Sense of Place

Sometimes there’s a way to find a different place, even in the middle of a sea of sameness. This grass-roofed open hut sits on a hillside in Wales, hidden on the backside of a very clean-shaven gray and beige housing development.



There’s a small path at the back of the housing development, and it isn’t well traveled. People walk right past it, as it’s just about hidden at the entrance, but it opens up into a road of sorts, once you’re down inside.

And once you’re down the hillside, you’re in a different world. Small camper-sized trailers are set among thick, overgrown woods. A strange mix of lush wet wood scent and propane from the tanks outside the camper homes come together and separate and permeate the air.



My husband and I took a walk down this hillside last summer. We walked a kind of hide-n-seek hike down the hill, as we were seeking to see people, and they seemed to be seeking just the opposite. Finally, about halfway down, we met a woman sporting high Army-green Wellington-style plastic boots, and two long white chin hairs tucked into her dark blue turtleneck. She eyed us up and walked us on down and out of there, down the rest of the path, which we’d lost in the thick brush, down to a place where the green opened wide and offered up a gorgeous full frontal view of the Bristol Channel.

She walked on with us a little farther, and I swear it felt like we were being ushered away; that if she could've shut a conjured door and locked it behind her to keep us out afterward, she would have.

As we came closer to the sea, we saw the hut. She told us, just before she turned around and left us there, that the hillside people had built it for a gathering place.

I’ve stumbled upon enough separated places like this in my life, often hidden in plain sight, behind a wall of trees, inside a pub, inside a building somewhere, that my view of what constitutes reality is very fluid. It affects my worldview, and it enters my writing, as this place did.

How about you? What kinds of places have entered your writing? What kinds of places tug at you?

The Stories of Us

At my office a few days ago, a Chief of Staff level exec and I were having a discussion. This guy is one of my favorite people in the place where I work. You know how you sometimes have to warm up to people, and how you sometimes simply know you like someone from the first time you meet them? This guy's on that nice and easy second list.

We were talking about how to approach a certain issue, and he said, only half-joking, that he wasn't going to use a confrontational approach, and neither would his boss, as they were both Norwegians. And he looked over at me and grinned. I knew without further explanation what he meant. "We're Norwegian" meant to both of us that they were quiet, not prone to loud or argumentative behavior; that they were going to be polite and subdued in their approaches.

"Well," I said. "I'm Irish." And I grinned back at him.

"Yes...I thought so."

And we both had a good grin then, because our conversation was in a kind of ancestry-shorthand-code; we both knew he was telling me his story, about the end-game he and his boss were looking for, so that I could look for a social, vocal, pushier way to a solution for all involved - which, in this case, was called for.

We'd both heard stories growing up, as everyone does, about who we are, about where we and our people came from, and what that means in the scheme of the definition of them as individuals.

I learned about who I was and what the history of my 'people' was, by listening to family stories, and learning about the personality traits held in esteem by my family.

One half of my family came from a poor area in the city I'm from, a neighborhood called Irish Hill.



This picture is of my father, on the left, and my uncle, on the right, during the Great Depression, in Irish Hill. In less than ten years, both of these brothers were in the Pacific, fighting in the Second World War. After the war, both of these brothers had their children later in life than their postwar peer group did, in general. And both of these brothers had the 'gift of the gab' without ever laying their eyes on Ireland, the country their ancestors called home until the mid 1800s.

Stories we're told about who we are matter. We fold them into who we become, and we pass them on for generations.

My family stories included tales of bravado (false and otherwise), smart mouths, raucous humor, tough "I can make it through anything" attitudes, self-reliance, distrust of authority figures, and emphasis on the importance of story, and of sticking together, as well as an inordinate emphasis on intelligence as a way of measuring self-worth. (One of my cousins and I saw a long time ago that this lifelong family emphasis stemmed from placing a value on the one thing our fathers had - the one thing they 'owned' - that was good enough not to be ashamed of, when they were growing up so desperately poor.)

