MARY T. WAGNER

"Bairns..." is now in paperback!!

2/16/2025

I'm happy to announce that my cheeky little guide to understanding British detective-speak on TV is NOW IN PAPERBACK!! Perfect for gift-giving to your favorite Britbox-addicted Anglophile friends, perfect for keeping on your bedside or living room side table for watching your favorite British detectives and quickly navigating such phrases as "sling your hook," "on the lash," and "having a barney" without having to pause the action for long! And dare I say, perfect for American fans of Shetland, Vera, Endeavor, Dalgliesh, Hinterland, and all the classics!

It's been a journey from the first idea in my head (2022) to publishing this an an e-book (2023) and finally to getting it out there in three dimensions (2024). The BBC played a big part, although a very unexpected part. When they called out of the blue to set up a radio and TV interview last November, I was thrilled! But it wasn't until someone commented on social media that "if only this was in paperback, I'd buy it!" that the eureka moment hit and the fuse was lit. It contains 280 words and phrases that I laboriously and meticulously assembled from my recliner, watching all of my favorite series from start to finish to find and research the things I didn't understand, just so you wouldn't have to!

The book is available on Amazon, of course, in both e-book and paperback form. But you can also ask your local bookstore to order it for you, and BUY LOCAL! Now get a wiggle on and quit faffing about, it's time to see what you've been missing!

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From Sheboygan to Scotland!!

11/21/2024

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It is a rare Sunday morning that finds me getting good news while still in bed and in my pajamas. But that's how things played out recently when I did my usual morning run-through of checking the weather, the headlines, and email, and discovered an invitation from Huw Williams, a reporter for BBC Radio Shetland in Scotland, to do a radio interview about my little e-book, "Of Bairns and Wheelie Bins." The book, which I published last year, is a cheeky guide for Americans to help with understanding what our favorite British detectives are saying on the telly.

Serendipity is such a wonderful thing! I'd just recently posted something about the book on social media and hashtagged the British series "Shetland," which is one of my very favorites. Williams, alert that a new season of Shetland had just started to air in Great Britain, was idly trawling through Twitter (yes, I still call it that) for mentions of the series and found mine. Would I like to chat about my book and the series? He didn't have to ask twice. Shetland is indeed one of my British detective series addictions, in no small part for the magnificent setting for all the human intrigue, a vast landscape of desolate, unforgiving beauty surrounded by surging waves in a thousand shades of blue and white.

And so I made my international media debut on Good Evening Shetland from my kitchen the next morning, a lively and humorous chat with Huw that ranged from the conundrum we Yanks have in deciphering both the British brogues and the lingo, to the fact that many female fans of the series would not kick Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez' character "out of bed for eating crackers." HERE'S A LINK TO THE RADIO INTERVIEW!!

When the radio interview was finished, it was time to re-enter reality and resume a day of errands and art class. But the wonderment wasn't quite over! Just two days later, I was sitting in my drawing class again when the professor asked if I'd yet received an email telling me how to access the radio interview and share it with the class. Well, I hadn't as yet, and even though it was quite bad form, I checked my phone and discovered yet another invite, this time from the BBC Scotland television news show "The Nine," to do a television interview just TWO AND A HALF HOURS LATER. Well, of course!! I blasted out of the classroom, tidied up the kitchen, threw on some makeup and settled expectantly into my Zoom chair.

I "clocked on" to the fact that this interview would be live about 30 seconds before I was on air, but that was the least of my worries! I've been through many a Zoom meeting both for business and for catching up with old friends ever since Covid changed the way we do things, and my general expectation is that I'll be able to see the person I'm talking to. That was not the case this time! For some reason, I could hear my interviewer--who I learned after the fact was the gracious and lovely journalist Laura Maciver--but all I could see for our entire conversation was a black screen containing a tiny shot of myself. However, as you can see by the screen shot above, technology worked its magic across The Pond, and we clearly ended up with a televised chat. HERE'S A LINK TO THE TELEVISION INTERVIEW!!

What a wild and enjoyable ride that was over the course of just three days! One thing I didn't expect to come of it is that I am finally going to publish a paperback version of my "Bairns and Wheelie Bins" e-book just in time for Christmas. It will be "stocking stuffer" sized, so ... stay tuned!!

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Tiger Beat

4/12/2024

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One from the archives...

I’ve introduced myself—and been introduced—in many different ways. I’ve been described as “the wife,” “the mother,” “the prosecutor,” “the writer,” “the utility person,” “the girlfriend,” “the mother of the bride,” and "the Hot Dog Fairy."

But this time, I was at the bedside of one of my children at an enormous university hospital, and when the specialist walked in, trailing a pair of medical students behind, I stuck my hand out in greeting, and announced my status so there would be no mistake.

“Hi, I’m Mary. I’m the mother tiger.”

I don’t know why it took me so long. It’s not like with four kids I’ve had any shortage of opportunities. I’ve sat at bedsides waiting for test results to come back, X-rays to be analyzed, abdomens to be palpated, surgery to be finished. The title comes with the territory. I’d just finally made it official.

