MTV interviewer Josh Horowitz (After Hours with Josh Horowitz) has some of the stars of the Harry Potter series repeat phrases with an American accent. Of course I’m impressed. I can not speak with an English accent, although there is an English accent in my head. I’ve always loved anything English. To call myself an Anglophile does not begin to encompass my lifelong obsession.
It began in childhood. My mother was besotted with the Queen and everything English. Her grandmother was the third daughter of a titled landowner. With a child’s wide-eyed awe I listened to tales of my great-grandmother’s privileged childhood of having someone else do everything for her including brushing her hair (the ultimate luxury!) with tortoise-shell combs. And the stories didn’t stop there. She grew older and fell in love with a man who came from London, an indentured apprentice. They ran away together to America where they traveled by covered wagon to the wilds of Iowa. Their home included an “indian cabinet” a cupboard to hide in when the indians came to raid the pantry, though actually they were only after the pickles.
The truth lies somewhere in here. My great-grandmother was the third daughter of a titled land owner, who was actually a farmer. She probably did enjoy some luxury in comparison to others. The Orkney Islands of Scotland are cold a lot of the year. Relatives who still reside there must keep their sheep and cows in the barns for almost nine out of twelve months of the year.
My great-grandmother did fall in love with a man from London who was a plumber. She married and moved to America with her father’s blessing. And I imagine Iowa was still a little warmer than Scotland. I’ve seen the home they built. A three storied, multi-gabled Victorian. It may still be there in Mason City.
I know there is a lot more to the stories. The bit about the indians leaving one of their old people behind the fence where the body wasn’t discovered until the Spring thaw. The part about my great-grandfather’s family dying of influenza so he had to apprentice himself in order to pay debts and survive. I have a family history booklet created by some great-aunts and passed to the extended family where many of these stories are proved by eye witness accounts.
My mother’s family was from Scotland, but my father’s family was too. Does that make me doubly crazy about all things British? Yes.
I’ve immersed myself in British murder mysteries, classics, and television programming for over thirty years – or for as long as I can remember. If anyone could do an accent is should be me. In fact, after a car accident where I was knocked out, According to eye-witness accounts, I spoke in an English accent. They found it so amusing. Me? I don’t remember anything about it.
That’s why I say I think I have an English person residing in my head. I imagine this person sitting next to me wondering why I drive on the wrong side of the road. And asking what’s wrong with spotted dick pudding? But sadly I have not much accent. I can hardly do a “roight” right. Strange, really.
I used to have more of a Texas accent but can hardly remember much of it. I still say Italian with a long ‘I’ as in ICE. Occasionally I add an ‘r’ to wash so it comes out ‘warsh’. And I add ‘fixin’ as a preface to what I’m about to do, as in “I’m fixin’ to throw my warsh at the IIItalians.” And that’s as genuine as it gets.
In high school I wrote my first “novel”. I sent the bits of typewritten onion skin off to a publisher. The largest publisher that I knew about, knowing nothing, was Zondervan. They published Bibles. They had to be huge.
I have kept the rejection letter. Rejected because it was too controversial.
That was in 1973. The story was my story about the year I went to an all black school. Now, if I rewrote that story, which I intend to do, it would be historical fiction. I don’t believe I would write it as a memoir. I think it would read better to put someone else on that stage. Someone else can ride on that bus across town, with the loony bus driver who insisted we girls take turns sitting on his lap as he drove.
As a child I have loved books. I dreamed of a future writing and illustrating children’s stories. My mixed media collage on the right is a girl reading in a tree-house. My father constructed a tree-house that stretched between two trees. I spent hours up there concocting stories which I would act out. My stories usually involved being chased by the bad guys or (for some strange Freudian reason) a gorilla.
I wrote and illustrated several stories before I discovered SCBWI where I learned more about the mechanics of picture books. The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators provides tools to learn the craft of writing. They offer great advice about the publishing world, and provide conferences attended by other aspiring writers, published authors and illustrators, and acquiring editors.
I discovered a real joy in writing words on paper. I love writing. I love my words. All writers do, or they wouldn’t be writers.
