Blog Posts

"Makeshift Christmas" past...

12/25/2015

I have many Christmas memories to pick from over the years, from bare-bones and sparse (in terms of material trappings) to full-bodied and fully festooned (again, in terms of material trappings). The people I love and keep close to my heart do not change from year to year, but the circumstances (or chaos!) in which we celebrate Christmas can vary quite a bit. This year has been running pretty smooth...and sedate...so far.

The other day, just two days short of Christmas Eve, I encountered a woman around my age whose father was recovering from quite serious and immediate surgery. He wasn't "out of the woods" by any stretch, and yet she still was keeping her chin up, facing the public with a smile in her job, and counting her blessings while steadfastly putting one foot in front of the other. As life, with grace, demands.

I told her that I empathized, and had gone through something similar a few years before, cataclysmically different from the holiday before.. And so, without further fanfare, is the "Makeshift Christmas" essay I wrote back then. Enjoy, and may you have a blessed holiday!!

Imagination stood in for Christmas wrap this year.

“Sit down,” I instructed my various children and my new son-in-law, “and shut your eyes!”

Then I exited stage left, grabbed their bundles of unwrapped presents from the spare bedroom, and returned to the living room where one after the other followed instructions and sat with eyes closed and hands face up on their lap to catch the goods.

“Okay,” I said, “now just imagine there’s a big bow! And shiny ribbon! And gorgeous wrapping paper, all sparkly and shiny! And when you tear that off, there’s a box inside. Then you take the top off the box, and imagine there’s some tissue paper! And you rustle it and rustle it, looking for what’s under it, and finally…”

That’s when I’d hand them their unwrapped sweater…or gloves…or flannel-lined pants…or scarf. We laughed, I got by without a nervous breakdown trying to find two extra hours for present decorating I didn’t have time for, and there was no cleanup of tumbleweed sized balls of cast-off wrapping paper. I guess there’s an upside to this after all.

It’s been that kind of a Christmas. Never tried the “Emperor’s New Clothes” approach to holiday wrap before, but hey, they say necessity is the mother of invention.

Two months ago I couldn’t have foreseen that my eighty-five year old crippled mother would break her leg and need to go to a nursing home for three months, that my eighty-five year old father would need to follow her because of his own serious health problems, that my--ahem, never mind how old—godmother would suddenly wind up in the hospital only a month later in serious pain and distress, and that my father would then deteriorate suddenly and require hospitalization himself.

Two months ago I was still envisioning the kind of Christmas I wrote about two years ago in Tale of the Christmas Axes. The kind of Christmas that evokes echoes of Norman Rockwell with the seasonal decorations around the house and garland around the banister and the tree festooned from top to bottom with hand-embroidered ornaments and a glorious angel atop, a mistletoe ball hanging in the living room, family around the dinner table for a fabulous meal, Christmas music playing softly in the background. I’d even found the crèche this year that had been lost for the past two holidays.

But then life got in the way, and a few thousand miles got put on the car running back and forth again and again to my hometown of Chicago to deal with the unfolding dramas, and Christmas shopping and Christmas baking and Christmas planning and Christmas cards went right out the window. My younger son and I had managed to pick out a live tree a few weeks earlier and get it into the house and upright with the assistance of his lovely girlfriend, but with less than twelve hours left until Christmas officially arrived, the only thing the tree had on it was a few strands of lights. And bah humbug, I was about ready to leave it that way.

But somehow things went right anyway. By the time it was afternoon on Christmas Eve, the kids had come home and the ornament boxes got dragged out of the closet, and then some of our favorite decorations made it onto the branches through no effort of mine. While a new fire crackled in the grate, they then set to rolling out the batch of cookie dough I’d made the day before, and the usual irreverence and laughter and the smell of coffee lit up the kitchen as they came up with new demented ways to decorate the axe-shaped cookies and their “victims.” Yes, we have Christmas stars and bells and pine trees and Santas. But we also ended up with a gingerbread man wearing a Speedo, a couple of Christmas giraffes, some Christmas pineapples, a pirhana, and a cookie decorated like a liquor bottle.

