Home on the Range

Our dog, Charlotte Bronte, lies on the back porch in the late afternoon and looks through the ballusters at the yard and pasture beyond, leading down to the creek. Birds chirp. Rabbits move among the grasses and scout the perimeter of the vegetable garden, which is thankfully well fenced.

I, sitting in the rocking chair, whisper: Rabbit, Bronte!

No response.

Look, B--(pointing)--Rabbit!

Oblivious.

After thirty seconds of this, escalating in volume, she lopes off the porch in the wrong direction.

Nothing has ever been as safe on our premises as those rabbits.

Oops. Maybe not.

After dinner, I stroll out the front door toward the gate to finish carving an entrance arch through the Lady Banks, so visitors won't have an eye poked out. The sun has just disappeared behind the trees and it's still light. Something moves in my peripheral vision. I stop. It moves again and I think: deer.

But no. Not deer.

A large grey and russet furred creature just outside our yard fence stops. He looks at me. I look at him.

Coyote. As big as Bronte, which is large for the local variety. Never seen one here in daylight.

We exchange looks for about ten seconds and then he trots off behind a clump of trees.

And where is the B dog? In the front yard, nose to the ground. Smelling the passage of rabbits, no doubt.

Mothers

I've been thinking about motherhood today. Not so much individual mothers, as the experience itself. Women are waiting so much longer now to have children and I know something about the side effects of that, myself. My mother was 37 when I was born, which was nearly unheard of in the 1940s and 50s. I was called an "elderly primipara" myself when I was pregnant with my son, and I was 29.

The temptations and demands of career seem to be the reason for women having children later. We have control, now, to an extent unimaginable even fifty years ago. And so the bright young women fan out into their careers, with few distractions from the challenges of their jobs.

These young women are focused achievers, just like their male counterparts. Neither they or the young men have been required to place the needs of someone dependent ahead of their own. Or if they have done so, it hasn't been for long. It hasn't been for twenty years at a clip.

No wonder they regard parenthood as a fearful prospect. Also, an expensive one. Schools, clothes, food, doctoring--all become the main locus of expenditures. Personal indulgences shrink in number and kind. The idea of deferring personal gratification seems as disagreeable as it is novel.

I was afraid of having children, too, and as an only child, ignorant of everything involved. Married couples had children, though, and so we did. When my son was born, I felt stunned for the first few months, pulled by his daily needs to exist only in the present. How to interpret his cries? Would I ever again rest, sleep, think? And enveloping it all, breaking over every fear and worry, the most overwhelming surges of love, surely the great love of the human race, the one that keeps it all going.

This is the part of having children that the hesitant young women and men of today don't know. They don't feel this for even the closest sibling. They don't feel it for their pets. They don't even feel it for each other. It's simply more, greater, than everything else.

So, looking back on it now from the perspective of my sixties, I can see that the products of the ego, however lavish or glamorous, mean nothing in comparison to the experience of rearing/raising my child. If I had been able to do it, and refused for whatever reason, I would have missed out on the central experience of life.

A few additional words about elderly mothers. Once you manage to get pregnant, it's not your age when your child is born that matters so much, although it has an effect. Toddlers in particular take a lot of maternal energy. It's your age after that: To be nearly sixty when your oldest child graduates from college; to be seventy for the first grandchild; to absent yourselves from your grandchildren's lives by dying before they can really know you. We may live a lot longer now than people did in earlier generations, but not all of us enjoy that opportunity.

It's worth thinking about, if you have a choice.

Cop Shows

I confess to the guilty habit of watching TV cop/FBI shows, but I'm about to quit. I stopped CSI years ago because of all the dead bodies. If I wanted to look at dead bodies I would be, right now, an M.D.

The Mentalist is OK; Law and Order is still generally OK, with the puzzle the main thing, and I can usually figure it out in the first ten minutes or less, so the fun is in being right about something for once (or twice), except when I'm wrong.

But the rest of these things are disgusting. Especially Medium which has been getting more grisly with every season. It's like CSI spawned a virus that's infected all of them. I watched Medium last night with my eyes closed every time there was a tight camera angle on someone or on a door about to be opened.