What I soon discovered was that no matter how much I love my words – a lot of others do not. In order to write commercially, or for publication, one must craft a story. Sending out a first draft, or even a second draft, is not a good idea. Yes, enthusiasm sells. Poorly strung together bits of thought do not sell. Save the enthusiasm for the final draft. It is hard. Sometimes I’m so thrilled with my new “idea” that I am bursting to share it. That’s when I must “put the lid on the pot” so my idea doesn’t boil up all over the stove.
As most of you who have been following me here on WordPress or on Facebook know, my husband and I buy and sell houses. We love to buy old and renovate and sell. Well, at this point it is more like buy, renovate, and rent, but that is another story.
I would like to draw an analogy between selling a gorgeous property and selling a great manuscript (picture book or novel). Selling a property before it is perfect, is much the same as trying to sell a manuscript before it is as perfect as is possible to make it. (Though perfection is in the eye of the beholder in both cases. Yes, that is a cliché.) If you put your house on the market before the bathroom has been repainted or before the dog trail in front of the fence is re-sodded, then you risk those first lookers hating the yellow bathroom, and wondering what to do about the grassless trail in front of the fence. Those are unnecessary distractions.
By the same token if I send my manuscript out with two grammatical errors on the third page, the reader of that manuscript would toss it aside and send a post card rejection. Post card rejections have a little check mark next to the appropriate reason for rejection. Post card rejections are the ultimate rejection, right next to the rejection where you never hear anything. Ever.
When you lose your houses’ first lookers, you won’t get them back. If your manuscript is rejected by a publisher you can not send it back, even if your grammatical errors are corrected. For some reason known only to God that first reader at the publisher’s always remembers.
So no matter how enthusiastic one is about selling the gorgeous little doll house in the historic district or how enthusiastic one is about the adorable mouse story, stop! Wait. Learn patience. Learn to sit and get that manuscript right! Let it “cool off” and then re-read it. It is surprising what you see with a cold eye. Don’t use up all your publishers, don’t lose your opportunities. Polish. Polish. Polish. Get it critiqued by others who write in the same genre. Listen to their advice. It is okay if they find fault. Re-write. A gazillion times. Make your critique-folks glow with the same enthusiasm you have for your work.
Then and only then do your research on which publisher would most likely love your work. This is about writing now. Now is very different from 1973. Publishers are specific. They publish specific things, or at least a variety of specific things. Zondervan does not just publish Bibles, they have a massive range of things they publish. Match your work to work published by that company. It is unlikely if your research is thorough that you will get a postcard rejection. You may get rejected but there will be a handwritten note as to specifics. And that is all part of the learning curve. If you are like me – it still hurts. But I get up, dust off the rejection and keep on trying. You can’t stop me.
I sat across from her hospital bed as she pushed her food around on her plate. I waited. This was some sort of ticking bomb situation here. And I wasn’t about to be the one to light it this time.
“There isn’t enough salt,” she said.
I said, “Aren’t you on a low-sodium diet?”
“Yes. But I’m supposed to be on a low-sodium and diabetic diet.”
I thought – well that explains everything, but I said, “that means less salt and less sugar, right?”
She pursed her lips like she does when she doesn’t want to talk about something. She pulled out a plastic baggie from a stack of baggies that I thought were designed to hold all her meds. This bag was full of salt packets, the kind you get at McDonald’s. She ripped them open one by one and dumped the contents on her food.
My children and husband watched this and then looked at me. I didn’t know what to say. She must have noticed. She took a bit at the tip of her spoon and shook her head. “Still isn’t enough flavor.” And then she pulled packets of sugar substitute and emptied them on her food.
“Mom”, I said, “that’s sugar substitute. It’s sweet”.
“I know. It helps”.
I asked her what her sugar was. She said – two sixty-five.
“Not so good, huh?”
She shrugged. She pushed the food around and then pulled the two bowls of fruit closer. “I tried to be zealous about my diabetes when they first discovered it. When my weight went down the doctors didn’t seem too concerned, so I thought worrying about it was stupid.”
“Mom, that was 1964. There are better medications these days.”
My husband leaned over and whispered, “You shouldn’t preach.”
That was several years ago. Today, as I watched my eighty-five year old mother getting her nails done I thought, despite all the prickly feelings between us all these years, she was the best mother she knew how to be. I wonder what my daughter will think of me when I’m eighty-five.
