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salix buddleiaToday is the first day of the 'best' of your life! March 24 Springtime... Almost April...I find myself asking the same question, over and over again..."Where does the time go?" The first robin appeared here on March 5th, I heard him before I saw him. It was a sunshiny morning, and we were loading the van to go do some spring skiing. Once at the ski resort, I saw another...odd, nearly 70 miles from home and there it was...almost as if they have a departure schedule and an arrival schedule to follow :-)) The clacker frogs made a raucous on the 17th, and in true PA springtime fashion, the peepers followed them a day later on the 18th. Last weekend, a honeybee landed on my pant leg as I sat outside, and just today I noticed that a soft-wood on the steep hill below the house had fuzzy gray catkins swaying in the wind...just blink and there will be butterflies... This evening the garden got a second tilling...and it is outrageously early for that in my neck of the woods, but it is an exceptionally dry spring so far. There have been a few small local brush fires that the fire department was called to extinguish. In the garden, there is the rich smell of earth tonight...under stars that shine down on a cold world. It is too early for anything to be planted...but it was sure nice to get my hands in the dirt :-)) I recall a springtime of past...the past--where I go when my thoughts meander. It must surely have been April. I was not in school yet, and I was walking along a hedgerow watching nothing in particular. I could see my dad on the Farmall "H" harrowing the field. It was slow going for him, the harrow was very narrow by today's standards. This was after plowing the field with a two-bottom plow. The dust flew behind him as he went. It was warm and sunny, and the wild juneberries were in bloom--white puffy clouds of trees on otherwise yet winter-bare, forested, hillsides. Over across the valley, Gloz's cows grazed...enjoying the treat, no doubt, after a long winter eating hay inside of the barn. Their sides were black and white spotted, and there were some red ones with white faces. I could see Mary walking the fenceline with her bucket of nails, hammer, spare wire, insulators and pliers. My dad pulls to the edge of the field and asks if I want a ride down to the house. I like riding the tractor, but my voice chirps out "No thanks" as I shake my head from side to side. I walk a long walk, across the newly harrowed field, and there is the scent that I have not even yet identified as the smell of the earth. With each gust of warm wind, the dust flies through the air, and the scent surrounds me. I reach the closest property line that the Gloz's own, and know not to go beyond. I turn down the lane and walk to the house...singing as I go... The day is a blur...siblings arriving home from school, grandma getting old potatoes out of the cellar with our help. I pay little thought to what it is all about. Saturday morning arrives with an early start. There are old metal five gallon buckets loaded on a wagon, and all of us kids are rounded up to help. We hop on the hay wagon and ride up to the field that my dad just harrowed yesterday. My grandma gets organized--she upturns one bucket for a seat, and then she starts at her task. She picks up each potato and cuts it into pieces, making sure that each has an eye. Then she drops the pieces into a metal bucket. My dad dumps powder into the bucket and shakes the potatoes around in the powder. Then we are handed the buckets to carry out to rows that older siblings have been hoeing into the field. We drop potatoes into the ditches made by the hoes, and then the rows are covered back over. My older sister, Anna, sings while we work. I try to sing her songs with her, but she knows so many... Life is a song :-) This potato planting goes on endlessly...and we are plenty happy when it is all done! Late Saturday afternoon, and we are all rounded up again. We are filthy, every last one of us, from hours in the potato field. We head to the summer kitchen and start to pump water up from the springhouse--being sure to save that last container for priming the pump the next time :-)) The water is placed on the stove in BIG copper "boilers"to heat, and then it is dumped into big galvanized tubs, with cold water added to make the temp just right. We have homemade lye soap to wash with, and the room is warmed by a woodstove. All eight of us sparkle when we are though...we are ready for church on Sunday morning. My older sisters take extra milk (from our cows) and make fudge, two kinds-- Hershey's chocolate--the recipe from the side of the tin can, and vanilla fudge (my absolute favorite). We can watch TV until 9:00 pm, and then it is bedtime. We head upstairs to the bedroom that all 8 of us share. The stairs creak as we step on them...but it is a familiar and comfortable creak. The house is chilly...there has been no fire made in the fireplace down in the living room. It was not necessary-- the dirt floor cellar kept the pipes above freezing from the gravity-flow spring above the house. And the plumbing is minimal-- just cold water to the kitchen sink. There is no bathroom...but I have not yet started school so I don't know