Then after the cookies were baked we raced through passing out my gifts before driving over to a family gift exchange, because I knew I’d be on the road to Chicago and back on Christmas day, visiting at hospitals and nursing homes and basically crashing my cousin’s delicious family dinner on the way home. Not the best timing in the world, but it was the only day in the week that the weatherman could guarantee I’d have dry pavement and clear skies for two hundred fifty miles. I drove home in the dark to an empty house, since the kids had spent the day with their dad. Christmas dinner at my house is going to be a day late. I hope the chicken in wine sauce that I made a few days ago is still good.

Taking inventory of this year, there are a few things we missed. The percentage of ornaments is a little thin this year…though the kids still managed to get the strands of wooden “cranberries” threaded through the branches. We’re missing the angel and the mistletoe ball, the crèche never made it out of storage, and I can’t begin to imagine getting out the garland. Never bought a wreath for the front door, left the big electric outdoor Santa down in the basement, and the singing moose that chimes “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer” is nowhere to be seen. We skipped the tinsel on the tree too.

But we had warmth, and love, and laughter, and delight, and once again, Christmas cookies shaped like little bloody axes. As for the rest of the traditional things that got left undone, well…

We can always imagine them too.

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Ode to "Bones"

9/13/2015

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With apologies to Will Shakespeare, I come today not to bury Bones, but to praise them.

Oh lord, that was a cheap attempt at a pun but… I am still seized by the impulse to describe just why I'm a devoted (or rabid) fan of the TV series “Bones.”

Viewed from one perspective, I should be about the last person on earth to opine about anything on television, given that I’m nearly always too busy working, writing and unpacking boxes from my recent move to watch it. I got satellite TV a few years ago so that I could stay in the conversation with my youngest son, who is a football fan. I am now down to perusing three channels once in a great while, looking for any partial episode of “Law & Order" to get me through my dinner and give me an excuse to sit down for ten minutes.

And yet, the series has seriously set its hooks into me, and I’ve turned from being a casual fancier to being occasionally spellbound by its emotional depth and resonance. Go figure. It’s a series that revolves around a gorgeous forensic anthropologist with the people skills of a lump of granite, and her evolving relationship with a brash FBI agent who likes to go with his gut in his investigations. There are gorgeous teeth and high cheekbones and cleavage and sexy, form-fitting outfits in overabundance. And I try not to hold that against the series, and instead just vow to upgrade my own work wardrobe some day when pencil skirts and form-fitting spandex and I can coexist without embarrassment.

As most habits do, this one started by accident. I was flipping channels for several evenings at the dinner hour, and could not find a Law & Order episode running. As a prosecuting attorney, my comfort zone with that program is total, like a pair of familiar bedroom slippers with fleecy linings. Drop me in any place in the plot line—police investigation, charging decisions, suppression motions, appellate courts—and I don’t need to play “catch up.”

However, at the same time, there were multiple episodes of Bones lined up back to back on another channel, and so I gave it a shot. What I saw, I instinctively liked. I found myself appreciating the fact that here was a female lead character who was unquestionably, simply RIGHT about her scientific deductions. While much sport was made of her lack of social awareness, if she said the dead guy’s tibia told you something, by golly, that’s exactly what it told you. Her team of researchers relied upon that precision and anaylsis to arrive at a broader picture of a cause of death. She didn’t have to flirt her way into cooperation with anyone. She didn’t have to fight with her superiors do have her viewpoint recognized. She didn’t have to weigh multiple possibilities as to what a particular fracture meant. In short, the bones didn’t lie, and she didn’t have to coyly conceal or reveal just what they told her.

It was a nice, nightly shot of “girl power.”

The series spanned several seasons by then, however, and I was not catching them in sequence. I eventually got absolutely dizzy trying to keep up with the lusty romantic attachments of the various cast members, as well as Temperance Brennan’s—that’s the main character modeled on real-life forensic anthropologist and author Kathy Reichs—evolving relationship with her FBI partner and her once-absent father.

And so I bit the bullet, and used my Netflix subscription to watch the series from the very beginning, not even skipping the episodes I had already seen.