I wonder if I will get to be eighty-five.
My mother has survived terrible ups and downs with her blood-sugar, hundreds of mini-strokes and one major stroke. These days she gathers twelve to fifteen books from the library every three weeks and proceeds to read them, preferring like me to read her way through authors. She gets a hair permanent and her nails done at the salon every four months. She looks pretty darn good.
These feelings well up and I want to tell her what I’m thinking. Before I can she reaches out and pats my hand and tells me that she’s proud of me. And I wish I can take back all those times I was so smart. When I wasn’t.
Today was the day I told my mother that she would be a great-grandmother. Her eyes grew wide and she smiled and said, “I don’t know how I feel about that. I never thought I’d see the day.”
Daybreak strained through a thin sheet of clouds. I stood on the front porch. A fickle breeze gushed through the tops of the cottonwoods. It sounded like people clapping. A mixture of dread and anticipation made my stomach queasy.
It was September 11, 1961. My brother was seven days old.
We’d been listening to the radio all morning. News of the impending hurricane kept my brother and me home from school. I don’t know where my father or my older brother were. Maybe father went to work. He rarely stayed home from work. I wonder, now, if he and Bobby weren’t helping my grandparents at their home, tying things down, clearing their large yard of car parts and stacks of wood, though why my father wasn’t helping my mother with her tiny baby, I don’t know. Plus, we had our own loose car parts and stacks of wood in the back yard. And there was our wonderful swing-set. I was worried about the swing-set. Who was going to protect that?
My mother called me to come in when the first spattering of rain bit my skin. My anticipation became a trembling excitement. I wanted the big storm to come. It was different. Something new. Something to look forward to. I retreated into the front room and kept my face pushed against the window. I watched as scatterings of leaves danced across the pitted asphalt drive and out of sight. Where was my father? Was my brother Bobby at a friend’s house? My mother didn’t seem to know.
She didn’t seem to hear me much these days. She pressed the baby against her breast and looked sad. I didn’t worry for long, the storm was coming.
The window panes trembled with a rat-a-tat-tat. I pressed my fingers against them. The temperature outside had changed. It was cooler. The rain patted against the glass, coming at it sideways. The clouds were rolling in now, deeper and darker almost like the ocean’s waves as if the world were upside down. The tall trees were doing a jig. The wind only brushing their tops. We had big trees. When I hugged them my fingers didn’t quite touch on the other side.
My father had recently added on to our house with a family room big enough to skate in, and my parents now had their own room with an attached bathroom. So I no longer shared a room with my older and younger brother. I had a room of my own. When they asked what color I wanted the walls painted I said, “Aqua, of course.” And so the walls were aqua, with one wall of wallpaper with ballerinas dancing across it. Curtains to match. And my own closet. I was a princess.
In the process of adding on to the house my father dug trenches in the backyard for the sewer. Brother Jon and I had a wonderful time playing trench warfare. The pipes were only part of the hardship. Our creed was simple: The life of the soldier is tough. And don’t eat the dirt, no matter how hungry you get.
After the trenches were filled in the swing-set appeared. We were thrilled. Now we could swing up and see over the wood fence into the neighbor’s yard. The neighbor was a wicked witch for two reasons. Instead of a cat, she had a stupid beagle that bark-howled all the time. We beat on the fence to make it stop and it got worse. We hated that dog. She also had a huge wisteria bush that grew over into our yard, which was okay by me. It was a fort. But one day my older brother trimmed the vine and tossed the trimmings over into her yard and she screamed at him. That was the second reason why she was a witch. At least I think that’s what my brother called her.
The wind was getting wild by this time. The trees limbs whipped and punched at the ground. My mother pulled me from the window. We had to get on the floor in her bedroom. She pushed my baby brother under her bed a little while she kept an arm around me and my little brother. I was on the outside of that circle by choice, having scooted as far away as possible to keep an eye on the drama outside.
The color turned sickly, first greenish and then almost purple as the wind pushed against the one tree I could see. It lay almost sideways in the wind. The whistling noise grew into a low moan and then into a high-pitched howl. My little brother was fidgeting. He kept pushing against me. It made me mad and I pushed back. But every time I got mad enough to DO something to him, some other noise outside distracted me.