There is something so primal, and visceral, and imperative about sitting guard at your child’s bedside when something has gone wrong. All the medical professionals and state-of-the-art monitors are no substitute for parking yourself next to your cub to hold off the dangers lurking beyond in the dark forest. Danger can come from the things we can see and sometimes from the things we can’t—microbes and antibodies and viruses and environmental toxins and the dealer pushing baggies of meth and crack in the shadows around the corner.

When we become parents, we are captives and keepers all in one. I remember standing beside the crib of this child as he slept, only a few days old. In the silent room, with the lights dimmed, I was hit by a tidal wave of emotion. “I adore you,” I thought. “I worship you. I would die to protect you.” That was twenty-five years ago. He’s married now. I still feel the same way.

Years ago I read an essay by Michael Kelly, the late Washington Post columnist who was killed in Iraq in 2003, and it has always stayed with me. Long before his death, he’d written a light-hearted yet poignant piece about parenting and what he called “the look,” that silly combination of worship and rapture that we wear when we gaze at our kids when they’re not looking, regardless of their age or even their personal grooming habits.

It captured, more eloquently that I ever could, that universal surge of pride and protection and tenderness that comes with bringing the next generation into the world. The only thing he left out was that feral “mother tiger” thing. The certainty that anything that threatens your cub has to make it across a vast and vigilant expanse of claws and teeth first.

It came into play a couple of times during this hospital stretch, and turned out to be good for a laugh or two … and, I think, some actual results.

Before the specialist came in for the consult, we had been handed off to a “hospitalist” to oversee the case during the stay at the hospital. Now this doctor may have done very well in medical school … but she still came up short on people skills. She wasn’t very good with tigers either. She was brusque, unsmiling, not very familiar with our situation, and dismissive of my questions and concerns to the point of rudeness.

“Hmmm,” this doctor sneered as she shot down one point of mine after another. “And you have no medical training …” What could I say? True… and yet I was still vigorously challenging some fundamental assumptions. So sue me.

The hospitalist finally left the room, still not cracking a smile. Not only had we balked at staying in this hospital for several more days of testing, we didn’t seem to take her medical opinion at face value either. My son and collectively exhaled in relief. “Geez, what a BITCH” we both said. I explained what had just happened.

“Honey, what you just saw was “the clash of the middle-aged Alpha females.
”
I’d like to report that I’d engaged in this epic test of wills while stylishly decked out in spike heels and a suit. But in fact I’d slept in my sweats on a hospital sofa the night before, and I had to beg a nurse for a spare toothbrush. I felt, and looked, like road kill. But I still had claws.

Vindication came a couple of hours later when the specialist finally came in and sorted things out. Jovial, quick-witted, and experienced, he deftly poked and prodded, quickly figured out the medical mystery that had brought us to the emergency room in the first place, and recommended a course of treatment I’d already suggested—and had rejected—by Dr. Grumpy.
“So,” he asked brightly as he gathered his notes and medical students. “Does this make the mother tiger happy?”

“PurrRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR….” I replied.

My cub eventually returned to his place in the forest, which was his college dorm. I went back to my usual routine of trying to do too many things at once. But I still smile when I think of the way things played out.

If there’s any moral at all to this story, it’s straight up and pretty simple.

When the chips are down…put your money on the tiger.

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The Rescue

12/31/2023

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LOVE WINS!!! I am thrilled and honored to announce that this reflection on adopting my "shelter cat," Thomas, at the end of year full of grief, has won a FIRST PLACE AWARD in the National Federation of Press Women's annual communications contest!

I hope that you enjoy reading this...and that it might motivate you some day to offer your home to an animal in need of rescue and shelter. Because really, so often, the "rescue" goes both ways. And to celebrate this remarkable kitty and companion, I'm going to add on a gallery of photos at the end of the essay, to share the joy!

The road to the local animal shelter was darkly paved with trauma and grief.

It was the middle of December, just a year ago, and I was sitting in a well of depression the depth of which I had not known in decades. My werewolf-channeling dog Lucky—one in a life-long string of joyful and wonderful companions—had been felled by cancer earlier in the year, a three-month journey of shock, surgery, recovery, hope, and then the crushing finality of when “borrowed time” finally expired. My mother—ninety-nine and bedridden in a nursing home and the essence of “difficult” on her best days—had come through bouts of Covid and pneumonia with diminishing returns, and was at last in her death spiral. And my younger daughter and I had just put her elderly cat to sleep after discovering that her kidneys, long failing, had finally quit. Mookah, a dainty tabby with green eyes, had lived with me for the past several years, and given the terrible realities of the previous year, had been a constant and a comfort in uncertain times.

I spent the next couple of days in a zombie-like haze as I visited the nursing home and wept and waited for yet another loss to arrive. And then I realized that I was alone in my home literally for the first time in 47 years, and a tsunami of darkness suddenly hit me broadside and left me physically nauseous and weak in the knees. Did the time of year have something to do with it? Of course. The days leading up to the winter solstice and the holidays are always the shortest and most fraught with expectations and, sometimes, disappointments. Did all of the wrenching traumas in the preceding months weigh in? Of course they did. It had been an exhausting, depleting year of watching and waiting and dreading and bracing.