yet--the other school-kids have not had a chance to tell me-- what I don't have :-) Going out to the outhouse is just part of life. It is 1965... I bet that the peepers sang that evening, and that the smell of earth and the sound of cows lowing were all a comfort to me--even though I was but a mere 5 years old...and did not understand the concept of comfort. I share this story from my early years, not because I want those who know me to say, "Awe, Willow, you had it rough..." We all have a story...and I think that pity is a wasted emotion, anyway... What I hope that you take from it is this: It was my reality, and compared to others it may have been a reality of poverty...but my spirit was never trampled to the point that I gave up and believed that I would never have anything more, that I was a poor soul destined to a piteous life of rural poverty. I sang...even on the darkest days of my life...I heard the song wending through me, and I knew that tomorrow would be better...there was a song of hope and a song of determination that dwelt within-- that could not, and refuses still, to be silenced... I will never take things for granted...and my very humble beginnings have given me something that I deeply cherish--I am grounded beyond the ability of any flight of fancy to turn me...to change me into something that is unappreciative or full of a feeling of entitlement. I understand that people can be poor of material things, but be wealthy in spirit and love. And I have the gift of understanding, and the gift of perseverance...handed to me by my early years. I understand that the children of poverty have no hand in the choices that placed them there. And I know that if people persevere, things will get better. Hardship in my youth did not hold me back. Not being gifted with a new car, or a college education did not hold me back. I hold no one to blame for the steep road that I walked to be where I am...and I am often troubled by how quickly people are willing to blame others for their situations in life. I am by no means wealthy, but I have a comfortable life, a nice, humble, home and have hope that tomorrow will be better than today. I wish that everyone had a song in their heart...and that they chose to raise that song to the stars. We each can soar, we each can hold the promise of spring, the wonder of hope--eternally in our souls! Springtime comes to all of us, young and old, rich and poor...as does summer, autumn, and winter...I greet each of the seasons with a hopeful look forward, and a nostalgic glance backward at the things that made me who I am... I take my flights of fancy, wondering, dreaming...yet always knowing that the earth is steady and dependable...and waiting for me... With springtime, and the smell of the earth...a peeper sings, a honeybee buzzes in an early search for something sweet, and a butterfly flaps her wings-- stretching them in the sunshine-- basking in the warmth of longer days... She takes flight from time to time--she always does...Like me...but my roots are deep--tethered in a way that most cannot see... the roots are sunk deeply in a soft, newly-harrowed field, in 1965... and if you don't see me in the field with my hands in the earth, then look to the hedgerows...and an old farm lane...I am probably there...walking a long walk--while I sing... February 28 ziggy's wedding               My daughter, wise young woman that she is, and so practical to boot, decided that her wedding should be on a beach, with the sunshine on their faces, sand beneath their bare feet, and the waves rolling in for a back-drop. It took place on Columbus day weekend--trying to take advantage of any long weekends that the wedding party might have. Her and Tim rented a very large beach house, 8 bedrooms, more bathrooms than I would ever want to clean ;-) hot tub, in ground pool, sand volleyball court, game room with pool table...and the wedding party was invited to stay with them, as a thank you for their willingness to pack up and travel to the wedding. I caught the nasty bug that was circulating a week before the wedding, and was in the midst of it when the decision was abruptly made to leave about midnight, rather than 5 a.m. as previously agreed. It was a night of misery, fighting the effects of Thera-flu (that I had taken a half hour before the plans changed) to stay awake because I have trust issues about other people staying awake while they drive the night shift. When we travel to Florida, the graveyard shift is mine, from about midnight to 6 a.m. for just that reason. Nate and Amanda waited until 4 a.m. to leave as planned, and Zig and Tim left much earlier in the day, and were spending the night in a motel on their way down. We arrived waaaaaay before anyone could get into their rentals on Saturday morning. So we stopped at Kitty Hawk NC to kill some time. The monument to flight just held me in awe...such beauty, such a prayer for mere humans who were given arms instead of wings...yet we lift ourselves into the heavens... Then on to the beach at Kitty Hawk, the likes of which I had never before seen. Such a steep narrow beach, backed by a dune that rose at least 15 feet, in some places even higher. Ziggy called us to see where we were, and the Real Estate agent that they booked through