Beside the Big Pool

It’s been a while since I blogged. I’ve changed the tagline, because we’ve moved. Now, we live next to the Big Pool.

That’s what my sister called the pond when we were small.

Last fall, my husband and I sold our house in New Hampshire, and we moved in with my elderly father. He’d lost his wife to cancer, and, while he was able to look after himself, he was lonely and sad.

So, we left our home, gave away nearly everything we owned, and we moved into a little bedroom with one small closet.

And this…

The pond.

I spent my childhood on this pond. We didn’t live here, but my mom piled kids and dogs into the old station wagon, and we drove through the woods to a tiny cabin–one room with a wood stove and a sink with a hand pump. How we loved that pump, my sister and I vying for a turn to bring water up from the pond and let it run into the makeshift sink.

Then we swam. Pandy, the golden retriever, tried to rescue us by grabbing onto our hair and dragging us toward shore. Tripper, the Dalmatian, was willing to hunt frogs in the shallows, but swimming wasn’t her thing.

We played on a wooden raft, one with near-zero flotation, so it rested an inch beneath the water’s surface. It reared from the deep when we all stood in one spot, then crashed beneath the waves when we ran as one to the opposite edge.

My husband and I moved here last fall. October was glorious. I swam every day, well into November, when the water turned cold but still suckered me into one more dive. When finally the water froze solid, I shoveled a skating path around the pond’s perimeter. Two miles. And we skated, even though the ice was rough, and we fell quite a bit.

When the ice melted, and the storms came, and trees fell all around us, I paddled to the center of the pond and took pictures of the devastation. My favorite sugar maple uprooted itself and crashed into the water. No syrup this year. But I buried its root ball, and I water it every day, and I hope it might find a way to survive.

Spring came slowly, but it finally arrived. One day in late April, while I was away, taking my sister for cancer treatment, my dad called 911. When I got home, there was a police car at the top of the driveway, and I knew.

I parked behind it and ran.

EMTs were there, rolling my dad from the house to the ambulance. He spent three days in the ICU. Then, he left us. A month later, my sister followed.

So, every morning, I walk down to the Big Pool, and I dive in. With a GALUNK, the waters close over my head and fill my ears and rush past my skin. My sadness lifts, and the years wash away. I’m nine years old, holding my big sister’s hand, making the raft rear up like a dolphin, and forever vying for my turn at the pump.

Falling

I know this brief New England heatwave has been uncomfortable (understatement) for a lot of people.

But dayam, it turned the crisp September pond into a bathtub, and it gave a few lucky people a chance to relive the summer that wasn’t. My neighbor and I spent more time in the water in one week of fall than we did in July and August combined.

All good things end. I swam last night at midnight beneath a DreamWorks moon, just as the wind picked up and began sweeping the humidity away. I stood on the dock with arms outspread and let that wind flow across my skin, wishing I could bottle up the moment and trot it out in December. Or January. Or March.

I slept with the sound of acorns slamming onto our metal roof and pelting my dad’s new car.

This morning, I walked 3 miles rather than diving immediately into the pond. There were hardly any gnats bouncing off my lips, a sure sign of fall. It’s strange how so many leaves seem to be falling without first changing color.

The water will be a bit cooler every day now, until it gets to where I can’t make myself step off the dock. Until then, I’ll swim the magical waters and close my eyes and make memories.

Midnight Marauders

We here in the boonies know enough to put our bird feeders away for the summer, because bears will lay waste to them. But a few of us set them out by day and take them in at night, which works well as long as we actually follow the plan and bring them in at night.

 

Yesterday, I hung the feeder in the center of my fenced garden. Last night, I forgot to bring it in.

 

Around midnight, there was a crash. Then there was another crash. Of course I immediately remembered the bird feeder and flew out of bed, down the stairs, grabbed a flashlight, out the door in my birthday suit (plus muck boots, of course)… at which point I sorta crept past the cars in the driveway and shined my weak little beam onto the garden, where I could just make out the bird feeder swinging back and forth.