And that’s where I got drawn into the people and the writing rather than the crime solving. If I had to sum up the essence of the series for myself, it would be that love is complicated and damage is permanent. And that while love may not conquer all, it is still our saving grace.

The crime solving is always brilliant, of course, and multi-layered with many red herrings preceding the “eureka” discovery of whodunnit, and why. There are gruesome methods of dispatch, and equally gruesome discoveries of murder victims in various stages of decomposition and slipperiness and, for want of a better word, "goo." There are interesting locations, and rapid pacing, and comic banter, and a shared sense of noble purpose.

But that’s taken a back seat for me lately to the finely limned portraits of affection and connection and frustration between the characters. A bit like the way I look at the combination of sweet corn and butter. Each has their strengths and values. But when you get right down to it at a picnic on a hot summer day, the ear of corn pretty much exists as a vehicle for consuming melted butter. I’ve started to regard the plot lines in Bones as merely the pretext for enjoying the interplay between Brennan and her hit-man father, and her parolee brother, and Booth, and her best friend Angela.

What’s past is prologue for all, and Temperance’s history of abandonment and time spent in foster care is baggage she will never escape no matter the emerging closeness and faith she has in Booth, by now her husband, with his own issues to carry. And I am continually surprised at how well the series avoids large denouements and happy endings in favor of leaving those loose ends hanging just as they do in real life.

Okay, real life plus money and spandex and great cheekbones and fabulous teeth.

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A writer's retreat

8/9/2015

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I wrote this essay about taking a giant step off the beaten path about two years ago. The thirst for the shore is just as strong! Better "late" publishing than never...

The writer in me was craving some peace and quiet, some long-term sitting time, some mental room in which to grow and nurture a thought plucked from thin air.

The rest of my daily life was having absolutely none of that idea! The last few years have gone by with the speed and fury of a cyclone, carved up by job, commute, new grandbaby, elderly relatives in decline, funerals, household chores, writers’ conferences, wrestling with nature rather than ceding the field of battle over my ten little flower beds, and…of late…the addition of two “spare” cats to the household while their owners (my children) went temporarily overseas.

It seemed that I could hold no train of thought for longer than five minutes, and I was wilting from the lack. A dear friend of mine who I had first met at an idyllic writers’ retreat led by the late poet Norbert Blei was headed back to the idyll earlier this summer for a glorious full week away from reality.

I knew full well the value of that environment, and that recharging of the soul. I had experienced it for myself three times in the past decade, driving north along the western shore of Lake Michigan to “The Clearing” in Door County, a collection of log cabins and larger gathering places and campfire pits set on the shore of Green Bay, augmented by three hearty meals a day with the plates whisked away by the staff so that “the writers” could get back to work…or not. Another year, when my checking account permitted but my work schedule forbade my going up to The Clearing I rented a tiny cottage on the lake and repaired there for a week of replenishing solitude. I hiked shaded trails, lived mostly like a hermit, and wrote…and napped…a lot.

Oh, this year as my friend prepared to launch into her writer’s Eden, I was so jealous! But a combination of scheduling problems and finances conspired to keep me from going with this time. A week away from home at a place like The Clearing is never cheap. Add to it the post-divorce costs associated with parking the dog in a kennel for a week and paying someone to drive over to feed the cats and make them feel validated, and the idea of a week-long getaway rapidly rose to the level of “pipe dream.”

Still…I knew I needed to recharge. Badly. And so I improvised.

I co-opted my youngest son and his wife, newly returned from a semester abroad “across the pond” in Ireland, to move in to the house while I’d be gone and play zookeepers to Lucky the dog and the four felines who had kept me in conversation, kitty litter and carpet shampoo for a number of months. One of the cats was theirs, and while I had grown incredibly fond of little Finnigan over the course of seven months, there was payback to be reaped. Knowing that the cats would not be “home alone” and full of mischief was a HUGE weight off my shoulders.

Then I got on line and started looking for a cheap motel room for an entire TWO DAYS that my other commitments didn’t cut into. And lo and behold, I found a lovely place just two miles from Kohler Andrae state park, site of what I consider the loveliest beach in the state of Wisconsin. SOLD!! I booked the room and started to pack.