What are your family stories about who you are and where you came from, and what is held most dear, most important, in your family story?

Do you agree or disagree with the ancestry-shorthand-code idea?

Update on our voices

Hi, you all. Please sign up here if you wanna do a 'voice/reading exhange'.

(Please see end comments in the "read you a story" post just below the Dale post below.)

Dale

I mentioned before that I used to change my avatar and the "About Me" bit on Blogger every once in a while, as a stand-in/substitute for blogging.

This is one I wrote last year. The laid-to-rest avatar is below it.

Dale the Cat has been my baby for sixteen years. He is one year older than my younger daughter, which makes him a little bit of a middle child. Dale is a beautiful and needy boy; high strung, afraid of his shadow, a wonderfully sensuous sleeper. He is without meows; he emits only a warm, soft purr or a high-pitched whine, depending upon his mood. In this picture he’s perched on one of his favorite seats in the back of our house, in a section of our living room. He sits here when he wants to get away from my daughter and her friends, when her gaggle of girlfriends gets to be too, too much for Dale’s sensibilities. It’s quiet back here and no one bothers him. Behind Dale, on the hearth, is a dulcimer my father made a long time ago.



Dale became our pet in 1991. He was born in a lovely crackhouse part of town in Kansas City. We adopted he and his brother, Chip, when they were barely six weeks old, and took them back out to the Army post town where we were living at the time.

My older daughter was then my only daughter. She was three at the time - and she named her new kittens after the chipmunks in her favorite afternoon cartoon. Chip didn't make it a year - killed by a car. Dale lived until yesterday.

Dale was always retarded (truly), scatty, afraid of his shadow, and loved being petted only by women. He was afraid of men. And he'd never sit on my lap, or anyone else's. He'd sit about a foot away from you, so you had to do some hard work to love him.

He used to be quite a hunter. He was beautiful. He was virtually vacant inside. He liked tuna.

And he got lost all the time, through the three states and several neighborhoods he's lived in. He'd climb up on places and he couldn't get down again, and then off would go the high-pitched help-me cries. I've retrieved him by climbing three stories up a firetruck ladder and grabbing him off a flat roof, by climbing up extendable ladders with a bucket in my hand and holding him in it all the way down, by skinnying under the deck of a neighbor's, and grabbing him, because he was afraid to come out and walk the thirty yards or so home past some fenced-in puppies. I've fought off cats trying to get him.

One time at 2:00 am or so, when he was three or four years old, he scratched on an upstairs bedroom window to be let in (he used to go in and out of it by climbing onto a ledge) and when he woke me up and I opened the window for him, he popped on in, with a live mouse in his mouth. After a few minutes of the three of us scurrying around the bedroom, with me trying to keep all of us quiet enough not to wake up both girls (I was alone a lot then, my ex was a military officer, and out more than he was in)- I finally saw the mouse hiding in the folds of an overnight bag under the bed - I opened the window and tossed the mouse and the bag onto the ledge, holding Dale so he couldn't go on outside and finish his killing.

He'd lost a lot of weight - several pounds. His mind was gone, was essentially, in absentia, and we decided better to go out peacefully than cornered and killed by a fox in the yard, or tortured by the new kitten, Madison, that Blondster received from friends on her birthday. So, my husband and I took Dale to the vet yesterday, and had him 'put to sleep'. In other words, we ended his life.

It was a heartrending experience. Dale lay on a soft warm towel in the office, and he was anesthetized. He hates going anywhere, so some part of him remembered mama took care of him, and he butted his little head up into my stomach as I stroked his back, and he got his shot. That act of his just about took me out.

Then they came in a few minutes later, when he was asleep with his eyes open, and they shaved a small section of fur off his leg, and inserted a tube and into the tube inserted the drug that stopped his heart. That heart-stopping part only took maybe five seconds.

There's one damn thin line between life and death, between existing and not existing. We all know this, and we all do a pretty good job of blocking that out, because we have to. Because it's one of those things you can't dwell on if you want any peace at all within yourself.

