Counting Down while Counting up

Ah, the year-end swan song. This year, out loud, we are chanting, “Thank God” for the end of 2009, but if you listen to my heart folks, you’ll hear: “Thank God for 2009.” OK, the bank account is suffering. That’s the check mark in the negative column. Here though, are the positives:

1) It was a forced decision, sure, but I finally moved on from the career I was good at, but that didn’t inspire or enrich me--well, other than financially.

2) I began Middle Passages--unplanned, in shock, but out it came, like a river after a torrential rain fall. Through this blog I learned that not only can I write, I will write, and I can hold myself accountable to make sure that I do write--regularly. Stay tuned, because it’s going to get even better.

3) I was published, twice. Once in a sort of semi-major publication. Oh, I wish you all could have seen my face the day the editor of the Boston Globe Magazine called me to tell me she’d be using His and Her Unemployment. If I recall correctly, there was some dancing involved--witnessed by visitors that were in our house that day. There, another positive. Become “redundant,” write about it, get published. Who knew?

4) Including payment for His and Her Unemployment and All Together Now, (which occurred before I set up my D/B/A bank account) as well as the six, count ‘em, six writing projects that I completed by year end, LCS Writes, my freelance writing business, is actually in the black. It’s a very tiny black; more like a shadow really, but maybe in 2010 it will pay me a salary.

5) I have blog readers who are supportive, kind, generous in their comments and over-the-top helpful for which I am over-the-moon grateful.

6) For the first time in my 51 year old life, I am in love with what I do.

So there you go. If that’s what happens in a bad year, bring on 2010. There’s the glass half-empty or the glass half-full mentality. Pop the champagne. My glass is bubbling over.

Best wishes to all of you for a safe celebration and a fulfilling, prosperous and healthful year.

What are some good things that happened to you in 2009?

Sharing a Lesson Learned

Quite recently, I discovered the value of conducting thorough research when writing.

Those of you who read my two Shelby and Henry vignettes may remember that yesterday I had Henry washing his hands daily with Fels Naptha, an old fashioned bar soap that really exists. I know, because it’s the miracle elixir my grandmother recommended when a head-to-toe case of poison ivy threatened to turn me into a screaming, itchy maniac the summer I turned eighteen. Scrubbing with the bar dried up my festering rash faster than anything else on the market.

Several years later, I worked with a woman who swore by Fels Naptha to calm the effects of Poison Ivy exposure, and to eliminate her most difficult laundry stains. Since the timing of that information coincided with the purchase of our first home on a hillside lot erupting with the shiny three leaved vines, at that time I bought my own bar. These days, although we use it for Poison Ivy rash prevention more than anything else, scrubbing with it when we accidentally encounter the insidious plant in our garden or yard, we are never without it in our home. And head's up--along with drying the itch, it does a spectacular job curing "ring-around the collar."

Therefore yesterday, it seemed logical to me when I was trying to get Henry’s hands clean, that I use the same yellow soap. I was pretty sure I had spelled the product name wrong when it came up in my draft, and while I kept on writing, I reminded myself to go back at the end to check the proper spelling before publishing the post--which I did.

My mistake though, was that I didn’t read anything else about Fels Naptha. Having felt its drying properties personally, late last night it occurred to me that regular use on the skin may not be a good thing. Turning to my best buddy, Google, I investigated further and decided that it would probably be a lot better for Henry if I scrubbed his muddy hands with a different soap. Something about the name “Naptha” being another word for benzene solvent, a possible carcinogen, didn’t feel right.

For more information, click here: Ehow.com and if I inspired you to think about scrubbing up with the stuff every night, you might want to revisit that idea. I have apologized profusely to Henry, and he’s OK with it, because although his hands are pretty grimy right now, he knows that this exercise taught me that if in the future I want to be trusted by my reading audience, I’ll check these things out first.

So, you can rest assured, if Shelby and Henry become long term characters for me, I’ll make a change in his grooming habits. That said, you can’t scare me. I’ll continue to use the soap when I accidentally yank up Poison Ivy, because, like Henry, I have a hard time keeping my gloves on, and avoiding that particular nightmare itch is worth every bit of the risk.

A Little Bit More...

