down the corn row to the Buddy Holly crash site, a pair of yellow butterflies kept dancing in the air before us, almost leading us to it, as it were. It reminded me of the closing lines of I Heard the Owl Call My Name, a gem of a novel by Margaret Craven about which I have written briefly before. In the Indian village, all is still the night before the young vicar's burial. Only two residents are awake. One is Peter, the carver, who remembers that "in the old days," the soul of a man would return after death to the village in some other form:

Peter did not believe this literally. Yet it seemed likely to him that the soul of the young vicar would return to the village he had loved, as would his own, and surely it would be most inhospitable if no one was awake and waiting. Thus he dressed and sat on the top step of his house in the dark night, and hearing the rustle of some small night creature he, too, spoke softly, "It is only old Peter, the carver, who waits here, friend."

Those lines came to me as I watched the butterflies lead us to the crash site. They were nowhere in sight when we made our way back out to continue our trip.

In the Nursery

I thought we were done with the nursery.

No, not that kind of nursery. Until and unless there are grandchildren, Warren and I are both done on the baby front.

No, I mean the plant nursery. Ever since March 21, a large folding table has dominated the space in front on the patio door. To get to the back deck, you had to go through the percussion room, into the garage, then out to the patio and up to the deck.

All that was coming to an end this weekend. We spent part of Mother's Day tilling the two gardens. They and I were ready to go this weekend.

The table would finally, blessedly, be empty.

Yesterday I put in peppers, eggplants, and broccoli. We took some tomato plants out to dad. Today, I heeled in our tomatoes, planted onions, and seeded cilantro, basil, greasy beans, pumpkins, and zucchini.

In addition to being the weekend I planted the garden, this weekend is the Delaware Arts Festival, a two-day downtown street fair. The Symphony always has a booth there, which Warren and I helped set up early Saturday. I wanted to buy Ben and Alise's wedding present at the fair, so later on (before the first round of gardening), we spent a good hour or more wandering up and down the blocks looking at the wares.

One of the booths was a gourd artist, the kind who paint and carve gourds into decorative art - penguins, jolly Santas, dogs (no, Ben and Alise, I did not buy you gourd art). Warren is always interested in gourds - not to decorate our house with, but to turn into percussion instruments such as shakeres or güiros.

While he eyed the gourds, judging size and dimensions, I realized there were trays of brown paper packets underneath the lowest shelf.

Seed packets.

Gourd seed packets.

Warren and I engaged the proprietor in some gourd talk. What's this gourd here? How about this one?

Gourds have descriptive names: kettle, pear, apple, basketball. That's a big pear. That one? A penguin (painted like, you guessed it, a penguin).

I treated my husband: one pack of kettle seeds, one pack of large pear seeds. The seed owner and I talked planting and germination. He suggested starting them inside, under heat. They have a tough coating, so they'll take awhile to germinate. Just stay at it.

If I started now, I asked, would I still have enough growing season to get gourds this year?

Oh heavens, yes.

I spent all morning today gardening. The kitchen garden is fluffy and easy to work. The sod garden, even after last week's compost and roto-tilling, is still rough and still has a long ways to go. Pa Ingalls flashed across my mind.

The broccoli is down in the sod garden this year, where it can grow to the size of fifth graders if so desires. I have two rows of pie pumpkins and two rows of zucchini seeded. A fifth row will hold the gourds when their time comes. The kitchen garden will have eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, basil, cilantro, and pole beans this year. It is not as crowded as last year and this year I know where every single tomato is planted. I also planted six containers: two with artichokes (trying yet once again) and four with sugar lump cherry tomatoes.

By the time I finished, I was tired. But not too tired to make ten newspaper seed pots, fill them with wet potting soil, and poke a gourd seed down into each one. The big table came down as planned, but one of the small deck tables holds a tray of seeds and a lamp just fine. The babes-in-waiting spent a hour or two in the sun before I carried them inside and tucked them in for a nap.

The nursery is humming one last time this garden season.

Thanksgiving Pie

"I didn't know you could," Carrie breathed, looking wide-eyed at the pie.

"Well, I don't know yet," said Ma. She slipped the pie into the oven and shut the door on it. "But the only way to find out is to try. By dinnertime we'll know."

from The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilders

Longtime fans of the Little House books will recognize the above lines from the time Ma made a green pumpkin pie as a surprise for Pa. Upon tasting the pie, he pronounced it a success: "Ma always could beat the nation cooking."

Ma was on my mind this weekend as I took stock of the remaining Thanksgiving leftovers. Most of what has not been consumed went into the freezer, but there was still a small bowl of homemade cranberry sauce sitting in the refrigerator. What to do, what to do?

When in doubt, bake.

Over the years, I have seen several recipes for cranberry/apple pies. I never made one, but remembered they took fresh cranberries, not cranberry sauce. My sauce was fresh cranberries stewed with sugar and nothing else. If I drained the sauce off and mixed it with the apples, then I wouldn't need anything more than spices to make my pie complete.