gave them the key and the go ahead early, so they were in the house, and asked us to come on down, rather than wait in Kitty Hawk for Nate and Amanda who we originally were invited to stay with. We arrived, and Zig started mothering me, sweetie that she is. She gave me Mucinex, and I had already taken another cold and sinus pill, and I became sleepy and, confused at best. I ended up asleep for the better part of the afternoon and early evening. Late evening, I was starting to get it together, and DC was fading into the worst of his. (Nate, Amanda and Natalie were over and done with, Dave was over and done with earlier in the week, Peggy had just recovered from the worst of it before they left for NC, and some members of the wedding party were starting to feel the bug. Dave and I headed up to Kitty Hawk (about 30 miles) to a grocery store to buy breakfast provisions. Sunday (the big day!) we were up early, frying bacon, eggs and french toast. Orange juice, coffee and hot tea completed the meal. We went out to the beach in front of the house and the guys swam, Nattie slept (the wind was wailing). Lunchtime or so, we headed in and the guys were kicked off of the third floor of the house, and the hair, make-up and dresses began in earnest. It got sunnier and sunnier as the day wore on, but the wind never let up, so TJ (Ziggy's hairdresser that she invited to go along) pretty much varnished all of our heads ;-) to keep from having wild hair (and even at that, it sort of only worked ;-) Near the end, after the primping, the mimosas, and the nerves setting in, there was an event that lives on, was referred to in the toast at the wedding reception at home in November...as the "airing of the armpits"...and that is what it was, exactly. The deodorant needed to be reinforced, and until the roll-on dried, the arms were in the air, outside, on the third floor deck. The people at the house next door, from their third floor deck saw it all--and happily commented on it! The guys went out and set up a handful of chairs, there were only 8 family members and two friends attending, and 11 in the wedding party. That was it, all of us. Very intimate. I walked out to the beach, carrying Natalie who was crying--her nap had been interrupted again :-) She was 11 months old at the time. Then the girls came out, and then Dave walked Ziggy out onto the beach. The vows were sweet and beautiful. In lieu of the unity candle, there was the sand ceremony where they each took a different colored sand and at the same time, slowly poured it into a pretty glass container. The sand represents that though they are still clearly individuals, they have been joined in an inseparable way. Then the preacher brought tears to all of our eyes while she had them take turns holding and looking at each others hands, while she said all the things that those hands would do-- like comforting each other, brushing away tears, massaging tired feet, cuddling a newborn... After she pronounced them husband and wife, Ziggy turned to us us and shouted, while a smile beamed from her lips, "YAY!!!" Tim is a wonderful young man, and Ziggy is a beautiful and intelligent young woman. I pray that the intensity of the love they bear one another never leaves them. We went back up the beach (I think that it was about 30 miles) to a restaurant for a wedding dinner, then Tim's sister, Kristi, surprised Zig and Tim with a custom made wedding cake which was indescribably beautiful! I copied the sea-shells from the cake, for the one that I made for Zig for at home reception in November. The food was excellent, and the view was magnificent. It was on the sound side, and the sunset painted the sky in shades of flare orange to magenta. Then Zig and Tim got back in the van with us (good choice for all of that wedding gown ;-) and we went back down to Rodanthe. Now, what happened after that, I cannot say :-D Nattie and I spent the evening on the third floor of the house, while the party rolled on downstairs. There was swimming and hot tubbing and a lessening of inhibitions due to the presence of a rented margarita machine. Monday morning, breakfast for a crowd, goodbyes to Shanna and John and Jen who rode with them. Scheduling constraints mandated that they leave today. We spent the morning on the beach, then ordered from a little restaurant nearby-- second best pork bbq sandwich that I ever ate :-) Dave and I went down to Hatteras and climbed all 260? steps to the top. What a view!! Then back up to Rodanthe just in time to join the whole group for dinner at Miller's Seafood Restaurant. Tuesday a.m., we packed up and left the newlyweds to a little time to themselves. Nate and Amanda had their timeshare at Kitty Hawk for the week, so they stayed, and I hear that Ziggy was in the worst of the flu by Saturday when they packed up and headed home, and Tim was in the worst of it, Sunday when they got home :-) Oh, Tuesday a.m. we all stood out on the deck of the beach house and I took photos of the sunrise at sea-level...then we drove across NC to grandfather mountain, and I took sunset pics from a mile above sea level :-) Nothing that we planned to do...just happened...but pretty cool anyhow! I wrote this for a scrapbook page for Zig and Tim: "Counting the reasons that I love you...would