My needs, when you got right down to it, were very simple: a bed and a bathroom, breakfast, free WiFi, and above all, peace and quiet. Armed with my laptop computer, a picnic basket full of “gluten free” snacks and fruits, and several cans of Diet Coke, I set out to recharge my batteries.

It didn’t take long. I could feel both life and creativity flooding into me before I even stepped on to the sandy path leading from the parking lot to the beach. I felt my state of eternal vigilance and rapid responsiveness—dog, cats, elderly mother, kids, work, laundry, boyfriend, and the occasional raccoon in the garage—relax, and new trains of thought start to grow and evolve. I felt the daily realities and timetables and litter box maintenance fly right out of my head on the breeze, to be replaced by whimsy, and mischievousness, and, dare I say it, imagination.

Leaving the motel for the first time to head toward the beach, I drove past the ruins of an older motel, in full swing of being reclaimed by nature. It gave off the disturbing feel of the Bates Motel…about twenty years after abandonment when Norman Bates got locked up at the end of “Psycho.” It was desolate…and atmospheric…and I stopped to snap a lot of photos. A place that creepy has just got to find a spot in a story some day!

n early morning trip to the shore revealed that I was indeed the first person there, and I walked into sand shrouded in mist rising from the rains of the night before. The sand between the grass in the dunes was still pockmarked by raindrops, and I set my little blanket a few hundred feet from a gathering of seagulls at the water’s edge. While I am a rabid fan of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s book “Gift From the Sea,” I admit I broke her cardinal rule that the shore is no place to work, but a place to replenish. And so I wrote.

I was writing “old school,” of course. I had left my iPhone in the car’s glove compartment, and the laptop back at the motel room. I was equipped with those most antiquated forms of writing accoutrements—a pen and a pad of paper. But sitting there, surrounded by wind and waves and footprints in the sand, the thoughts and images just kept coming as though Pandora’s box had been opened. And every piece of dialogue that I jotted down, every shred of character development or backstory that emerged, invariably led to more. It would have been criminal NOT to write it all down! Nefariousness, clues, atmospherics, troubled families, emotional scars, observations of modern society—they all would have flared and then disappeared on the wind like leaves in autumn, gone for good if not pinned to the paper.

There were breaks in my action, of course. I can’t sit by the shore and not be lulled by the sight of rolling whitecaps. Or stretch out full-length and watch clouds pass by…or even just close my eyes and listen to the sounds of the wind and water. This is truly my favorite beach, reminiscent in size and endless, unbroken horizon of the shore at the edge of the ocean. While you may not spy any dolphins playing in the surf at daybreak, I personally find that the dearth of sharks and jellyfish is more than a fair trade-off.

And so it went. A trip to the beach followed by the trek back to the motel to read and research and type, after a quick shower to remove sand and sunblock. Write, rinse and repeat.

I will drive back toward reality and routine in a few hours, but not before I return to the beach one more time with pen and paper in hand. As I chatted the day before with the motel manager, he offered up the location of yet another “inspirational” place for a writer to visit, known to the locals yet off the beaten path. If I had another day or two to spare, I’m sure I’d find my way there, drawn by the promise of broken foundations and ruined buildings, grown-over gardens, and cliffs at the shore. I’m keeping the exact location of that one to myself.

Because I just know there must be a “next time.”

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Spring Equinox reflections

3/20/2015

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As the sun peeks over the horizon this morning, a look back at another spring equinox, a wee bit less chilly!

The sun is sinking low in the western sky, on a perfect track with the road I live on that runs in a straight line from east to west. This is the time of year that folks around here usually keep snow boots and shovels in our cars in anticipation for yet another snow storm, but the temperature is still a balmy seventy-something, another in a string of perfect summer days...in March. I put pansies in planters outside the other day, for heaven's sake.