But until that dark moment of realization, I had experienced everything good and bad and even truly awful without being utterly alone. Over the years, there had been a husband, children, boyfriend, dogs, cats, horses, a rabbit, mice, tadpoles, even a chameleon for a brief spell. Whether two-legged or four-legged, with feet, paws, or hooves, there had always been others within reach for sharing. Sharing a laugh, sharing a touch, sharing a glance, sharing the warmth of a cozy fire or the radiance of a big open sky above.

And so the sudden emptiness and stillness echoing around me felt like a bottomless chasm. I asked my older daughter to spend the night to keep me company after a splendid outing to see "The Nutcracker" ballet. And when I woke the next morning, I canceled my plan to meet my younger son at the nursing home to visit my mother as she continued her journey into the next life, and instead started scrolling through the cat pages on the website of the local Humane Society.

Common sense would dictate more of a waiting period between losing a pet and gaining another one, just as the newly divorced are advised to not jump headlong into another relationship as soon as the ink is dry on the paperwork.

But I needed rescuing, that much I was sure of, and I knew that surely there was a cat nearby who needed rescuing as well.

A black and white “tuxedo” cat named Bootsie caught my eye, and seemed perfect. She was a little overweight (like me), and a bit older (like me), and Bootsie was the name of the dog my mother brought home with her from Germany after her stint working in the State Department in the aftermath of World War II. That Bootsie, gentle and soft to the touch, was the first dog I had known in my young life. It seemed fated.

So my daughter (who, unlike her younger sister, is not a cat person but also loves her mother dearly) and I made our way to the local shelter, introduced ourselves, and got ready to meet Bootsie in a visiting room. My daughter took the chair, while I sat on the floor to make the introduction less stressful.

As advertised, Bootsie was just lovely. Friendly, eager for affection, a little portly, and quite cuddly. For all of the earlier reasons, she would have been a perfect fit. But as the aide entered the room to retrieve her, I said, “you know, as long as I’m here I feel like I should at least meet another cat or two, just to say that I did.” I knew I wouldn’t be emotionally equipped to walk into two rooms full of cats in cages and pick one or two from that mass of sad and eager faces, so I asked her to pick for me and to bring back someone who would be mellow and a lap-sitter.

She took her time figuring out who to introduce next, but eventually, she came in with a another tuxedo cat, a large grey and white fellow the staff had named Turkey. He was a muscular chap, with a swagger to his walk and a quirky, tiny moustache that looked as though a tiny white butterfly had landed upside down under his nose. Turkey came without a back story, having been dropped off at the shelter as a stray around Thanksgiving (good name, hey?). He seemed young and strong, with a marvelously healthy coat as dense as penguin feathers, but with a respiratory infection that had him leaking green gunk from his eyes and his nose. He walked over to make my acquaintance, explored the contours of my ample lap, and then busied himself sniffing around the edges of the room. Shortly before the aide returned, though, he gravitated back to my lap, laid his head on my chest, looked up at me, and reached both paws toward my shoulders.

My daughter (the not-a-cat-person, remember?) grasped the significance of the moment. “Mom,” she said, “that cat just hugged you. I’m impressed!” And so was I. Suddenly Bootsie’s future with me did not seem quite as secure.

A third cat was proffered, a tiny coal black beauty that seemed as if she’d be right at home in a Fifth Avenue penthouse, dining on caviar and sporting a Tiffany diamond collar while looking over Central Park from her rarified aerie. She found me uninteresting in the extreme. I pushed all earlier thoughts of "fate" aside and decided to go with my heart rather than my head. I put in an application for Turkey, being utterly unable to resist that endearing hug.

It would be another week and a half before I could pick up my new companion, since he first needed to finish a course of antibiotics for the respiratory infection, and then get neutered. In the meantime, I continued with the seasonal Christmas duties that come with having children, grandchildren and good friends; visited my dying mother as she continued her downward slide; and made ready for a new arrival. With a plan in place and hope on the horizon, I regained my former equilibrium…or as much of it as could be reasonably expected with a parent dying in the wings during the darkest days of winter.

Thomas (I renamed him the moment I brought him home) finally moved in on December 28 and found my lap a safe resting place almost instantly. My old recliner became a comfortable refuge for us both. My mother passed just two days later. Two weeks of frenzied funeral preparation and family visits followed, after which I could finally turn to my new pet and properly start our new chapter of companionship.

The transition has not always been easy over the past year, and it certainly hasn’t been bloodless! Without a proper history from an earlier owner, no one knows how much time Thomas spent fending for himself on the street before he was brought to the shelter or what experiences and frights he might have endured. For months, his reflexes led to his immediate jump from sound sleep to “I must kill something” mode, with all claws and teeth instantly engaged, regardless of whether he had been smooshed face-first into the crook of my arm like it was a hiding place. If that sleep happened to be taking place in my lap, well… I went through a lot of bandages and first aid cream before I started to pick up on the warning signs of a twitching tail or the subtle flick of an ear. I swear, there are literal Panthers and Tigers and other wildcats out there with Instagram and TikTok accounts that I would feel safer casually approaching with less trepidation than Thomas on occasion.

