“Forever is composed of nows.”
—Emily Dickinson
Happy New Year. It’s resolution time. Time to get thinner, stronger, smarter, richer. Time to heal our broken relationships. Time to find a new job. Time to quit procrastinating on that novel that needs to be written. But I’m tired. Are you tired, too? Too tired for big changes and improvements and overhauls?
This year, especially this year, maybe we deserve to cut ourselves some slack in the resolution department. If you have the energy for any or all of the above, good for you, but if you don’t and you’re a writer, a stressed-out writer who wants to pen a terrific novel or come up with a score of brilliant stories or poems, but is struggling to simply think straight, I have a suggestion. It’s something I’ve been doing. It’s easy. And it makes me happy. [Read more…] about Present and Accounted for
My dad used to work in a nursing home. If he had to go in on a Saturday afternoon, sometimes my sister and brother and I went with him. I’m not sure why this was permissible. I’m also not sure why we didn’t stay home with our mom. But she was a waitress at Davidson’s Restaurant and occasionally worked the lunch shift, so maybe she had to work, too.
I’m an enthusiastic gardener in the spring, a lazy weed-enabler in the fall. As I write this post, the brilliant foliage in the woods outside my window, though lovely, isn’t quite distracting me from the sad state of a flowerbed, where grass threads the lavender, wild asters bloom whitely between the lanky remains of hollyhocks, and bindweed twirls around the rosebush branches. Worse yet, it looks like poison ivy has gotten a roothold in my hydrangea. 
Six months into this pandemic, I’m realizing things about myself, one of which is how cautious I am. Some friends and family members assure me the country’s situation isn’t as bad as the media paints it and, in fact, is getting better. But as of this week, there are over three million active cases of Covid-19, and we’ve passed the two hundred thousand deaths mark. That’s…a lot. That doesn’t sound like “better.” So I’m still practicing social distancing. Though I’ll call and write to the people I love, I won’t visit or entertain them. My caution has strained a few of my relationships, and I feel badly about that. “This isn’t forever,” I’ll say and think, I hope this isn’t forever. 
When I was a teenager, I liked romantic suspense novels. Mary Stewart’s Nine Coaches Waiting and This Rough Magic were my favorites. My mom, a reader, too, eschewed romance. She once told me in a bored voice that if she came across a sex scene in a book, she skipped it. But Mom enjoyed suspenseful novels, especially cozy mysteries, though she had an odd habit of plodding through the first couple of chapters, jumping to the end to read the last few pages, then returning to her earlier spot and finishing the book. 
Summertime is filled with the tasks I enjoy most. I live in Lake Ontario fruit country, where there are so many berries, cherries, peaches, and plums to do things with, bake into cakes, pies, and crisps, preserve or freeze. By August, I’m pickling cucumbers and canning tomatoes. Inevitably, at some point, a neighbor will leave a bag of zucchinis on the porch, and it’s a shame to let nice zucchinis go to waste. In the meantime, I have a writing project languishing, neglected. But the warmer months are also my pottery months. My studio isn’t heated, so I have to wait until the summer to throw and fire pots. 
My first novel The Beloved Wild, a historical YA, came out in 2018, but once in a great while, a reader will still contact me about it. It’s gratifying when this person shares what they liked about the book, but usually they just have questions. Okay, one question: “Are you going to write a sequel?”
I recently started reading the Harry Potter series to my kids. They’re ten and eleven. They’re home—every hour of every day, for who knows how long, on account of the pandemic. And they’re anxious. I am, too. If ever there was a time to plow through eight fantasy novels and escape into a world of witchcraft and wizardry, it’s now.
Some of the most popular works of fiction are what I think of as monkey-wrench stories. They’re tales that establish an ordinary, habitual, possibly boring-as-hell situation, then introduce an element that upends everything. When an author throws a monkey wrench into the works, the reader gets to experience the disruption (along with the ensuing stress, struggle, excitement) and then, if the tale leans toward hope, the reader can enjoy the restoration of order or the development of a new order. 