So that is what I did this morning. The result is cooling on the table as I type. They say the proof is in the pudding, but in this case the proof is in the pie. We are off to a waffle supper at Margo and Gerald's this evening and we will cut it then. Margo and I frequently talk about Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House books, so Ma's quote nudging me this morning fits just right.

The other quote that went through my mind as I crimped the crust today was my favorite from World War II: "Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without."

Another era, another book, another time.

What Would Pa Have Done?

I am a huge fan of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House series. Ever since reading Little House in the Big Woods when I was a third grader, I have read Laura's books countless times. Even now, if I am "between books" and want something to read while eating lunch, I am more likely to grab a Little House book off the shelf than anything else.

I never watched the television show, so my mental images of Laura and her family are those by Garth Williams, the original illustrator. That's a good thing as lately I have been dogged by Pa Ingalls, and I'd rather not have Michael Landon popping into my head as I struggle with starting the second garden.

I knew I wanted and needed a second garden bed for all the vegetables I planned on sowing directly. Zucchini, yellow squash, Swiss chard, spinach, Lazy Housewife beans, pie pumpkins. I even toyed with the idea of having a separate pumpkin patch, as pumpkins sprawl so.

The lawn where I wanted the garden has been undisturbed for decades, and the grass is well established. My dad brought over his old front-tine rotor-tiller, but I couldn't begin to handle "the beast," as my dad calls it, let alone till with it. After several futile attempts, I gave up. I couldn't break through the grass even after dad sharpened the tine blades.

Fortunately, a neighborhood friend has a rear-tine tiller that he was glad to lend me. Last Friday night, Warren and I walked around the corner, walked the contraption back, and then I set to tilling the garden.

This is the point where Pa Ingalls first came to mind.

As already noted, the grass is well established. Warren's house was built in 1964 on a parcel split off from the imposing brick 1869 home directly to the east. A rear driveway from the large residence to our street was removed for this house, but other than that, my guess is that most of the backyard has been lawn for a long, long, time.

Long enough for the grass to grow roots to China.

The borrowed rotor-tiller was a "dirt-eating machine," per another friend. It did not balk once as, inch by inch, it cut through the grass roots and turned the soil.

But it was really, really hard work. And as I sweated and grunted and clung to the tiller, I thought about Pa Ingalls. Specifically, how did he do it? We all know from reading the Little House series that Pa was always breaking the sod of the Great Plains, whether it was in Indian Territory or out in the Dakotas.

We also all know from reading these wonderful books the two basic rules about breaking sod. First, it is very hard work, even if you have horses to help pull the plow. I didn't have horses to help me till, although I did have horsepower. I know the root stems on these lawn grasses don't begin to measure as deep as prairie grass roots, which can reach 15 feet or more. And I'm only digging a garden measuring about 20 x 15 feet, not breaking 160 acres.

All the same, it was hard work. Warren offered to help, but I figured I needed to do the bulk of it since it was my idea to have a second garden. Besides, Warren had a shed to build and a storage unit to move. So most of the tilling fell to me and as I cut through the grass, I thought of how many times and in how many places Pa put the plow to the prairie.

The second lesson about breaking sod is that you don't get very good garden results the first year. As Pa noted after that first harvest in the Dakotas, "we can't get much from a first year on sod-ground, but the sods will rot this winter. We'll do better next year." I hope so because my results dismay me. After three passes through the plot, I didn't have the strength or the daylight left to do a fourth. It was clear from everything I saw that, whatever I did, the results this first year would likely be meager at best.

My dream garden, put together on paper back in February, has zucchini, yellow squash, Swiss chard, spinach, Lazy Housewife beans, and pie pumpkins growing in it. Uh huh. I've got a sod garden that looks like a dirt-eating something or other barfed in the backyard. The garden will take time and hard work, and I am particularly short on any capacity to do a lot of hard physical work, having used up a huge chunk of my reserves in tilling the garden and helping with the storage unit move (one phrase: a ton of rosewood).

Something has to give, and what has to give is my dream garden.

When the Ingalls had to sell a heifer calf to send Mary to college, Mary was dismayed, but Ma was ready with a response. "We must cut our coat to fit the cloth." As I walked the tiller back to its owner, I already had my scissors out and was taking measure of the cloth I was about to cut.

This year, the second garden will be zucchini and pie pumpkins only. I am planting those because I believe that zucchini will grow almost anywhere and that pumpkins are known for their ability to break up soil. (Let me hold onto those beliefs, no matter how deluded I may be.) I never saw a zucchini mentioned in the Little House series, but I know there were always pumpkins, even in that first poor Dakota harvest.

I'll sow the garden tonight if the rain holds off. I've cut my cloth. With luck, come the harvest, my coat will be orange.