But when you do see it, you find yourself stepping back and doing some hard thinking.
I've seen it before. My guess is, most of you have. I saw it in my father's eyes just before he died, when there was no longer any blue in his beautiful blue eyes.

I noticed that color loss again yesterday in Dale, when his blue eyes drained of their strong color, when he was dying, and then dead.

We should celebrate life while we have it - and I guess we mainly do - but breathing and blinking and walking around sure as hell is more tenuous than we like to face, isn't it?

I'm (sort of) reading you a story...

Voices and accents matter. It's not like this is big news. We all know it - and I think it's something I miss with you guys. (Also, I knew 'as if in a dream' that you were just dying to see our front hallway.)

I've seen one of you, spoken to two others of you, and heard one of your voices on a link thing (paca); it was nice to confirm that we're not only ether.

So....here's my voice, reading you the paragraphs I wrote about in 'Edit Me' earlier on.



This is my first attempt at one of these, so I sound a bit like I'm hollering out from inside a nice cozy tin can. But the only reason I chose YouTubing is because I don't know how to use anything else and get it into the blog (actually, I don't know how to use this either, which is why it sounds louder than I sounded when I was reading it. And Blondster did the whole thing for me on her Mac. If she hadn't been around, there'd be no sound going on, I can tell you.)

If any of you guys know how to embed any other sound things, let me know. And now, it's somebody else's turn...

Fun storm stuff....

Sorry I'm late!! This afternoon, an oak tree with a five-foot diameter trunk from an adjacent property came down in a strong thunderstorm, took out three other trees in our parkland of a back yard, smashed into a bungalow-sized 'shed' filled with family antiques, and slammed through the roof of our newly-county-inspection-approved freaking addition.



AND - I was at work and missed the amazing Woods-Mediate 19 hole playoff.

Yeah. It's been one damn fine afternoon.

Hope nobody else had storm damage today.

I've been reading your comments today as they were emailed to me. I was itching to be on here, answering and talking, but in the office, that's problematic. I wasn't all that worried- because I'm usually on here by 5:30 pm Eastern or so. Then I came home and saw the damage done, and my husband arrived home just after me - we had to take quick action, as more storms are expected tonight.

I'm so sorry I wasn't here a lot earlier. I feel rude (I'm from the South. It's a thing we have - feeling rude. I can't help myself.)

I'll be on either here in a little bit, or very early in the morning. And thanks so much for the great discussion, you all! Seriously. It was wonderful to read it unfolding. If there's one thing I want this place to be, it's the kind of place where people feel at home to speak their minds. (Yeah - even you, Lyle, so don't get on your high horse, and you know you like to get right up on it, about how you're going to be run away on a pole, blah blah blah. Just don't be stinky mean, 'K?)

I'll be giving you more good grief later - rest assured!

P.S. Our shed is behind the tree, in the center of the picture. You can just see it in there. Among other things, there's an old piece in there that my great-grandmother called a 'shiff-a-robe' (she was from rural Kentucky), about 140 years old, and a handmade cherrywood cradle that my father made my older daughter. It looks salvageable.

Coming soon...

A new post - sometime later this afternoon. Right now, I'm getting ready to run my Mom Taxi Service for Blondster. It's just gotta be done. According to Blondster, anyway.

Meanwhile, I found some pictures from my forays in Germany in the 80s. Put two border pics on the pic list on the right - in the Hartz (sp?) Mountains area - and one of a German village that I can't remember, but I must have seen, since I took the pictures.

Here's a quote from my novel - and this is what I'd like to talk about:

"It's not like vaginal activity and cussing have anything to do with who is or isn't good. What's good mean, anyway? I mean, what's good?"

I've been thinking about how to talk about the next topic for a while, in a way that isn't offensive, but says what I want to say.

So - should I just 'say it'? Or couch it in polite terms? What do you think?