The hair is still damp on my neck from the exertions of dragging a large assortment of trash trees, woody vines, and jumbles of branches that sport wickedly deadly thorns into one larger pile for burning in the back yard later. Yes, the chain saw came out early this year. And when warm weather hits, I know from experience that there is only a small window of opportunity--between when the snow melts and the grass is dry underfoot, and when the trees and shrubs fill in with leaves--to make headway on trimming back nature's encroachments. Only a short time when you can look into the trees or bushes preparing to hang in to the driveway, and see what else they are tangled up with. The deadfall from a winter storm, the vines holding them fast to the tree standing behind, the outstretched arms of thorny things that, if you do not take care, will leave your bare arms looking like you've been wrestling with a circus lion.

I have another, larger pile of things to burn in the front yard. This will light quickly, since it contains some pine branches and the balsam fir that was the Christmas tree. But I'm exhausted from the dragging, and have no wish to start a bonfire and tend it into the wee hours of the morning. The goddess of firetending in me will just have to wait for another day. There are things that are better shared with another person, and standing under a dark sky full of stars bright as diamonds while sparks and cinders waft upwards, is one of them. So I've rented the animated film "Puss n Boots" to watch this evening.

I won't lack for company, with the dog and the two cats vying for attention when I finally settle in on the sofa. Lucky is the dog, and one of the cats is Meatball. Meatball belongs to my older son, but has been living here for the past couple of years. He has the personality of a stalker, the vocal ability of a bird, the conversational ability of Jay Leno. I just with I knew what the heck he keeps trying to tell me all day long. But one thing that really makes him stand out in a crowd is the fact that he like to go on long walks in the woods with Lucky and me. I come home after work and, now that it's daylight, I've got Lucky and the Meatball both hovering at the front door for me to get into my hiking clothes and take off down the path. You haven't really experienced the joy of cat ownership until you've seen a short-haired cat with black and white markings like a milk cow come flying across the countryside to catch up with the pack like a cow pony heeding the rustle of a feed bucket. Yes, today's walk was utterly splendid too.

I love the spring equinox, that tipping point where the days finally start to outweigh the nights, a few minutes at a time. I know a lot of people get excited about the first day of summer, but for me, by the time we've hit June 20, it's all downhill after that. The days get a wee bit shorter, and despite the looming heat of summer, the calendar reveals that winter is just a foregone conclusion. I left the house earlier than usual this morning, because I needed to drop my car off at the dealership to check on a mystery problem. As the country road I drove on turned east on a curve, I suddenly spied the rising sun. It was a bright fuchsia, and glorious. And as I rounded the curve, I could see it gleam off the surface of a smaller east-west road amid arching trees, and I remembered what day it was, and the perfect symmetry of such a sunrise aligned with our meager attempts to put our own human stamp on our surroundings. It was almost enough to get me to backtrack and take that side road, just for the worshipful experience of driving into the rising sun. But duty called, and the fact that I needed to get to work somewhat nearly on time kept me on course. But as I drove, I stole glances to the east, and as I passed through hilly and beautiful terrain, I noticed that the fuchsia glow of the early sky reflected pink off the surface of the small lakes and streams that I passed by. It was magic.

Tomorrow, the day after the equinox, will be just a tad longer under the sun than today, and so on and so on. I don't know how long this glorious weather will last. I know that there are thunderstorms forecast for the next several days and so I won't be meandering through the woods with Lucky and the Meatball, or starting up any bonfires with confidence. But I'll be thinking back often to that fuchsia sunrise, and the way it gleamed off the surface of the water, and conjuring this day often if the season turns back to the snow and the cold that we have every right to still expect.

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INDIEFAB Award finalist!

3/12/2015

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I'm happy to announce that my essay collection, "When the Shoe Fits...," has made the list of finalists in Foreword Reviews' 2014 INDIEFAB Awards, which were announced today.

Winners will be announced in June, but in the meantime I'm celebrating by giving free Kindle copies of the book to the first 25 book lovers who promise to read it and then post a short, honest review on Amazon!

Send me your email address if you're interested in getting your free Kindle edition!

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My Growing Bolder connection!