And yet… with the passage of a year, there are signs of progress and relaxation for us both. Often, now, after being deep in slumber, stretched comfortably across my lap, Thomas will awaken and simply open his eyes without the immediate need to attack something. There are times he will even shut his eyes again and go back to sleep, trustingly proffering his soft, furry belly for some scritching. He decided early on that if I’m going to be in my bed, he’ll be there as well, sometimes curled up at the foot, at other times nestled snugly into the small of my back or behind my knees. If I leave the main part of the house to retreat to my little office space, he will follow to keep an eye on me like a dog guarding his flock.

Just who is more the “rescuer” here in our little family equation is open to interpretation. I’m pretty sure that anyone who has ever “rescued” an animal from a shelter or from the street knows that love and trust and reassurance flow both ways, and you can’t possibly put a price tag or a measurement on that. There are reasons going back to the dawn of time that we have seen and valued animals as our companions and protectors on a spiritual plane.

As for me, I don’t parse things much further than to simply feel a boundless gratitude that a stray kitty seized his moment to reach out with a hug, and I was open to taking the bait. Because from where I sit—in a well-worn recliner with Thomas spilling over the sides, whimpering softly as he sleeps—I’d say we’ve both been rescued, and that’s as marvelous as it gets.

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Test your British to American detective skills!

3/31/2023

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Now that I've written "Of Bairns and Wheelie Bins: An American guide to what those British detectives are saying on the telly," I find myself watching episodes of some British mystery that I've newly discovered with occasional bursts of joy, thinking "I know what that means!!" It definitely helps to move the plot along when I don't have to scratch my head and wonder what just went on because I didn't know some of the lingo.

So play along with me, and test your "British to American" interpretive skills! Answers at the bottom, in tiny type...

1. Barney a) a big and annoying purple dinosaur b) a now defunct New York City luxury department store c) a heated argument d) Andy Griffith's sidekick in Mayberry

2. Chivvy a) a salad green b) a street game of cards c) a scrum of rugby players d) to prod someone to do something they don't want to

3. Grass a) marijuana b) the green stuff in a lawn c) a picnic d) to snitch

4. Kip a) a pickled herring b) the stuff you bring to the gym c) a children's game d) sleep

5. Shopped a) went bargain hunting b) sold at a rummage sale c) discarded d) informed on to the police

6. Clobber a) something Moe, Larry and Curly did a lot of in the Three Stooges b) a clotted cream that goes well with strawberry tarts c) an internet dating profile d) a collection of personal stuff

7. Twigged a) went bird watching b) a muscle cramp c) had a flash of understanding d) stood up a date

8. Skinful a) a leather bota bag b) a wine bottle c) a blistering argument d) enough alcohol to get you drunk

9. Caravan a) a truck convoy b) to travel together while hiking c) a gypsy wagon d) an RV

10. Grafter a) a grifter b) someone who works very hard c) a tree surgeon d) a surgeon that does heart transplants

11. Bespoke a) engaged to be married b) the last round in a debate c) custom tailored d) offer accepted on a house

Answers: 1.C; 2.D; 3.D; 4.D; 5.D; 6.D; 7.C; 8.D; 9.D; 10.B, 11.C

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Of Bairns and Wheelie Bins and unlikely inspiration

3/24/2023

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Somehow, the thought of publishing a "British-to-American" guide to understanding the lingo of my favorite British detective shows was not even the last thing on my mind over the past several years. It simply wasn't there at all!

As many writers know, trauma and stress and anxiety can get in the way of the creative spirit, and since early 2018, I'd had a universe full of it. That's when my elderly mother--who had not only been wheelchair bound for years but also never met a fact she couldn't ignore or a situation she couldn't instinctively make more difficult--broke her hip, triggering several years of caretaking, emergency response, crisis management, moving households, hospital visits, bizarre doctor consultations, and, to be quite frank, some periods of deep depression.

There were literally times in the past couple of years, before my mother finally passed at the end of 2022 at the age of 99, where I despaired of ever being able to write again, to put words together in joyous fashion, to feel the playfulness inherent in setting up phrases and sentences to build scenes and characters.

Of course, if I HAD been able to crawl out of my defensive funk, there was quite a list of projects to get back to: a fourth Finnigan the Circus Cat chapter book; two YA novels (one half-finished, the other still just an idea waiting for a starting sentence); a detective novel I'd started years ago and then been interrupted by the Finnigan series.

But while raking leaves last fall, this particular idea sprang to life. In the fading light of a chilly October afternoon, as I raked and gathered and grimly pondered the likelihood that I would never be able to generate words again, my mind kept returning to an episode of "Vera," that marvelously cantankerous and middle-aged and utterly brilliant fictional detective created by Ann Cleeves. Another character had described finding some evidence in a "wheelie bin," and the phrase had kept me laughing for days. The words, which referred to what I'd call a "garbage can" or "recycle bin" was so utterly CHARMING, as though winged fairies would escort me to the curb as I took out the trash.