be like trying to count the grains of sand on this shore...Our love is endless as the seas..." "The music was the song of the wind and the crashing of the waves, in a cathedral bounded by a sand-strewn earth and sun-filled skies..." In retrospect, now that time has sorted out the thoughts and the emotions of the day, I recall sitting on that beach, watching Ziggy and Tim gaze lovingly into each others eyes, while they smiled great, wide smiles... How can one define the myriad of feelings that swirl through the mind of a parent watching their child wed? It was with equal parts joy, and reservation. They are so young, and in the most wizened way (which they have not begun to understand) their hearts are innocent and untried. My tears were truly tears of joy--the reservation tempered by a song of hope whispered on the wind that day--the song reminding me that this is a display of fragile human hope--an affirmation that life will, and does, go on. It was bittersweet to my mother's heart beating inside of me. That my little girl was forever casting aside things of childhood, and in a place in her own heart that I had held above most all others since she was born, had now been filled, rightly so, by another...by her husband. And now the understanding begins from this day forward... the ultimate sacrifice and compromise--giving all--baring ones very soul to another human being. And life journeys on... While in time, our feet of clay grow heavier and heavier with the passing of years...and we bury the precious knowledge that this choice, this time, this day in our lives gave us wings to soar and carry clay feet high above the burdens and bindings of just living all of our years... My Zigzee ♥ and Tim ♥ On trying days, I hope that you hear the song of the wind and crashing waves, and that memory gives you both wings to soar high above earthly trials...to a lofty place where the burdens of the world give way to the mere presence of two hearts that know the joy and the comfort of loving each other... ♥                         February 01 Manuscript on its wayThe last day of January is winding down while I sit and type. I am not sure what I have done for the last month, with the exception of writing. I have a few pages of scrapbooking done, and a couple of new Steeler's fleece hats (my own design, sewn by me) to show for the last 31 days, but here I sit...
Just kidding-- I have a receipt, with today's date, for the first book that I ever sent to a publisher. It is sort of funny, you know. For a long time, when people asked about the length of the story, I told them, "Just shy of 300 pages, about 160,000 words." Well, when I printed it out to publisher specs, it was 627 pages!!!! lol...it weighed 6 lbs. 14 oz. Pretty heavy story, huh?? <pun intended> ;-)
There are some gems in the book, and I still am not sure where they came from, but the one that speaks so openly and directly to my heart is this one: In the end, it is not so important how you learn to love...it is just important that you do learn to love. It is the end sum of what the character has gone through in the course of the year of her life that the book encompasses.
She struggles with her sanity, she struggles with judgement of her by other people, she struggles with insecurity, she struggles with even believing that there is a God. And most of all, she struggles with a very human need-- to be loved.
I think that there is a little bit of her in all of us. Maybe, some of us more than others ;-)
And the book does take a very sci-fi fantasy twist :-) Which made it a lot of fun to write. I am all of the human elements that went into that book. Every bit of boldness fueled by inner strength, stubborness and tenacity, and I am the confused, insecure, soul who fears her own frailty. And the weird thing is...every person whom I hold dear to my heart, who has opened their soul in front of me, is also every bit of those same human elements.
<sigh>
I suspect that it is not up to professional standards yet. I expect a form rejection letter :-) and I intend to frame it! I know that editors are busy, but if I have one hope at all, it is that the editor who reads it can take one minute and jot any thoughts about the writing that roll around in his/her mind. Slim to none, I know :-) But when all else is gone, there should still be hope! I am rather upbeat about the whole process. I do expect it to take a quite a bit of time to get published...but...I will. :-)
This publisher accepts unsolicited manuscripts (which is a rare in the publishing world in 2009) and it takes a minimum of 3 months for an editor to read it. I am not waiting with baited-breath ;-) I have stories to write!!
Being published is what?? Why do writers search for that? Money, of course, but I can live without the additional income. So what is my incentive? Perhaps I am a rare, but I don't believe that to be the case. Being published is a validation of sorts, strange as that sounds. I have a small group who reads my material, and a couple of them wait on the next installment like it is a favorite TV show. It makes me feel really good, but the insecurity filters in, and I know that they tell me it is great...but are they thinking -- Imagine that? She wrote a book? Pretty good for a lab rat, huh? lol...