A window broke. I jumped. My mother held me down. She had curlers in her hair. She always had curlers in her hair. But on this day, some of them had come out and bits of her hair stuck out from the tight pin-curls everywhere else. It made my stomach sick when I saw the tears on my mother’s face. I asked about daddy and Bobby. She said don’t worry. I worried. The carpet smelled like baby powder and a strange mixture of dirty feet and the perfume my mother liked. “Intimate”.
Our house was built on a cement slab so we didn’t FEEL the wind inside the house but we could hear it like there wasn’t anything between it and us on the floor. It was like a wild animal trying to get in. I was scared. It seemed to go on forever. Then it stopped.
I jumped up. My mother said, don’t go outside but I ran, out into a changed world. The trees didn’t look so well, drooped to one side. Our sandbox was gone. The swing-set remained but the chains were wrapped around the other parts and our “carriage” the two person swing-part was twisted. Before I could look at much more the wind picked up. Why? My mother yelled. I zipped safely inside.
Back on the floor. My mother told me the “eye” had passed over us, that was only a short calm spot. Now the back side of the hurricane would have to go over us. SWEEP through was more like it. This time the tree I could see from the window twisted backward as the wind whistled into a frenzied howl that seemed louder than the first time. And it took longer. Worse. This wasn’t exciting, or fun. It was terrifying.
But it finally ended.
The days following the storm were cool and breezy, as if nothing had happened.
We came out of it with some broken glass and debris and rainwater on the floor. The baby was fine. My mother’s relief washed over all of us.
Now the exploring could begin. Outside was a wreck. Our garage leaned even more than ever. There was a handy hole in the back wall that we found useful when playing hide and seek. If you used the alley behind our house to count you could sneak a peek at what was going on through the garage.
Some of our fence had blown down. The part between the other neighbor and us, the cowboy neighbor. It took some months to get that fence up and so my brother and I watched as they brought a calf home from their ranch soon after the hurricane. The calf wouldn’t stand. They tried everything to get it to stand. They’d hold it up, prop it up. They even fed it from a bottle. Finally, they must have seen us watching and said something to my mother. She told us we had to come inside. My mother told us later they had to put it down because it couldn’t nurse. It made me ill worrying about that calf, thinking about that poor mama cow not knowing what was wrong with its baby.
I discovered where my father and older brother had been during the storm. They had at first decided to go down to our bay house to see to tying things down and getting the fishing poles, but they didn’t have time. And a good thing they didn’t go. The hurricane touched land a mile south of the bay house. That was where the storm surge was twenty feet. There was nothing left of that neighborhood except the bay house. All the pretty shingle houses – gone. Our ugly ramshackle wood house – fine. Much to my embarrassment, my uncle and father had allowed a tree to grow up through the eave of the roof. They simple added more roof around it. But this eyesore saved the house. While all the other homes were being washed away, leaving only brick chimneys to mark their former places, our house was lifted up and twisted around that tree and set down again. Except for the outhouse. IT was washed away. When they repaired the bay house, they added indoor plumbing. YES!
Instead of going to the bay house, they were caught by the fierceness of the storm at my grandparent’s house, not a mile from our home. It was fortunate they were there. A tree the size of Houston blew down, barely missing their home and while they sat inside praying for safety, the wind lifted their home right off its pier and beam foundation and set it down sideways in the yard.
I always loved the Wizard of Oz movie. I never disbelieved for a second that a twister couldn’t pick up a house and put it somewhere else.
Hurricane Carla was the largest category 4 hurricane to hit the Texas Gulf Coast to that date. Forty seven years later, Hurricane Ike rivaled Carla in size but not in strength. Though a killer, Ike was loosely woven and disorganized. Carla was tight and mean. Ike’s storm surge measured eight feet. Carla’s storm surge measured twenty.
English: Stylized lettering from a shield image formerly used by . Red version (#b11107ff) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
It is Day 26. I have lost two pounds. Glory be!
The weather is cold. The stark sunlight bares all the squish and frozen brownishness in the garden. Lots of s sounds in that sentence. Pamelot, I did that just for you.