And so as I raked, I started to laugh. And that spurt of laughter, combined with the fact I'd already been assembling a list of like phrases to share with friends and family who were similarly devoted to British mysteries, gave birth to this quirky project, Who was I to say "no" to an unexpected spark of inspiration? And the fact that I could channel my "Vera" Halloween costume--replete with my own bucket hat and a 30-year-old canvas barn jacket and a dreadfully mismatched thrift store scarf--for a cover photo was simply icing on the cake.

With this project now pushed out of the birth canal and "live" on Amazon as an e-book (a "short," really), I suppose I should start looking over that list of older, unfinished writing projects and pick one up where I'd left off.

But first a grateful toast to the universe, and to the random nature of inspiration, for throwing me a lifeline and putting me back in the saddle!

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Hunter's Moon

12/31/2021

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This essay won FIRST PLACE for Creative Non-Fiction in the 2022 Royal Palm Literary Awards (Florida Writers Association)!!

It was the night of the Hunter’s Moon, and the moon didn’t show up. For that matter, I nearly didn’t show up either, although the tide that eventually pulled me to the shore was emotional, rather than gravitational. More variable, though no less powerful, I think. In the end, hope won out.

Watching the full moon rise on the western shore of Lake Michigan had been a ritual, a touchstone, for my younger daughter and I during the first year and a half of the pandemic. She had moved in with me shortly after the world started shutting down in a panic of uncertainty in early 2020, bringing her job and a knowledge of how to use Zoom with her to navigate the demands of the new digital workplace from a bedroom closet.

My house—a small duplex, really—proved a tight squeeze for the two of us and my large dog, but the nearby lakeshore and some splendid hiking trails vastly expanded our living space during these stressful and anxious times. Both of us took nature breaks at least twice a day, weather permitting, finding peace and refuge amidst towering firs and birches, crashing waves, and meandering forest walks. She got fully into the water nearly every day, whereas I considered myself daring for getting my toes wet at the shoreline.

“Hey, it’s going to be a full moon tonight!” one of us would invariably say. “Shall we?”

And then the countdown would begin, as we kept an eye on the clock to give ourselves the requisite lead time of fifteen minutes to drive to the shore. In heat and cold, snow and ice and shifting sand, we found ourselves standing at the water line, or sitting on a favorite bench, trying to guess exactly where on the horizon the moon would begin to cast its golden glow. As the setting sun turned the skies pink and red behind us, we would sit and talk about nothing, or everything, or just how cosmically lucky we were to be able to be drenched in such awe-inspiring beauty that surrounded us and was within such easy reach.

And then, finally, there it was, a textured golden orb rising from the waves as night fell deeper, casting a path of silver on the darkening waves as it rose higher and higher into the night. They were magical moments to share with a daughter, moments of shared awe, and appreciation, and renewal, and magic of sorts.

But all good things must come to an end so that other good things may happen, and eventually my daughter found a living space much closer to some of her essentials, and moved out. I was happy for her, of course, even as I shed occasional tears as I helped her load up her car before leaving. But the approach of that first full moon after she left was packing a heck of an emotional wallop.

The day arrived, and I spent it in a funk, both because I had lost my moonrise-watching companion, and because the weather forecast had clouds and rain predicted throughout the afternoon and evening. I pouted, and dithered, and hesitated, and stalled. And then, closing in on that fifteen minute window, I caught a glimpse of a little blue sky above among the rain clouds, and grabbed the car keys, grudgingly muttering “why the hell not?” It is a mantra which has served me well over the years even though it lacked its usual devil may care cachet this time.

I parked the car and made my way down the cordwalk from the lot to the beach. The rain had literally stopped just a few minutes before, with the result that both the parking lot and the entire shoreline as far as I could see were entirely empty. The sand, damp and pocked with raindrops, showed no footsteps other than mine.

At first I simply sat on the usual bench in the sand, reflecting on the fact that I was here alone…not just on the beach at this moment but embarking on this next phase of my life as well. It was unsettling, as most new things are, and I took in the expanses around me, somberly, quietly. But sitting still is not my favorite thing to do, and eventually I pushed off from the bench, leaving my shoes and blanket behind.

The lake level had been dropping in recent months, and there were marvelous expanses of flat, wet sand and pools close to the water line as the shallow waves pushed across them and retreated. I rolled up my pants legs and walked in up to my knees, marveling at how warm both the water and the wind felt in mid-October.

On the flats, the surging sheets of water made mirrors that reflected the evening clouds. Channels cut crosswise by tiny streams of water flowing downstream resembled the cross cuts of Irish crystal in the fading light. I was enveloped by the sounds of water and wind and felt part of a much larger, seamless fabric whose patterns kept changing.

The time for the Hunter’s Moon to rise came and went as the earlier rain clouds marched eastward and covered the horizon, while swaths of cloudy skies converged on both ends of the shore. There would be no moonrise for me to celebrate…or to mourn…this time around.