Private Time

Every family has them. The slots you fit in, in your family. You're defined. And you spend your life being defined, and making the best, or the worst, or a middle-of the-road kind of grounding of it. Sometimes you forget you even have that definition inside, until you see family again, and are reminded.

In my family, my main slot was "she looks like her mother but she acts like her father". I had other slots, of course, but this one overwrote, or maybe underwrote, them all.



Privacy. Time to be alone with his thoughts. That was a major definition of my father. He wasn't a loner, but he needed his time alone. An ample amount of time to himself. And I was the same way; still am. I love the people I love, like the people I like, but I go crazy without my private time.

I mention this because when I write I like to be alone. I can be in a room full of strangers, if they're quiet, or with my husband or daughters, if they're not talking directly to me and I have my music going in my ears, my I-Tunes deal, to keep me separated. But when I really need to write in a deeper way, I need to be alone. No audience at all.

I drive my sweet husband nuts, because I can't just relax and 'let it be' at home sometimes. I have to be sequestered, to think. So...I'm going to the library, beginning this weekend. I'm working under a deadline I've given myself, to finish the edits on my novel. And I need to be alone.

I guess that's what I meant when I said I needed to listen to music. It's a mood enhancer - but it's also a separator. Right now, it's not enough - and I think it's because I'm nervous about finishing.

How about you all? Anybody else a privacy hound?

Getting in the Mood

Because the novel I'm writing takes place in the late 1960s and in the 1970s, I have mood music to take me traveling back there. This is the opening song for a certain set I play. It's a theme song, of sorts, and it gets me in the mood to write:




Now I'm telling you, if you can listen to that first two minutes and not feel something special, well, all I can say is, sorry about that. (P.S. Turn it up LOUD. Make that, DAMN LOUD. Let it seep inside you. There. You just took a music toke.)

Other songs on this particular playlist include:

Rickie Lee Jones - Young Blood

Post Toastee - Tommy Bolin

Run - Pink Floyd

Layla - Eric Clapton pretending there were others, well, yeah, Duane Allman, a Southern boy par excellence, saved his ass AND did the amazing guitar opening, but yeah, Eric.

Statesboro Blues - Allman Brothers

Gimme Shelter - Rolling Stones

The Year of Living Dangerously - from the movie soundtrack, same name

....and some others.

(I may add to this post later, but my word count is waiting. So, chance are, I'm listening to one of the songs above, or one of the thirty others on this playlist, that get me in a certain mood, and take me back to a certain place.)

How about you all?

Do you like silence when you write, or certain songs, or something else?

Writing Away

Hi.

I love photography and I love going away. Traveling.

So, I added a column of pictures this morning. They’re down the right-hand side. I’ll add to the column as I find and scan more places. For now- sorry- limited menu of destinations. (These were the ones saved on my laptop.)

I could live in a long series of hotel rooms located in places I want to see, and be perfectly content for a long, long time.

For now, with family, that’s not gonna happen. But when I’m away, I make the most of what I have when I have it. I love to write when I’m there, wherever there is. I feel less constrained. I know it’s only perception, but it’s also more than a little bit of reality.

One of my favorite “writing books” is The Forest for the Trees, by Betsy Lerner.
Here’s a quote from it (she’s quoting Joyce Maynard who is in turn quoting or paraphrasing J. D. Salinger, speaking to the then-nineteen-year-old Maynard):

“Some day, there will be a story you want to tell for no better reason than it matters to you more than any other. You’ll stop looking over your shoulder to make sure you’re keeping everybody happy, and you’ll simply write what’s real and true. Honest writing always makes people nervous, and they’ll think of all kinds of ways to make your life hell. One day a long time from now you’ll cease to care anymore whom you please or what anybody has to say about you. That’s when you’ll finally produce the work you’re capable of.”

Words that struck me, for a set of very particular reasons. I think about this quote and try to remember it when I’m writing - most especially when I’m writing and I’m fortunate enough to be gone.

How about you all? Do you like to write in one particular place, or all over the place?