Shelby leaned over the bottles and gazed out the window to check on Henry. As she anticipated, he was on his knees in his new garden. One blue jean leg was tucked into the back of his work boot, his brimmed baseball cap sat high on his brown curls. She watched as he smoothed his palm over the muddy hillocks where he’d planted tomatoes last week. At least his gloves were tucked into his back pocket. No matter how many times she asked him, Henry would start the day with his hands covered, but as soon as he was eye level with his greenery he’d toss them off and thrust his fingers into the damp ground to relocate earth worms and tamp the soil around his seedlings. Though she had taught him to scrub his hands thoroughly with Fels Naptha, the bar laundry soap that Gram used to swear by, it was a rare night that Henry didn’t go to sleep with dirt under his fingernails.

Shelby watched as he patted the soil around the zucchini and the cucumbers, and knew that soon she would have to walk out there, take him by the arm and lead him inside. Henry would stay with his babies all night if she let him; she’d learned that from hard experience.

Although he was only seven minutes younger than she, it had been a long time since Shelby had thought of Henry as a twin brother--for so long now; they’d lived more like mother and son. When Gram was alive, she had seen to Henry’s needs, but for the last 13 years, Shelby and Henry encompassed their own little nucleus of family. And though Henry’s mind had never grown beyond his ten-year-old self, each morning she chuckled as he greeted her with his sing-song, “Morning, morning Shelby,” while sliding into the bench at the table, grinning at the strawberries and chocolate milk she placed in front of him. “Morning, morning Henry,” she’d smile right back.

She was aware that people who didn’t know them assumed that she and Henry were husband and wife. Most times it didn’t take long--they'd see Shelby hand him his napkin at a restaurant and remind him to wipe his mouth, or the way he looked down at the ground and etched the dirt with his booted toe upon encountering a stranger, and realize that Henry wasn’t “all there” as she had overheard Vera telling her sales manager on the telephone.

To Shelby though, Henry was more there than anyone. Though his garden was by far his favorite, Henry threw himself into all his projects, rarely slowing down. And whenever he saw his sister after an absence, he’d smile and call, “Hi Shelby, Shelby. How ya doing Shelby, Shelby?”with a smile so vast, you'd think she'd been gone for years. Shelby held tight to the blessing of Henry’s sweet disposition, his kind humor and the lack of temper, well aware that many families, regardless of intelligence, had things much worse.

Absentmindedly fingering the daisy petals, she again peered out the window to Henry, and saw from his profile that he was singing to his plants. Henry’s garden was one of the underlying reasons that this house was so perfect. Though the façade of the Victorian stood 20 feet from the street, the lot was narrow and deep, with plenty of sunny space out back for Henry to plant his vegetables. Yes, she’d dug a little deeper into the principal of their joint inheritance than she should have to produce the purchase price, but as she watched Henry mouth the words to music she couldn’t hear, she knew she’d done the right thing.

Comments anyone? I have no idea where this is going...

Merry Christmas

 

Wishing you light and joy, and a New Year in which all dreams are realized.

Pyrotechnics

My year is approaching its end with a chrysanthemum display of fireworks, as Diana at Writing Roller Coasters honored me with The Superior Scribbler Award! OK, it’s confession time. Since February when I began navigating the blogging world, I’ve read so many beautiful blogs, always envying the stamps lining their sides and wondering whether I’d ever write well enough to get one. Now, in a matter of weeks, I have--count’em--three.

I still ponder, when I page back through Middle Passages, what people think as they read—as in: “What, is she nuts? Sharing all that over the Internet? And she thinks she can write?” Little by little I’m getting over that, as a result of the kind and helpful comments from my (hooray, as of today) 45 followers. I have learned, since making that decision to join a writer’s group on LinkedIn, which led me so quickly to other writers who also blog, how valuable it is to have a support system.

My own group of virtual followers gives me the strength and inspiration to move forward, and through you all, I’m gaining the hope and confidence that Middle Passages may be only the start. Each of us is bent on improving our own skills while motivating and nurturing others in what can be a solitary quest. I'm so grateful to know that I'm not at all alone.

So, thank you. To those who read and to those who comment, you mean the world to me.

And though I’m supposed play the award forward; it’s a crazy time of year. My holiday gift is to hold off on bestowing the Scribbler on others, right now anyway--though there are so many talented writers out there, I reserve the right to do so in the future.

Seasonality

As we were creeping at a guarded 35 MPH down the slippery highway yesterday amid blowing snow on our way home from my sister’s house, sixty miles away, I forgot to say goodbye to autumn. I didn’t remember that the Winter Solstice arrived today, in spite of the fortuitous timing of the storm that roared up the east coast. Even as we gasped in pleasure upon arriving home to discover that some plowing angel had taken a whack at the twelve inches of snow covering our driveway, I forgot that fall was over.