But as I picked my way back across the sand in the fading light and gathered up my things, I was happy that I had gone out looking for the moon by myself. The astonishing beauty that I had found there in its absence was still somehow reassuring to me that this new chapter I was beginning to navigate would still have beauty, and surprises, and renewal, and grace. And as long as the world keeps turning, I know that there will be more full moons to remind me of my blessings.

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Book Report

12/11/2021

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For my entire life, my relationship with books has consisted of reading them and, much later, writing them.

But earlier this year, I've stepped temporarily into a different dimension! I took part in a book making class taught by Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design professor Shawn Simmons at the John Michael Kohler Arts Museum in Sheboygan as part of its "Art Links" programming that aims to keep the over-55 crowd creatively engaged and challenged.

I'm still working on finishing my class project, but want to show off my two "book" covers here. The front is the image on the right, the back is the image on the left. I am so passionately appreciative of the natural world around me, I wanted to really put that on the page. And so I scored some intriguing hand-made paper for the background as a starting point and then began to build. The birch tree on the front is made from scraps of actual birch bark that I've come across while hiking, while the tree on the back is fashioned of paper from a downed wasp nest. Then I cannibalized old issues of nature magazines I found at a thrift store for the birds and animals, and couldn't resist adding an Audubon print of a Barn Owl with his squirrel quarry that I found on a note card. Everything that I love about walking in the woods--the mystery, the birds, the greenery, the coolness of the shade--found its way into these two covers.

While I will still "dress up" the inside covers in the same vein, since I draw so much inspiration from my walks in the woods and my time at the shoreline, the interior pages will largely be blank. And there's a reason for that.

I have found, in the past several decades, once I started writing "from the heart," that a blank page is an invitation. To what? Well, that's the interesting, and joyful, and sometimes scary part. Sometimes these are happy threads of words and feelings and depths and transitions and closure. And other times, well whoa, it can be like lifting the lid to Pandora's box. Childhood traumas, feelings of abandonment, life long fears that go so deep I can't see the bottom, truths that I have been reflexively denying or ignoring to get from one day to the next. So often, as I have put physical pen to physical paper, I will stop and look back, stunned, at the sentences and thoughts I have just set loose from where they whirled like scraps in the wind inside my mind, and think "oh, so that's what I was thinking." And then, like the contents of Pandora's Box, there is no recapturing them and hiding them away and out of sight.

So I have REALLY enjoyed this "book making" project on so many surprising levels. Starting out, I had no idea how much deep thinking this would provoke, or how much artistic meandering and problem solving it would cause my mind to churn through. Because the thing about adventures both large and small is...you never know where they will take you!

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Cordless and Dangerous

7/19/2021

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I had to replace a window blind at my house today, and one of the first things I did was to fetch my cordless drill and charge it up. It doesn't get much use and spends most of its time at the bottom of a closet. But as I opened up the case, I remembered that it was the VERY FIRST power tool I'd bought after my divorce. And of course, I wrote about it! While this may be "from the archives of 2006," that flush of empowerment still holds true today. Enjoy!

The paddock fence was going to have to be fixed, and fixed that day.

It was eleven months after the divorce, in which I got the house, the animals, the big sky, and the upkeep on fifteen bucolic acres of Wisconsin countryside. Eleven months after he took all the power tools and the manly knowledge of how to use them. Now there was a broken board in the wooden fence leaving a space big enough for Babe, my geriatric mare, to sneak through and eat herself to death or disaster in a pasture full of lush green grass. She just couldn’t handle eating around the clock at her age. And the duct tape I’d patched things together with just the week before had proved an impermanent solution. The entire board had finally ripped loose from the end post, screws broken off, wood split, little grey shreds of duct tape hanging consumptively from the soft, splintered pine on the ground.

There was an urgency, real and immediate, to the job. I knew in my gut that if I didn’t do this thing very soon, my horse would end up dead. I had been taking care of her for most of her life, and she was my last connection to becoming a horse owner at the age of 16. She was also the Calamity Jane of horses when it came to health. She dodged more bullets over the years than I could even begin to remember, though one night spent with her in a barn a few years ago at eight degrees above zero when even the vet thought she would be dead by morning was the high-water mark. I could have bought a really good car—a Jaguar, or a Mercedes—for what I’ve spent on her over the past three decades.

My options to get someone else to fix the fence were none. After eleven months of “audition” coffees and casual dating, I still wasn’t seeing anyone seriously enough to ask him to start pounding nails. And while my ex could still be finagled into the occasional household favor, he was currently floating several hundred miles away on a houseboat with my children somewhere around International Falls, Minnesota. No, I was truly “home alone.” I slipped into a yellow rain jacket, found the retractable measuring tape that sat in a kitchen drawer with my potholders, and went out in the last of the drizzle to gather the exact dimensions of the board and the screws my ex used to build the fence twenty years ago.

I drove to the local Menards and went straight for the power tools. All I knew was that I wanted something cordless. More convenient and less likely to electrocute me if the rain picked up again. My first helper was a polite young man about as old as my third child. My whole story rushed out at once, of course, as it usually does when I’m treading water in unfamiliar seas. Divorced, on my own, ex with the tools out of town, need to fix something, totally clueless. He’s probably used to it. Sees a middle-aged woman in the power tools section looking like a displaced refugee, and thinks, “dear God, why me?” We eventually settled on the store brand package of a cordless drill with a 14.4 volt rechargeable battery and a bunch of drill bits and other parts I didn’t recognize. Did he think I’d need a cordless screwdriver too? Not really, he explained, you could do the same thing with the cordless drill. Oh. Well, then.