 

Then I saw three sets of eyes looking at me – one atop the shed, one atop the side of the pipe building that surrounds my garden, and one atop the bird feeder.

 

Okay. Not bear.

 

So I walked up to the garden, finally getting close enough to see the masked faces and disappointed eyes. Two of the raccoons left immediately. The third sat in the watermelon vines trying to look invisible.

 

I said, “I think you should leave now.”

 

He got up and walked slowly down the edge of the raised beds, climbed up the box wire, and was gone.

 

I took the feeder down and shoved it in the kitchen. It’ll go back out this morning, and, God willing, I’ll remember to take it in tonight.

My Brain—Where is my Brain?

My brain is going.

I was supposed to make rolls and cookies for my book club’s party and cookie swap yesterday at noon. I meant to do this on Sunday since I had a dentist appointment yesterday, but I completely forgot.

So, I head out the door at 7:30 and go to the dentist, thinking I’ll be a slacker and pick up rolls at the supermarket (sacrilege!) and maybe even buy cookies (Noooooo!).

Instead, I completely space the party until I’m home, thinking I have hours until my first massage, and yay! Maybe I’ll write. Sit down at the computer for about 12 seconds, long enough to read a message about the party…

SHIT!!!!!

It’s after 10. I don’t exactly live near any grocery stores. So I start making bread, fully aware that 90 minutes (allowing travel time to the party) ain’t gonna cut it. There’s no butter. Okay – walnut oil, then. I double the yeast, turn the sauna up to 120, shove in the bread, and pray it rises QUICKLY.

While the bread rises, I make beef and eggplant Parmesan, because a side dish is always welcome. My kitchen looks like a bomb went off – frying splatter (from the eggplant) and flour dust and mixing bowls with bread remnants and tomato sauce and eggs and millet and more eggs all over the place. Walnuts crunch under my feet. I manage to get it mostly cleaned while the rolls rise for the second time.

Cookies?

I have about a quarter cup of brown sugar, no butter, no shortening – just oils, flour, Halloween candy, one mini-box of raisins, a spoonful of chunky peanut butter … I could toss something together. But I decide not to. I don’t want to swap cookies. I’ll eat them. Eating cookies will mean having to buy new pants before Christmas.

I don’t have a good baking dish for rolls, so I pile them up in a deep soufflé dish monkey-bread style, first rolling them in walnut oil and brown sugar and walnuts and wishing I had butter. This, of course, means that they take forever to bake. I keep stabbing them with a skewer and yelling, “BAKE, damn you!” They ignore me for a long time.

In the end, I was 14 minutes late to the party. The rolls were awesome. 🙂

Roof Raking

 

This winter started out easy with warm temperatures and almost no snow. Then, things changed. Roofs in the area started collapsing beneath the weight of the snow, so I figured I’d best get out there and do some preventive shoveling.

Here we are (above) with the roof partially cleared. I shoveled it from a ladder. Shoveling is easy. Dragging the ladder through nearly 4′ of snow is not easy.

Today, we cleaned the rest of the roof, and here’s what I learned.

1. When your feet go out from under you, it is possible to hang on by your fingernails, even through gloves.
2. If it’s possible to reach the peak, that’s a good place to start.
3. If it’s not possible to reach the peak on foot, try the breast stroke.
4. The snow at the peak is deeper than it looks.
5. The snow at the peak is shaped like a wave, complete with arch and hollow. I can pretend to shoot the curl. Then I can make an awesome fort. And then I can knock the fort down on my head.
6. I should put my hood up before knocking down the fort.
7. I should have brought my camera.
8. If I start high and work down, there’s a snow bank to prevent my fall.
9. If I’ve already shoveled the lower roof, there is nothing to prevent my fall.
10. Dangling from a safety harness is only fun for the first couple minutes.
11. It’s a good thing I can still climb a rope.
12. I’m Batman.
13. I gotta unclip the harness sometime.
14. Once the harness is unclipped, I can ride my shovel down the roof like a sled.
15. Wheeeeee!
16. Thank goodness for soft landings.