I am big at acknowledging departures, in that I need to, no, have to recognize them. As testimony to this, one of the diaries that I have stuffed into the back of my closet contains a page written just before midnight on the eve of my 17th birthday. The entire sheet is covered with the number “16” as I attempted to ring out the digits like a wet towel, to use them all up before I turned a year older. I still do that, although not on paper. My husband laughs, but reminds me to chant the last vestiges of my age before we go to bed the night before my birthday, adding the final drops of liquid as the current year swirls down the drain.

Nostalgia swarms over me at the end of each school year. As regular as the phases of the moon, a lump grows in my throat on the last day of classes as I realize my daughter will not be in sixth grade, in middle school, an eight grader, a sophomore, ever again. And I remain unfinished, un-chewed and undigested when people leave me unexpectedly. To this day, I grieve my college friend who passed away suddenly, but also remember with angst the buddy who merely drove home at the end of a term without telling me, because she didn’t want to say goodbye.

As with all kinds of endings, I typically acknowledge the exodus of the seasons. So even though due to the distraction of yesterday’s first snow I’m a day late, here goes.

Goodbye autumn. Goodbye yellows and reds and the fusty crunch of leaves, acorns that pummel us in the backyard, the flocks of starlings crowding our trees in the mustard color of vintage afternoons. Goodbye to the pine cones that pile on our yard from the monster bottle brushes towering out front, to the hills of pumpkins and gourds mounding in nurseries by the side of the road. Goodbye to crisp mornings that warm in the afternoon, to drifting sea smoke fogging the pond when cold air hits warm water, to the sharp crack as teeth bite through the skin of a just-picked Macintosh.

I couldn’t cope if I didn’t know that these hard-swallowing goodbyes are chased by ensuing hellos—today, it’s the white crotched shawl tossed with abandon on the earth, the reflection of the sun that makes us tear up and long for sunglasses. Soon enough, it will be to the squeak of boots on icy earth, stars that pinwheel closer in frozen air, to the snap and dry burn of the fire after you throw off your gloves and reach your hands in close. Hello to days that are growing, of dawns that begin an infinitesimal moment sooner, a sun that hangs on a purple horizon a shade longer before plummeting us to blackness. Hello to the yell of hockey players, the slap of the puck, the smooth square of an ice rink shoveled out from frosted banks.

And, hello to edge of the year that fades out like a cinema ending but deep down holds tight to a kernel, the bud of a beginning, the nub of new life, wrapped like a breakable ornament gripped carefully in a snow covered palm.

 

The View From Here

Winkie the cat and I have retired to the front of the house where the 50- year-old cast iron baseboard radiators, well--radiate, unlike the helpless burners beside my cubby at the rear of our home. Fourteen years ago we completed a renovation back there that required tearing out the old heating system and “modernizing” things. Hmmm, as so often is the case, “new and improved” isn’t always so. Let’s just say the fleece scarf I am currently wearing around my neck would be enhanced by the addition of a hat and gloves, and yes, I am inside. Sorry to say, dubious Yankee frugality does not allow adjustment to the self-timer on the thermostat--yet anyway (we can discuss this again in February).

While marginally warmer, relocating the laptop to the front of the house affords a lovely view of the rime building up between our inside storm windows and the original leaky glass panes--here “new and improved” might mean so--but replacements are a dream that will have to be packaged beside a successful business writing career.


 

Ah, the holidays. A skim of ice crusts on the pond down the street and the grass crunches under our feet. The car coughs and puffs white frost, failing to warm up during short trips to drop off at school, to the grocery store, the pharmacy. While there is no snow yet, the thermometer is doing it’s best to convince us that Christmas is only a week away. We however, start tomorrow on my side of the family which means, if I can get this blog post written and complete the last class in my grant writing program, a massive baking project for this afternoon. Holiday preparation is good fun but guilt inducing, as I attempt but fail to neglect Middle Passages, an outlet that many months ago felt a tad self-indulgent, but which has morphed into an essential part of my day.

Here’s an early resolution though. I’m proud of what I have accomplished over the last year, and pleased with my efforts over the past week. That said, for the next few days, I’m going to absolve myself of anguish if I can’t get everything done.

And, I’m going to put on a hat and bake a lot of cookies. If anything, rubbing my hands together over a hot stove may help to keep me warm.

What do you do to cope with the challenge of holiday stress?