1/3/2015

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Way back when "Running with Stilettos" was just a wee new blog and I had JUST collected a bunch of essays from the blog into a book of the same name, I was surfing the internet one night looking for something else. It was close to seven years ago, somewhere in the summer of 2008.

And while I didn't find the link that I was looking for, I came across an ad for something called "Growing Bolder," a website based in Florida that devoted itself to the message (at least as I understood it!) that instead of bemoaning the fact that we are all inevitably growing "older," we should celebrate that we can and often do grow "bolder" in our choices.

Given that I was shopping for my first motorcycle jacket at the age of fifty and had only started wearing spike heels not very long before that, you could say that I was "all in" from the start! For years I posted paragraphs and essays at the Growing Bolder site, sharing news, challenges, photos, and encouragement on a "member page" personal blog. There were ups and downs, joys and sorrows, challenges and satisfactions...and demons wrestled to the ground.

In my literary world, I wrote three more books, and learned to enjoy speaking in front of groups of people instead of wanting to run from the room. Growing Bolder turned into a media juggernaut, expanding to radio, TV, magazine, and now a documentary. The GB website has undergone a sleek new redesign recently, and I am so very happy to note that while the "member pages" part of the site is gone, I've been folded into the official "GB blogging team." Woo hoo!!!!!

And so I expect that just as hearts expand to hold more love, my writing output will expand a bit too. I'll still be posting at Running With Stilettos...and I'll still be adding to my "author website" here as well. But come on over to check out Growing Boldertoo! Not just for what I'll be writing, but for everything the website has to offer in terms of inspiration, and encouragement, and pushing one's limits, and trying new things. Because we can ALL use more of that to keep us "growing bolder" instead of "just growing older."

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The One-Legged Bird

12/31/2014

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We all, once in a while, just need a little help to get by.

I thought of that tonight as I stepped out to fill the bird feeders in darkness on New Years Eve. The temps were zero when I woke up this morning. They're currently hovering in the teens right now as the moon shines above, but the stiff wind will just about peel the skin off your face.

And it all makes me think of a tiny visitor that came to the clear plastic feeder that sticks to my kitchen window many years ago. He still stands out in my memory as a testament to resilience, and survival, and hope, and the fact that every so often, we really all could use a safe place to land.

One chickadee pretty much looks like every other chickadee--crisp, tiny, with brilliant white collars that look just a wee bit "fluffy." They dart, and flit, and visit the feeders on my porch with impunity, jostling for pecking order among the cardinals and nuthatches and goldfinches and various woodpeckers. There's a large feeder that sits on the porch rail and holds more seed and supports several visitors at a time. And then there's the tiny plastic feeder stuck to the window with a suction cup, positioned just at eye level when I'm washing the dishes. It holds less than a cup of seed at once, and has room for just one small bird to feed at a time. I fill both feeders on the porch with the expensive sunflower seeds that already have the shells taken off. More birds like them that way--it takes work to break the seeds out of their shells first--and I like having more kinds of birds around.

On this particular day, a very sorry-looking chickadee showed up at the tiny window feeder. I think it was raining. He was bedraggled, and missing some feathers around his head. One of his legs was broken and it trailed behind his body. He balanced unsteadily on the other, but managed to feed himself without jostling or interference at the window before flying off. I didn't think he was going to make it very long in the natural world where "only the strong survive." I didn't expect to see him at the window again.

I was wrong. He came back day after day, balancing on his one good leg. Eventually the broken leg fell off, and he started to look healthier and stronger...albeit as "normal" as a one-legged chickadee could look. His feathers grew back in, and his white collar gleamed against his black cap and beak. I nicknamed him "Stumpy" for obvious reasons.

I don't know how long chickadees normally live, but Stumpy made it through at least another couple of winters, balancing solidly on his single leg at the tiny window feeder to reach the premium bird seed that kept him going.

Eventually there came a time when he no longer showed up and I knew that the laws of nature had finally caught up with him. But I also knew that he'd gotten a second chance, and his second wind, when he found a steady food supply and a sheltered place to eat it when life must have looked most precarious. And it reminds me that every so often, when life buffets us with surprises and dangers, we can all use some shelter from the storm, a good meal, and a safe place to land.