Where’d my house go?

Is it Ground Hog Day?

Normally we in New Hampshire can say, “If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute.” But it seems we’ve plunged into a lengthy cold spell, and every day is pretty much like the one before. It’s either snowing or about to snow, and temperatures struggle to creep into the teens by day, not quite topping 0 at night.

We plow and shovel and sand and snowblow. We go to bed with our driveways scraped clean, our walkways wide and snow-free, and our oil fills easily accessible to our intrepid delivery folks. And then we wake the next morning and start all over again.

This is Ground Hog Day. All we need is Bill Murray.

I like snow. 😀 I especially like this light, fluffy snow that’s easily moved and doesn’t weigh down the trees and isn’t likely to cause power outages. I like wading (or sometimes swimming) through powder. I like the bite of cold on my cheeks and the warmth of good snow pants over insulated jeans over fleece liners over silk long johns. I like snowmobile boots with toe warmers stuffed inside wool socks.

And I like feeding the birds. We have blue jays alongside red bellied woodpeckers alongside cardinals and titmice and goldfinches and red polls and chickadees and downies and juncos, all happily stuffing their beaks, close enough that I can see the feather vanes and almost touch them. This never happens in the summer. The birds stay largely out of sight unless you have lots of time and patience and high-powered binoculars.

This is partly because hey – they have plenty to eat in the summer. It’s also because winter is the only time we can safely feed the birds. If we’re fool enough to leave our feeders out past tax day, the bears will come to call. They might even break a window in their eagerness to take down a full feeder, and worse, they might injure themselves.

But in the dead of winter, bears hibernate, and we get to see the birds. This year, thanks to ongoing construction, I’m using my old refrigerator as a feeder.

The last storm was especially fun. Jim and I decided to wait until the snow ended before we plowed. We took an entire day to lounge around and be lazy, watching snow pile up while we had ourselves a movie marathon. And what happened?

Neighbors showed up to plow us out, assuming that we must be sick, or our tractor must be broken, or maybe we were dead and somebody ought to get the bodies hauled away before we started to smell bad.

Because that’s what it’s like here in New Hampshire. We look after each other. We’re family. And we’re stronger united than we are alone.

Adventures in Home Repair, Part 1

It started in July.

Normally, I’m a massage therapist by day and a writer by night. But for the last several months, I’ve been a carpenter’s assistant by day, massage therapist nights and weekends, and a writer hardly at all.

It’s time to rectify this situation, so everyone’s invited to follow me through this adventure in home repair. It’s fun! Well, it’s fun for me, anyway, but we all know I’m kinda weird.

The house hadn’t been painted in a while, so there was peeling and flaking, and there were wasp nests and hornet nests. We didn’t own an extension ladder, and the power washer was leaking. So, after a bit of discussion, Jim and I decided that we must buy ourselves a good ladder and a decent power washer, and I’d get off my butt and paint the house in my copious free time.

Only problem—I’m scared shitless of hornets, and I’m deathly afraid of heights.

I was willing to suck it up, though, face my fears, risk being attacked by hornets and hurling myself backwards off the ladder. Besides, I could start low and work my way up, right?

It wasn’t long before most of the house looked like this. Low parts painted, high parts, not so much. I loved the color, and I was feeling pretty darn pleased with myself. Life was good.

Then my trusty power washer blew through the corner of the house.

Seems there’s been a problem with the downspout, and, well, the house suffered a bit of rot. Okay—quite a bit of rot. This is the corner of the main house where it meets the sun room addition.

Isn’t the corner supposed to hold the house up?

Fortunately, I know a guy who can fix just about anything. He wasn’t available until fall but, by Mid-September, he introduced me to the fine art of demolition. 😀

I’ll let you in on a secret. I like tearing things apart. No one was as surprised to find this out as I was.