The Welch house is fast becoming amazing. All the rot on the outside has been extracted board by mushy board. The kitchen no longer has holes in the floor. We are getting the gas turned on today so maybe there will be a little heat soon. The only day I didn’t see the house being worked on was the day we had the flood in the living room (It was 22 degrees outside).
I took the workers brownies today. I had them trailing after me, the pied piper of brownies, until I put them down on top of a pile of Sheetrock.
Did you know if you put the oil in the bowl before pouring the dry mix in, it comes out of the bowl easier?
And no, I didn’t eat a brownie.
Okay, while transferring the hot brownies from pan to plate, a bit fell to the side. Just a bit. It was excellent.
It is day 24 of my Hundred Days to Health marathon. I have lost and gained and lost and gained and lost – one pound. I keep my diet under 1,500 calories, heavy on the protein, low on the fat and sugar. I’ve only broken my code twice with potato chips one day and chocolate on another day. So shoot me.
I don’t know what else to do – I have begun racing a bike for two miles, I’ve upped my weight lifting. In January I lifted the equivalent of 12.8 elephants. How is that possible? Well, it wasn’t all at one time! All my machines at the Y are plugged into a computer program – FitLinxx. I can access my information online, and every time I use a machine it transmits the info into the program. They use elephants as an incentive.And I suspect they might be using small elephants.
So where am I going wrong? I haven’t really lost a bit of what I want to lose. So … what to do? What to do?
It was a cold and blustery morn. Over thirty states were covered in snow today (Wednesday). More snow than normal. Here in the south it was cold, though not nearly as cold as up north. Our wind-chill factor was in the single digits while the temperature hovered in the twenties all day. Unusual for us.
Britt and I went to the new old house to check the pipes. There is no heat working in the house and the project manager had turned off the water and emptied the pipes the night before the big freeze. I didn’t expect any problem.
We walked in and Britt noticed the frozen puddle in the dining room. There were mini-icicles hanging from a ceiling beam above it.
We went upstairs. Britt climbed into the attic. I turned the corner and stepped into the master bath just as a spout of water shot up from the drain pipe where the shower will be. Water spread out and ran beneath the two-by-fours of the framed closet. Britt went downstairs to look for something to mop it up. I heard him yell and ran down. Water streamed down along the ceiling beam in a cascade of water. He scooted the wheelbarrow that was sitting in the living room to catch water. It wasn’t enough. He ran outside and dragged two garbage bins inside. The swath of falling water was growing. The ceiling plaster was sagging in one corner. He took a broom handle and pushed up. Water gushed.
With nothing to wipe up the mess we drove home for some mops. We were gone about twenty minutes. By the time we made it back the water was frozen solid. We had to use a dust pan as a scraper to get it up off the wood floors.
I went upstairs to check the conditions of the second bath. It is the only surviving bathroom of the demolition work. The toilet was disgusting so I flushed it. Not a good move. Brown water shot from the wall behind the toilet, splashed across the floor barely missing me. I heard Britt yelling from downstairs, “What did you do???”
I rushed downstairs and water was pouring from another spot in the kitchen. At about this time frantic calls to the project manager produced the project manager. He came in calm as the morning breeze and told us that the water backed up because the plumbers had had their “pressure” test earlier.
They had left the pressure cuffs (that look much like blood-pressure cuffs) in the pipes. As the water froze and expanded around the cuffs the water pressure pushed them up and out along with the water. And the toilet? It is so old, they knew they needed to replace it and a few pipes around it. That was scheduled for this week.
The freeze just heightened the troubles a little.
So this week the house may get painted on the outside before it freezes again at the end of the week. And the toilet may get replaced. And because the plumbers passed their inspection we may get some drywall and tile in so that we don’t have flooding from upstairs to down. I’m only hoping we don’t have to deal with any poop-cycles ever again!
Note on the diet: Salads at fast food places have as many calories as the burgers. Go for the chicken sandwiches – for over two hundred fewer calories – as long as the words “extreme” or “deluxe” isn’t part of the sandwich’s description.
Second note: Onion rings have fewer calories than fries.
On days like today I am the most likely to cheat on my diet. Today I had some near misses several times but managed to only flub once.