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Bonfire Therapy

12/29/2014

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I first posted this essay on my Growing Bolder blog...but like this "new beginnings" story so much I had to share it here too!

The “burn pile” in the backyard stood nearly five feet tall, a spiky assemblage of branches, sticks, vines, and firewood. It completely overran the neat and tidy edges of the fire pit created for occasional use two decades before. It was a mute testament to many things, among them the fact that I own a small chainsaw and I’m not afraid to use it, and that nature abhors a vacuum so yard work is a necessary fact of life.

Particularly when the yard is part of a fourteen acre wooded parcel. Mother nature never stops trying to reclaim the civilized part of it, the “lawn” part that gets cut with a mower and trimmed along the edges and even sports several flower beds. For that matter, there are a lot more “woods” to the parcel than there were thirty-odd years ago when we first built a home there and raised a family. The forest continues to migrate toward the house. For the record, the “we” part has changed as well in those years, as the phrase “separate ways” came to apply to a marriage of 25 years.

But the empty nest I got in the divorce years ago was temporarily re-occupied by two of my four adult children over the holidays, and my son, visiting from the far side of the country, eyed the burn pile with longing. “Hey, he asked, “can we light this thing up before I leave?”

“Sure,” I said amiably, although I had my doubts. It had been rainy and damp for a good deal of the late fall leading up to winter, and the early snow that had capped the pile had melted all the way through it. In fact the pile included some half-burned wood that marked the last time I tried to set fire to it, with little success.

Still, I took comfort in remembering some of the lessons and advice I had taken from the man with the longbow and the pipe and the black leather pants who had been in my life for the past several years, although he was absent now too, the sharp pang of parting still nearly fresh. During the time we were together I’d learned how to take apart and reassemble my chain saw; learned the difference between primer and regular paint; and learned that “you can burn just about anything with enough lighter fluid.”

This last had been underscored the night he took it upon himself to carve up a tree branch roughly the size of a small school bus that had cracked and broken away from the rest of a tree by the house in a recent storm. I couldn’t fathom that wood that green and newly cut would catch fire. I was wrong—a lot of lighter fluid was involved—and the evening turned out to be quite magical, if exhausting.

Back in the present, I kept an eye on the weather and the burn pile during the week of Christmas. It rained, of course, but Christmas Day finally came without fog and damp and mist, and the sticks and vines dried out a little. And so on the evening of the day after Christmas, less than twelve hours before my son and I would leave at four in the morning to get him to the airport for his return flight, my daughter and son and I gathered around the fire pit with some matches and a quart and a half of lighter fluid, and a hose in the grass nearby just in case of emergency.

Earlier in the day, I had walked the trail around my place with the critters, and hauled back roughly five pounds of fallen pine cones sporting gobs of sticky sap which I then salted the pile of brush and branches with.

And then against all odds and reason—and with several reapplications of lighter fluid—the pile finally “caught” and we stood around it, talking, sharing, and gazing into both the past and the future.

The past, in a very real and tangible way. There had been many bonfires in this fire pit over the many years we had lived here together. They had involved s’mores, and beers, and music, and laughter, and reflection, and connection, and celebration. Graduations, birthdays, friendships, all had been honored at the outskirts of a blazing fire in the back yard with a big sky above us. It was not lost on the three of us that with the empty nest up for sale, this could very well be the last bonfire we would share in the backyard of the home they had known since they were born. We all know and accept that the idea of me moving from this large and wonderful place “makes sense” on so many practical levels. But we will all still mourn the magic of having the wild just outside our back door, and the comfort of “home” to return to. This literally has been the only stable home I’ve ever known in my life, and I will miss it dreadfully some day when I finally drive away for the last time.

And I personally viewed this particular huge pile of yard waste through the lens of wrestling Mother Nature to a draw a couple of months earlier, tackling a stand of trash trees and serpentine wild vines that had encircled a couple of young maple trees at the edge of the yard, hobbling their lower branches and overshadowing a wildflower bed I had planted nearby. I had hacked, and cut, and dragged and stacked until I was too exhausted to do more, but by the time I finished, the maples stood on the cusp of their autumn brilliance, ready to blaze in splendor without interference.