Seems the sill on that sun room had also rotted. Oh joy! More demolition!

We jacked that puppy up and replaced it, easy peasy. Since we couldn’t very well assume the rest of the house was okay, we decided to strip all the siding and inspect the plywood and the frame and make sure we had a nice, sound structure. Like any good repair project, this one snowballed. The genius who installed the storm windows added trim, but failed to extend the flashing over the trim. The result was leaking windows and rot beneath them. So . . . in addition to repairing the frame, we decided to replace the windows.

Are we having fun yet?

And so began our adventures in home repair. It’s mid-December now, and we’re still at it. All will be well. Eventually. The house is already stronger than it was when it was first built, almost certainly by a well-meaning but none-too-bright uncle with no clue and too much beer.

Stay tuned. 🙂

 

Winning Ticket!

I hear Jim cheering from the sun room. Then he says, “Remember when I had that winning ticket earlier this week?”

I don’t, but I say, “Yes!” anyway.

“I won $2, so I kept $1 and used the other for a new ticket. And I just won another $2!”

“Yay!” (Wives should be supportive.)

“And if I keep this up, I can make $2 per week!”

“Awesome,” I tell him. “Just like being an author.”

He’s silent for maybe 3 seconds. But now laughter has him darn near collapsed on the floor. I think I should go and get his inhaler.

Gracie Won!

Yesterday was one of those days—the sort of day in which I realize the book I’m working on will never be everything I once hoped it would be. It was the sort of day when sometimes I wonder if my writing time might be better spent cleaning the bedrooms, or painting the living room, or weeding and mulching the gardens before winter.

I wasn’t thinking of giving up writing—I don’t think that’s possible. But I thought it might be a good idea to dial it back a bit, think of it as a hobby rather than as a future career. Maybe I should back off and allow more time for all the things I’ve been ignoring.

And then, this happened.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Saving Gracie won the 2014 Mystery/Thriller Award from The Kindle Book Review!

The timing of this contest win couldn’t have been more perfect. It delivered a much-needed boost and a swift kick, just when I needed it most. So I’ll be leaving those bedrooms dirty and the gardens filled with weeds, and I’ll get back to work on my new book, The Girl with Green Hair, and it will be the best darn thing I’ve ever written.

So there. 😀

Thank you, thank you, thank you to The Kindle Book Review and Digital Book Today!

Danger! Or Not.

Earlier today, I walk out into the yard, and I hear this hissing sound. Immediately, my mind jumps back to the day the power line rubbed itself raw on the branch of a cherry tree, and there was arcing and smoldering and lots of hissing and crackling and DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!

We had the Fire Chief and the power company and neighbors with marshmallows and graham crackers and chocolate bars. Not a whole lot happens here in Mason, and this is about as good as it gets. I probably ought to get hot dogs out of the freezer, but first I have to confirm that we do, in fact, have a repeat of the burning tree.

So, here I am, in a low stance (like that’s gonna save me), creeping toward the hissing sound, trying to get a visual on what’s causing it, sure I’ll be fried by electricity any. moment. now. And I realize the sound is coming from the big lilac bush.

The lilac bush?

So I creep closer and closer, straining my eyes, ready to run, until I see – what the heck? – water running down the leaves from about halfway up the bush, dripping to the ground. I look above the bush, fully expecting to see Joe Btfsplk’s perpetual rain cloud. But the sun’s out.

For a moment, I wonder if the water line to the barn could have blown, but no – that’s nowhere near the lilac bush.

That’s when the obvious dawns. Someone who shall remain nameless (Jim) left the water on when he cleaned the gutters yesterday. The hose, buried in the un-mown lawn, finally sprung a leak, and the leak is right up against the trunk of the lilac, so I can’t see the water going up – just coming down.

The truly amazing part of this – the well did not run dry. Life is good.