Weight: 139 (actually lost one pound, can’t believe it)
fasting sugar: 120
Breakfast: Oatmeal-On-The-Go (220 C.) Tea w/canned milk (40 C.). Lunch: here’s where I flubbed, and I even searched Sam’s Club while I was there to see if they had any samples being handed out! They DIDN’T! AARGH! Popeye’s 3 piece nuggets (who knows how many calories – it was deep-fried, spicy and delicious) red beans and rice, and three slow bites of fried apple pie. Okay, I was good here, I didn’t eat the entire thing. Supper: Half (because of lunch) a chicken enchilada, another cup of red beans and ham (Toot! Toot!), and later when I arrived home, a glass of red Merlot (120 C). Oh! and I had a handful of pistachios. Mmmm.
I was at the Hyundai dealership across town at 8:30 with my car because my sun-visor had broken, so I was out of there by 9:30. Went to Home Depot in the middle of town to order a pedestal sink in BISQUE. They don’t have pedestal sinks in bisque. So I have to order it from the website. (I wish I’d known that ages ago, to save a trip). The sink is for the house I presently live in. I’m redoing the guest bathroom to update it to more of a period piece, more 1905, without the plumbing problems and cold, I’m sure. Then to work to pick up a grocery list.
Then back across town to my mother’s. She wanted me to go to Sam’s Club for her. I did. Then back to her place. She was dressed and ready to go to the library. On the way dropped off a manuscript for a special reader since I was in the area. After the library, out to eat (Popeye’s). What a beautiful day it was in Sugar Land. My mother and I sat in my car with the windows down and ate our chicken. I usually go to see my mother on Wednesday, but yesterday I had to wait on an inspector for one of the other homes.
After seeing my mother safely back into her sweet, senior apartment, I went home to let the dog out because it was about 2:30 and he’d been inside all day (awww). After that went to the grocery store for my job (my peeps) then to work about 4:30, though I usually try to make it a lot earlier than that, the day wouldn’t let me. Everything much smoother after that.
This was just the physical part of the day. I didn’t mention the worries, the concerns, (will I make it in time? [yes] will the dog have an accident? [no] is my car still under warranty?[yes]) I try to keep up, let it “flow” so to speak. While with the same breath attempt to watch what I eat. I know that if I can keep this up it will become a part of me and it won’t take so much effort.
English: A pice of chain link fence over some railroad tracks (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Too much about diet details and I’m losing readers in droves, all three of them.
So here is a fiction story just for fun:
THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR
It might have been white once, but now the house was a flaky gray. It sat lopsided among the forest of trees next door. We’d only lived there a few weeks but my brother and I noticed the house right away. We wanted to know who lived there.
I wanted to climb the trees, build a fort, but how could I without knowing what kind of person lived there. Whether they minded or not. Wouldn’t want to go to all the trouble of building a mighty fort, only to have someone yell, or worse, tear it down. I had to know what we were up against.
My brother is a timid kind of kid. I let him hang with me but he isn’t what you’d call dependable in a fight, being the first to run away and all. But being the new kids on the block, and not knowing another soul our age, he was better than nothing.
“Stop laggin’ long behind me like a cat’s tail,” I said.
“Awwww – right,” he mumbled.
But my pep talk didn’t do any good, because he straggled along behind wherever we went, be it on foot or bike.
So with him at my elbow, I decided to re-con-noiter the next-door place. “What ‘at?” he asked when I told him what we were fixin’ to do. “It’s lookin’ to see what’s what,” I told him.
We snuck along the low fence between our two properties. We had a big wood fence along our back yard but that house had an old chain-link fence sagging this way an that, all the way from front to back of the property line.
In the deep green shadow of trees the little house seemed like a satisfied thing. It didn’t need anything or anybody. That’s how it made me feel when I studied it. It was satisfied. And creepy. I just had to know who lived there? And could we built a fort in their tree?
The trees were of the chinaberry kind. I think they’re really called tallow trees but that doesn’t make any sense at all. Why call a thing something it wasn’t when it had these real hard little seeds all over it that stung like fire if one was to get hit with one during a chinaberry war. We used to have wars in our old neighborhood. My brother never got hit much because he mostly used me as his shield but he had a good arm for throwing. I missed our old neighborhood even more thinking about it.