We all looked into the weight of the year gone past us too. All three of us had seen some mighty and significant professional accomplishments…and had known disappointments, both personal and creative, along the way as well. The flames licked and curled around the chunks of wood in the pile, turning them red and orange and gold and white hot, reducing them as they broke and settled to glowing, fractured hints of their former solidity. We celebrated the good stuff…and felt the weight and the pain of our past disappointments burn off and scatter as tiny, glowing embers lifted high above us on a channel of hot air rising from the middle of the fire. The night was warm and windless, and clouds covered the dark sky above. It felt and looked as though we created our own stars in the heavens that night.

And so the sparks carried away the past, and reduced some of it to ashes, and carried our hopes for the future aloft into the night, into the cosmos, into the air around us, into the Great Unknown of the future. And for a simple bonfire in the back yard on the night after Christmas, you couldn’t possibly want for more than that.

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RESTING PLACES

11/16/2014

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Now that the art exhibit has come and gone and all the photos and paintings are down from the walls of Inspiration Studios in West Allis, Wisconsin, click here to take a VIRTUAL TOUR of the "Resting Places" art exhibit by downloading the Kindle edition of the exhibit catalog.

The full-color Kindle edition of the catalog is only $1.99, and you can still access it and view the exhibit FREE through KindleUnlimited and the Kindle Owners Lending Library.

Enjoy! It was such a great and vibrant show to be part of. Moody, atmospheric photos of old tombstones interspersed with lively, colorful and often quite moving abstract paintings...what's not to love?

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About those old graveyards...

10/12/2014

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In case you've been wondering about all those graveyard photos that I've been taking lately, some of which have now found their way into the art exhibit "Resting Places"...

MOST OF THE BEST THINGS in my life have happened by chance or by accident, and hanging around rural and small town graveyards taking photos was certainly one of them.

About a year ago, I was working on a scene set in a small, neglected rural cemetery for a book I was writing. I decided that a visit to just such a place with my camera would allow me to both get a visceral sense of the place…and capture all the visual details I’d surely forget by the time I got back in the car.

I was utterly unprepared for how the place captured my imagination that foggy autumn day, or how I would find myself drawn again and again to these poignant places. As I drive down two and four-lane roads in the countryside these days, my eyes scan the hilltops for a glimpse of tall obelisks rising above the surrounding grass, inevitably leading to a stop...or a return trip.

Sometimes it was the visuals and their symbolism that pulled me in, and sometimes it was the stories that rose from the words on the marble and granite tombstones. Oh, the stories written there, of lives and loves and losses. The monument to a married couple, and the string of small markers beside it for five of their children who didn't reach their first birthdays. Some lived only a day or two. The man born in Limerick, Ireland, who died in his thirties and is laid to rest in southeastern Wisconsin. The ship's engineer laid to rest at a small cemetery at a land-locked crossroads in Dodge County, a steamboat carved in bas-relief into his tall monument. The tall monuments to German immigrants, who died here but whose loving tributes were written in German, their dates of birth and death marked by "Geb" and "Gest." The old man who had fought in the Revolutionary War, and died decades later in Wisconsin when it was still little more than a wilderness.

Whether ornate and well-maintained, off the beaten path on two-lane country roads, or beside steepled churches in small towns, the graveyards and their stone markers stand as testaments to the fact that we want to be remembered, and that we mattered, and that we were, above all, loved. I have come across some cemeteries that are so small that they are not even on the map. Often the only sounds that I hear are crickets chirping and birds warbling, a dog’s far-off bark, the whinny of a horse in a pasture nearby, the wind in nearby branches.

And in the places that are more forgotten and less visited than others, there is a strange peace and beauty—the arching branches of oaks overhead, the fragrant crush of wild mint underfoot or the smell of lilacs nearby, the blaze of white trilliums and purple violets among the stones, a swirl of dead oak leaves from the winter before, resting against worn marble, brown and curled like scraps of leather. And as my fingers trace the worn letters, I know that here was love.