Here is the real deal for me. I feel as though in my mother's eyes, I never did anything right in my life -- until I wrote that book. My mother consumes books (mostly Harlequin and Silhouette) like other people consume air. And she raves about it. So, by that measure alone, I have been a success...
And when all is said and done, and I have a collection of form-rejection letters (as I hear that all writers do), I will have this for comfort-- the words of a friend spoken just a few days ago. He said to me that what I do is art. There can be no twisting of the end result, because it is done with passion, done with a purity and a beauty that only art done for the sake of art can create.
What I do, I do for love of the doing.
What is done for money or demand is nothing more than propaganda. The motive for creation becomes tainted...and creation becomes production.
His words humble me, because I understand, I comprehend his words; there is a great deal of truth in them. So, may I never become so entangled in deadlines and money, that the purity of art flees, and its space is taken by methodical, subscribed production.
:-D
But...
If they offer me money, I won't turn it down lol... ;-) And in the mean time, I think that my day-job is reasonably secure :-)
I really meant to write something different tonight! But these thoughts just poured out. Something better next time around... I am going X-country skiing tomorrw and I do some of my best thinking out in the snow and the cold :-)))
Willow out <3
January 20 Willow "On Writing" I stepped outside onto the back porch, and walked out beyond where the roof covers. It was dark, cold and silent. A crescent moon peeked out through clouds that drifted slowly across the darkened sky. I had no particular reason to step outside...but I am sure of this. I was collected, gathered, organized and driven when I stepped out there, and I was tiny, a flutter and humble when I stepped back inside. Just a few minutes gazing at the vastness of the night above me, and listening to the deafening silence around me reminded me of how truly insignificant the universe finds me. The silence is deafening on such a night, when the creek at the bottom of the hollow is frozen over from a slew of below zero nights, and a foot and a half deep blanket of snow has all the life tucked in asleep underneath it all. I am treading with a measured step in this, the new year, 2009. My resolution is to send "the book" in, get it on the way by the end of January. And to welcome the form rejection letter if, and when, it arrives. It is okay, it will not be personal, but it took a while for the soul that dwells within such thin skin to realize that. My first manuscript has been written for four years now, and has been followed by a another completed manuscript, second in the series that will eventually be four books total. Odd the way that things proceed, though. I am on my second edit, really searching for the grammar and punctuation problems this time through. The first edit was removing content that I was just not comfortable with. But, somewhere in the middle of all of this editing, another story started to burn. I am 25,000+ words into that story, in just a week and a half. It makes me laugh, but it also frustrates me. I struggled with writer's block for months, and frittered away my time on other projects (non-writing projects) hoping it would pass. It was, by my best guess, plot-convergence writer's block, and at some point, I just started to write my way through that. That is on the third book of the four-book series. Now, I have shoved aside another story that churned out 5000 words in less than a week. It makes me start to examine my motivation to write. Is it for the hope of success? And what is success? I have my little fan club that waits on the "release" of first read-- printer generated (standard loose paper) stories of mine. The pages and pages of fiction I have written continue to pile up, and more stories wait in the wings. My "fan club" waits for the releases, and I see entire weeks melt into months while life sails by my window while I type away at the computer. <sigh> Of all of the types of "creating" I have ever done, this is second only to my children ;-) in bringing me joy! Who inspires my characters? Well, if you are reading this, then the answer is, "You.". Every person who has ever touched my life has in some way inspired a story within me. Some are good characters, and some are flagrantly flawed...but I found that I have an underlying thread that courses through all of them, each and every one. There is not one of them that has been utterly hopeless or abysmally beyond redemption. And I have found, somewhere along the way, that each character is inherently me, by virtue of their creation. That was a real discovery, by the way. A supervisor at work was the first person to read the first book that I wrote, and she told me, after a great review, that she saw a lot of me in the main character. That was frightening to me; it made me feel so exposed, so vulnerable in ways that I had never before comprehended. Writing is something that I came to in midlife. I never understood the mechanism by which an author takes a story from the mind to the paper. Sadly, I was constrained in my thinking by the things that I had been taught while sitting in a classroom. I could compose a grammatically correct sentence, but was clueless how to proceed composing a fluent and emotionally wrenching story. I did not understand the need to go first person. I did not understand that an outline is beyond being just useless