Down with decomposition, I say, and up with people. Stories about living people who are not murderers or child molesters.

Brothers and Sisters, anyone?

Am I in her head?

Either I'm obsessing or I've discovered a major failing in my writing. At this juncture, darn it. Why not twenty years ago?

My problem has been, I think, that I am fluent, especially on a computer word processor. Refining the fluency has been my focus for a long time. Getting the sentence to say exactly what I intend and to do so in a fresh manner.

Unfortunately the result is often boring. Sort of pretty but dull.

I was lolloping along today, feeling like I've been spiralling ever closer complete stasis, when two words popped in my head: Narrative Distance.

When I succeed in being in the character's head, the writing is more interesting. Light bulb flashing on! That's being in their head, not describing what it's like in their head. Not spending fifteen years looking for the right words to describe what they're feeling.

Am I on to something? Is this an oh-oh moment? Or is it an oh s--t moment, if you'll pardon the Anglo-Saxon reference?

Catching Up

I've been scarce lately on this blog. The main reason is that I've been working hard to complete a draft of my novel. That draws on some of the same energy as blogging. (Other reasons, too, but they're boring.)

Nevertheless, blogging has people on the other end while novel revision is just me and the screen and all those characters I have immobilized there until I decide things like the order of chapters, etc.

So: hello.

Developments around our place include three green tomatoes, first of the season; petunias in place of cactus in our window boxes--the cactus were not happy;
the first vines coiling up our pergola (thanks to Richard for removing the poison ivy flooring beneath it--even though he got poison oak for his trouble--maybe not from my poison oak, I can only hope).

We found a small copperhead snake in the pool skimmer. Everyone knows what that means. I'll make a careful search from now on before doing my water therapy.

Dog ate a small nest of baby rabbits, I think. I know she was eating where one of our many rabbits spends the night. I've actually watched a dog do that before (gulp, gulp, gulp and gulp) and it isn't pretty. This time, I didn't investigate, frankly.

Yes, I know that a swimming pool sounds extravagant. It probably is extravagant. But this is a narrow exercise pool to keep me ambulatory. I am hopeful that the result will prove the expense entirely worthwhile.

The twenty-five year old climbing rose that was devouring the side of our porch was brutally cut back in the winter with a saw. It is now reborn, sending up the most prolifigate number of shoots, most of which have new growth that is curled back upon itself. I can't tell for sure what's doing it. So I have no idea what to do to fix it.

The cardinals are everywhere, and in the mornings, we are treated to a splendid refrain of at least seven different bird species, possibly more, with no volume control.

I do love it here.

They're on the Move

For the past couple of days, I've been managing my husband's blog while he's out of town.

Yesterday I posted a short one on the numerous turtles I've been seeing on the roads around here. I wanted to know whether you're supposed to stop and help one across. And if you are (without causing a wreck), is it good luck? Or is it bad luck to just straddle the turtle and go on your way?

Some of the responses we've had are quite interesting. Check it out.

Before the Storm

For a piece of fiction I'm writing, I've been trying to re-enter the frame of mind within which one functions as a hurricane hovers out in the Gulf, targeting us. In the story, it is hurricane Ike, an uncomfortable week during which one haunted the television and computer screen, looking for a change of direction from the track that took a bead on Galveston. Now it's obvious that the track was remarkably dead on.

My character is afraid of storms, though. Every gust of wind buffets her as well as the leaves above her. How to convey this? How many days in advance did one feel the advance belts of rain, gusts of wind?

The information available on the internet has been digested, with most of the juices extracted.

My memory of the event has been similarly dessicated. The third threatening storm in quick succession--it seemed almost unreal that this could happen. A Cat 2, how-bad-could-it-be, mentality seemed to govern, so a great many people did not evacuate.

The winds and belts of rain in the days that lead up to a storm rachet up the tension of the communities to be affected, but never until the last minute are some people sure enough to leave their homes, their things, and head for higher ground.

Any suggestions of blog posts about this would be most welcome.