He stayed on to help me figure out what kind of screws matched up with the old ones. And to find the baling twine. Earlier in the morning, I’d picked my dog up from the kennel, and caught up with Pat, the owner and a friend of mine. She was single too, and a former horse owner, and she got a big laugh at my duct tape improvisation. “Don’t forget to buy baling twine,” she said as I was leaving. “You’d be amazed at what you can fix with baling twine!”

My cordless drill, a package of screws and a spool of twine in my cart, I headed for the store’s lumber yard. Same story spilled out, this time to an itty bitty young girl about half my size with a blonde pony tail. She was delightful. Chatty, friendly, outgoing, helpful to the extreme. She took me under her tiny wing and I followed her through the lumber yard like a puppy. She not only located the exact size board I needed, but carefully checked over each board to find me a really straight one. Carried it around for me until we got to the checkout lane. In between, she opened up the drill’s black plastic carrying case and gave me a tutorial on what I needed to know about using my new tool. She loaded and unloaded the bits, changed the rotation, cautioned me on being safe while using it. She’d followed her dad around a lot when she was little, working alongside him on projects and learning the ins and outs of power tools, saws, many manly and mysterious things. She felt pretty good about it. I felt like a hothouse plant by comparison, but somehow dropped managed to drop into the conversation that I’d gotten a Remington twenty gauge shotgun for Christmas. Female bonding, anyone?

I brought home all the stuff, opened the instruction manual, and knew was in trouble. For all my professional strides over the years—newspaper reporter, freelance writer, prosecutor arguing to the state Supreme Court—our marriage had followed very traditional lines. I baked the cookies and ran the kids and hung the wallpaper, he built the deck and hammered the drywall and set the concrete driveway. Once in a while I’d bring him a glass of cold lemonade if it was hot out. A building project, to me, was a two-layer cake. My tools were nine-inch round baking pans and a hand mixer. My “secret weapon” in most household emergencies was nail polish remover.

I phoned Tom, my go-to guy with all my manly questions—car maintenance, satellite dishes, tools, you name it. We’d met months ago on line, but weren’t dating. He drove a cement truck, and was smart, and funny, and tall, and cute, and sported a diamond earring. I still laugh out loud remembering his e-mails. He, in the middle of watching a NASCAR race on television, was the soul of patience and gave me basic instructions on drilling holes. He cautioned me about not setting the drill to use too much “torque.” Huh what? I didn’t know what he meant, but he assured me that I could break a wrist if I got it wrong. I found the “torque” setting on the drill, figured something in the middle range should keep me out of trouble, and stepped up to the plate.

I had a couple of screw drivers and a scissors in my pocket, my hand saw under one arm, the baling twine under the other, the cordless drill set with a screwdriver head and carried like a six-shooter, and a bunch of two-inch rust-proof deck screws in my pocket. I needed to make a separate trip back for the eight foot board, and as I carried it around, I thought I’d fit right in with the Three Stooges. Many things got bumped into along the way. I took a moment to mentally praise the sheer brilliance of my ex, who apparently knew that he could buy eight foot boards already cut, set his posts eight feet apart, and avoiding all sorts of custom adjustments.

I tried to take the old screws out of the post. The drill battery ran out of juice after the first three. Back to the house I ran for the spare. I used the baling twine to rig a simple scaffold to hold the new board in place, hanging it from the board above, while I position it incrementally to the right spot. Yes, my friend Pat was right—you CAN use baling twine for almost anything!!

The board exactly in place, I took one of the new screws from my pocket, and tried to drill the screw into the board. It didn’t make a dent. Back to the house again, I switched from the screwdriver head to a drill bit. Tired of the round trips, I tested the drill bit out on a piece of firewood in the living room. Sawdust flew, but it worked.

Finally fully equipped, I set to the task at hand. The drill bit peeled right through the board and into the post below, leaving tiny spits of wood in its wake. I could feel the difference in pressure as it ripped first through the new plank of wood, and then grabbed deeper into the softer, old post beneath. I remember the only thing I understood from the instruction manual, and kept the drill bit turning as I pulled it out of the board. By golly, I’d made a real, live, professional-looking HOLE!!! I twisted a screw in with a hand-held screwdriver, and breathed a sigh of satisfaction when it held the board fast. The rest of the job went quickly. So quickly, in fact, that I decided to inspect the rest of the fence. I found that another board has completely broken in half as well, but had escaped notice, hidden by some low hanging pine branches.

Well. No kids around, no bugs flying around either because of the heavy rains, nobody to interfere with another job, hey, I was on a roll. I drove back to Menards, sauntered in the lumber yard entrance, and found the same young girl. We located yet another fabulously straight eight foot board for this second project, and she seemed genuinely happy and excited for me that I was starting to have fun with this. I told her about the baling twine scaffold, and she seemed truly impressed. “That’s really smart,” she says. “I would have probably just wrestled with it myself.” I felt like I’d been given the Order of the British Empire.