when composing long fiction; it is actually stifling. So, for me, writing has been a very long journey accomplished, thus far, in a short amount of time. I credit my beautiful and intelligent daughter for opening the door for me. I had spent years struggling with the idea that I must be third person, sort of detached from my characters. She did not realize it at the time, but I have since told her, that she was the first to give me permission to just create, to go first person. She told me that if I did not empathize with my characters, that the reader never will either. I know that that does not sound like much, but it was, for me, huge! The light came on, and that first book just burned in my mind. I could not find enough time to get it into Word. It was actually a type of lust, I think. I could not eat, I could not sleep, I was awake and typing at 3:00 am on work nights. So, after book one, I journeyed on, while still not understanding how I was doing it. People would ask, after reading the first, "Where did this story come from? I mean, how do you make this up? Where do you find the story?" and I don't think that they believed me when I said, "I don't know." And that is the truth, I really did not know. I was sure that the story evolved while I wrote, in ways that I never imagined...and making an outline would have been a waste of time. But I still did not understand how one creates a fictional story, although I had over 1,000 pages of fiction created. Then a dear friend, Angel Wakes, gave me a book, which has the same title as this blog "On Writing" by one very famous and successful author (and English teacher)-- Stephen King. It was in that book that I came to understand how it happens. Stephen King liberated me <laughing while I type>! But, although I laugh at the choice of the word "liberated", it is the truth. I felt liberated, as if he made it okay-- how I invent my fiction. I will put a plug in for the book here, to anyone who likes to write fiction. His explanation is pretty much this: You create a character, then you place the character in a situation. Neither are yet the story. How your character(s) react to the situation they are in, is your story. Voila! Does that sound overly simple? If you write, and you think about it, it makes all of the sense in the world. From those bare bones, the rest is individual style-- unique to each author. Now, I cannot find enough time in the day (and the night when I should be sleeping--like right now;-) to write. The rest of the writer's block demons have fled for now. Now I face the passive voice demon! And many others that I am currently reviewing in a couple of different writing books, grammar books and other books of such "distasteful" nature ;-) So...if you miss me somewhere that I used to visit online, you will know that I am writing, answering a lust that calls to me when I work in my clean-room, while I look through a microscope, while I fix dinner, while I lie awake unable to sleep for the all the creation going on in my mind, the possible dialogues between characters, how to kill off good characters to whom I have given "birth", and oh, we cannot forget the question that yet remains unanswered...I reckon due to the nature of its subjectivity. How much detail to include with the sex? I mean, at what point does it cross the line and become porn?? Lol... ever wonder about that one? Please, if you have "the" answer, or even "an" answer, comment away ;-) January 06 Ice is a love/hate relationshipA tuesday evening...a winter Tuesday evening, and an icy one to boot. Here I sit, editing, sipping a cup of tea, and watching the thermometer from time to time while I watch the freezing rain continue to fall.
January is an unpredictable sort in my neck of the woods. It can all happen where the weather is concerned. I like the snow, don't mind the cold too terribly much, but this ice? Ha! I have a long history of mixed emotions concerning, and waging war with the ice... and the ice usually won! :-)
On the farm, my earliest recollection of ice was the frozen creek and the year that all of my older sisters got iceskates for Christmas. I don't know how old I was, I just know that I was not in school yet, so I was under 6. Ice was good when I was very young. When we weren't skating on it, we were chopping it off the top of the creek with an axe and hauling it to the house in old five gallon metal buckets to use for homemade icecream. It seems that I had a good relationship with ice...wonder where it went so wrong?
That seems to have occurred simultaneously with my driver's license when I was 17 years old. :-)
You know, as a new driver, your parents automatically deem you incapable of driving as soon as precipitation of the frozen sort falls from the sky. (I have 3 grown children, and all these years later I can tell you that my parents were geniuses-- they were so right of course ;-)
So, the first winter passed with me driving barely at all. It was the winter from hell. The winter of 77, and when it was not making snow and blowing drifts 8 feet high, it was raining and making ice on everything in the frozen landscape.
Living where I did, (our yard was a steep north face) and how I did (we had no indoor plumbing) was difficult enough in the winter without adding ice to the challenge! It was a constant job to sprinkle ashes from the fireplaces on the paths that led to various places-- the coal shed, the summer kitchen, the barn, the outhouse, etc...
You had to allow extra time for anywhere you went. Three steps forward, slide two steps back :-) It was a slow process.