The yard next door hadn’t been mowed in I-couldn’t-tell-how-long, but the Queen Ann’s Lace was taller than me and there were patches of ragweed as tall as the old house where the sun struggled through the leaves and hit ground. Who would ever let their yard get into that kind ‘o condition was beyond me. There were some pretty things, too. Some red lilies encircled one tree up near the front of the house. The pungent wild onion were green, the shade so violent it hurt the eyes. We took a few days to watch the house.
It’s black eyes stared back.
Nothing was happening fast.
After two days of that, I said, “We’ve got to sneak around back.”
“What about dogs?”
“There’s no dog. We would-a heard it by now.”
“Well, er, cats?”
“What’s there to be scared o’ cats?” I know I sounded put out because he caved.
“Awwww – right.”
We snuck. Or is it sneaked? Whichever it was, we did it and ended up crawling through the worst-scratchin’ trap in the world. Some kind of vine with thorns as big as our noses kept us from getting through for some time but with perseverance and a little blood we made it. Of course, I went first so I got the most scrapes but that was okay because at least I had back-up.
First thing I noticed was it was just as shady and thick with weeds back here as in the front yard. Only here it was worse. There were paths through the ragweed, like the kind animals make. The only spot clear of vines and vegetation was the house. There was some kind of placard or sign on the back porch door. It was white with some letters in black that were too small to read from a distance so we crept up real close to see what it said. It was under a porch roof that somehow had lost some of its will to be a porch roof. It leaned down like it was protecting that back door from intruders. That’s what we were – intruders. So I was about convinced that roof was waiting for us to step closer before it collapsed and killed us.
“Okay, we’ve seen everything.” I stood tall. I’m not afraid. “Let’s go.”
“I want to see what the sign says.” He had that stubborn set to his jaw, like a terrier standing over a bone.
I nodded and inched closer. “Okay, just to read what it says.”
The door was shaded. Dark almost.
Little brother hung back while I took the two steps to the top of the porch. At the top I turned around and gave him my best glare. He shrugged and came up behind me.
So what did the sign say? It said, “I don’t eat fish. I don’t eat birds. I don’t eat anything on four legs.”
Well, after reading that I looked at Little Brother and saw his eyes go real wide just as I heard the creak of a door opening.
I don’t remember too much about flying off that porch, and scrambling through the thorns though I’m still nursing the cuts, and I don’t know if we tumbled across that chain-link fence or if I tossed Little Brother over first (which he says I did) and I don’t know how we got inside our house, lickety-split. But we did. And we’re safe. For now.
Our parents can’t understand why my brother and I choose to sit this summer out. We don’t care about the television or the computer. And forget about building forts in trees. We spend our time staring at the house next door from the safety of our upstairs window that overlooks it. We’re waiting. For what? For signs of life, maybe – or waiting to warn any other kids to keep away.
Because we know.
If you take out fish, and you take out birds, and you delete four-legged creatures, that only leaves two-legged creatures.
Just like us.
One note about the One Hundred Days to Health:
Don’t take and eat snacks at the gym. It’s like taking treats inside the dog park. Take notice – ladyinthepinktoponthetreadmill – we will attack for the snack.
English: J.W. Sexton High School, Interior, Floor Mosaic, Drama Masks (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I was going to do the countdown backward for drama. But it’s so boring. Today I tipped the scale at 140.6. I’ve gained five ounces. How is that possible? No, wait! It’s muscle weight from all that exercising.
Funny.
I’m too bored to record what I’ve eaten. Just know it was oatmeal or salad. (Possibly 3 calories.) Except that my friend, Elizabeth, took my mother and me to lunch at Pappadeaux so it actually was a small (feeds 2 people, as opposed to medium which feeds 4 people, the large could feed a little league team if little league teams ate salad, which they wouldn’t if given a choice of anything else) Greek salad with lump crab meat. (possibly 2,000 calories).
But we won’t talk about that. It was wonderful to visit with Elizabeth and mom over ALL THE NOISE of the restaurant. By the time we left it had quieted down to three other tables. We really did have a nice time. Thank you Elizabeth!!!
Rebecca Nolen 