Returning to the paddock, I set to work with a hand saw, getting rid of the overhanging pine branches so that I could reach the broken board. There were more branches to trim than I thought, and more work all around than I could have imagined. . The lush, green boughs were each about ten feet long, and heavy as I dragged them away to a corner of the pasture. I was sweating, and getting covered with sap and lichen and sawdust. The mare watched from a distance, her gold coat and white mane gleaming prettily in the afternoon sun as she munched her way through a field of grass and Queen Anne’s Lace.

Nothing went smoothly. One of the old screws broke off in the post, leaving the twisted, spiral stem jutting like a brash taunt to my inexperience. I took the business end of the hammer and bashed the broken screw into the post until the surface was once again flat. Out of sight, out of mind. I somehow felt a whole lot better for pounding something hard.

This time, the board was an inch too long. Or the space it was supposed to fit in was an inch too short. It could be that the old posts have shifted over twenty years, or that the other boards swelled from the earlier rain. I lugged the board down to the second basement that doubled as my ex’s workshop. Nothing useful in sight except for a small vise. Clamping one end of the board in place, balancing the other on a cardboard box, I turned again to my little hand saw and hoped to heaven that I could cut in a straight line. This was WAY different than lopping off odd branches, this required actual precision. I guessed at what an inch would be, and tentatively scraped the teeth across the top of the board. Sawdust scattered every which way, and the saw skittered across the top, directionless, the teeth never taking hold. I tried again. The same thing happened. I remembered that failure was not an option. This time I grabbed the saw handle with both hands, and drew the teeth across the board like I was the one in charge. Amazingly, a notch formed and the blade dropped in a straight line through the pine. An inch-wide strip of wood fell to the floor, leaving an edge that looked straight, and consistent, and premeditated.

One more trip back to the paddock with the shortened board, and the job finally went the way I’d planned…an hour earlier. Baling twine, drill bit, Phillips screwdriver, all feeling familiar, in a final get-it-done-and-get-out rhythm. Board firmly in place, I gathered up the drill, the screwdrivers, the screws, the twine, the scissors, the saw, and dragged them back to the house. As I brought the mare in from the pasture, happy knowing that there was no way she’d getting loose that night, I realized I’d forgotten to cut down the loops of baling twine. It broke up the horizontal lines of the newly fixed fence like an odd little bit of macramé. After a second’s thought, I decided to leave them there. If they ever come loose, birds can use the strands for nesting material. But for now, every time I see them, I smile.

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The Art in Us All

6/30/2021

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Nearly a year ago, when pandemic adjustments were still in full swing and "Zoom" suddenly became a skill to master, I was asked to be the guest teacher for a series of three Sunday morning classes at the First Presbyterian Church of Deerfield in Illinois on the subject of "Spiritual Practice in the Pandemic." My first reaction to the invitation was sheer PANIC--what on earth could I possibly offer on the subject? I'm so non-religious I'd be at risk of smiting from on high! And so on... But after some deep breaths, I finally took some of my own advice to others, which is when the Universe hands you an opportunity, SAY YES!! And so for three marvelous Sunday mornings, in tandem with the wonderful Reverend Suzan Hawkinson, we had some lovely Zoom classes where we talked and shared about life, and kindness, and creativity, and art, and being in the present, and finding God in small things. And at some point in each class, I would share something that I had written in connection with that week's topic, and this is what came out on the subject of Art, after I had wandered through a nearby forest with its mysterious and haunting effigy mounds

Who knows, in the dawn of our ancestors, if we had words before we had cave paintings? What drove or inspired those people, dressed in animal skins and working by flickering torch light, to paint horses and deer and bison in motion on dark cave walls, side by side with figures of hunters and of their own hand prints?

Were these vast panoramas formed first in someone’s imagination and then turned into a project with collective planning, or did they arise for singular reasons to create and to inspire and to make a record of life around them?

Did music come before song? Or did the need to share an experience or a thought lead to grafting words to strings of notes and melodies, with drumbeats echoing the human heart?

It is insatiable, our need to communicate, to exalt, to explain, to show, to share with one another.

There are effigy mounds near my house, raised images in the landscape of deer and panthers. Some were tombs, others were not. They were created by nomadic people more than a thousand years ago, but they still evoke mystery and wonder in their presence.

The language that would have been spoken as they were being built has long been lost but the effort and the artistry remains. Squirrels scamper above them and acorns fall and seasons change as the mounds lay, immovable, under covers of grass and wildflowers and pine needles and branches.

Forest giants—trees a hundred feet tall and more—have sprouted from seeds among them, and grown, and fallen and yet these mounds endure. There have been no live panthers prowling these parts for many years, and yet still they are here, underfoot, if you just imagine.

We are hard-wired and driven in our need to share what we have seen and felt and dreamed. And so we build and we write and we see and we listen, bound together with those that came before us and the ones who will follow, celebrating the human and divine in us all.

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