I recall going to a wedding in January of 77, high heels and a dress. While at the small wedding and the dinner that followed, it began to rain. The streets seemed to be okay in town. The roads were okay :-) When I got home, out "the hollow" there was glaze ice over everything. Dave tried to help me up the hill, but we both fell down and slid back down over the hill. The glaze ice was wet with the rain that was falling. I did not want to take off my heels and confront the icy hill in my feet covered only by my pantyhose. So we tried again, and again. Each time I fell, the dress was dragged up my legs and behind my butt as I slid back down the icy hill. There were ashes under the new layer of ice, and it was pretty much working like sandpaper on my legs and butt.
When multiple attempts were met with failure, after sliding back down next to Dave's truck, we got in the truck and drove over to the barn. Figured we would try that side of the hill instead. It was not quite as steep, but unfortunately, it was twice as long!
We fell on our first attempt, on the short steep part right next to the barn, but we were nearly to the less steep part, so we crawled (or should I say "clawed") our way up to the less steep part. I do recall though, that I laughed until I cried at just how unbelievable it was! Dave, by this point, was beyond humor :-) I took off walking toward the house, and he watched me go, falling several more times, and when I was almost to the back door, he turned and slipped and slid his way back down to his truck.
Another night, , and I was back living at the old farmhouse with my mom after dad died, when the ice had grown so thick that most lines were down...I lay alone, listening to the world. No electricity, no white noise, no dryer bins running...no nothing but the limbs cracking under the weight of the ice.
By morning, the temp had warmed enough that public roads had been made safe for travel, and the school buses were running on time. But, have you ever livied anywhere that there are dirt roads? The ice on dirt roads lasts for a month after the blacktop is melted off! I got up and got my children moving. We headed out the door at our normal time, hanging on to various things, and each other while we slid our way to where my 4wd was parked.
I headed out the farm lane (just over a half mile with an incredibly long steep hill midway. At the bottom of the hill was a hard bend with a big old maple tree on the outside of the bend!) I could get no run for the hill. I started up over, with my studded tires spinning as I went. I was so close to the top of the "big hill", but just could not do it. My anti-lock brake light came on while I was spinning, and then as I continued giving it power :-) It started to slide down the hill with the tires turning forward. When it stopped sliding, we were close to the side, and there we sat and watched across Gloz's pasture field at the school bus heading to the end of our lane. I looked at my children and said, "You know what? It is a good day for all of us to play hookie" and we did. We slid and fell, and slipped our way down to the house and I called my brother and asked if he could bring the big tractor and pull me out? I told him I left it parked right where it had stopped moving! Almost at the top. He pulled me out and I left it sit at the field lane that night--we walked out the next morning--through the fields :-)
Another early morning. I worked the 5 a.m. start at my job, and I left the house unsuspecting, and found ice as sson as I cleared the roof overhang on the deck. Undaunted I continued. I started down the hill, with my purse and my lunchbox in my hand, made it down to the springhouse and came to a stop to think about strategy. The hill was very short but very steep from that point to my CJ7. I thought that a side approach was warrented, lol, and started trying to do a "controlled" slide. Let me tell you now, there is no such animal as a controlled slide on wet ice! When I started to fall, I leaned uphill onto my hip on the upper side. And then rolled onto my back, gathering water (and speed) as I slid, I saw the Jeep...so close...reaching out to...grab a ...tire...then the Jeep was behind me...and I was still sliding... I stopped in the center of the lane, at the low point where all of the running water was flowing across the ice. I knew that standing was futile, so I rolled over to my hands and knees, and headed back up past the Jeep, the way I had just come, collecting any water I had missed on the way down. :-)
My relationship with ice has been a complex one, for sure. I recall looking across rough run hollow at mighty hardwoods covered with a silvery glaze of ice that sparkled in winter sunlight. I recall sliding happily and playing on the ice covered lane when I was a child. I still see icicicles outside of the kitchen window that touched the ground...while the smell of the coalstove in the kitchen brought all of the comfort that a soul could want or need.
I recall walking about a mile and half, with my siblings, on a snowy evening...to Kradel's pond to iceskate.
It was one of those silent nights, when the snow fell thickly, but softly enough to make a hush...
I just checked the thermometer on the back porch. It is 30 degrees and the rain continues to fall. I brought work home with me just in case tomorrow is one of those days when you slide right past your vehicle in the morning--rather than getting in it :-)
And if I wind up at home, I will likely take a peek here, maybe even write a word or tow...about the ice :-)
Wherever you are, be warm, be safe, be well :-)
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