As treasurer for the Nebraska Writers Guld, I need to spend the next few days (or more) reconciling the guild’s financial records for 2019. Since we moved to a new Web-based system, I haven’t had access to the accounts for months, so this may take a while, not to mention the fact that I have to pay sales taxes on Monday. As Douglas MacArthur said, I shall return.
Month: January 2020
The Carried Wife–Working Hogs
Another Carrot Ranch Literary Community 99-word challenge. Something about a carried wife. As usual, 99 words, no more, no less.
Moving hogs across a small open space. She feinted right. I followed. She ran left around me. My husband, already distraught, started screaming at me. For once. I stood my ground, stared at him. He took the few steps that divided us, picked me up, and started carrying me somewhere. I had no idea what he intended. Startled and scared, I bit his ear. He put me down, as I’d hoped, took a couple of steps back, wound up, and punched me in the face, a glancing blow since I was turning away. We never worked hogs together again.
Eleos
This book has blown my mind and I’m not quite finished reading.
I’m revising a novel set in the first years following World War II. One of my main characters is in Paris. Her lover was a member of the French Resistance. So . . .
I’ve been reading a lot about the war and the post war period and I recently stumbled on a book entitled Eleos by D. R. Bell. That novel encompasses not just the consequences of the Holocaust, but also of the Armenian genocide that preceded.
“In the Bible,” Bell writer, “God was willing to spare Sodom if ten righteous people could be found.” Ten people in a whole city seems easy. Bell seems to concur. “How low are our expectations of righteousness,” he writes.
The crux of the book follows immediately, at least in my thinking. Though there is much more to reveal about the survivors of both horrors, one of the main characters continues with his attempt to understand how either or both could have happened. “Like guilt,” he says, “the righteousness is individual, not collective.” He argues that a righteous person can’t absolve the murderer or murderers of their guilt. “the only redemption there is must be our own.”
Individual responsibility. I’ve written several times about our responsibility as writers to write actively, not because it’s more exciting, but because active writing assigns responsibility. The sentence, “Abel was murdered,” means something entirely different from, “Cain killed Abel.” It has to do with telling the whole truth as much as we are able. Even in fiction, our characters do stuff, some of it pretty nasty. We can provide backstory to explain how that character did that bad thing, but if you believe in free agency, the bad actor needs to be assigned responsibility.
Throughout the novel, Bell sets his characters, all victims of the two genocides, in a world that has moved on. These characters argue, over and over, that letting the perpetrators go free or suffer minor penalties assure that there will be another genocide, and another, and another.
In addition to that thought, I’m still processing Bell’s grey zone, “the moral compromise that prisoners make in order to survive another day.” How do we assign responsibility to those prisoners? I don’t have an answer to that.
I found the book unsettling in an important way. I’m still processing and struggling to imagine how we stop the next genocide when genocidal wars rage all around us.
Great-grandma Carpenter’s Sherbet Dishes
Here is this week’s version of the Carrot Ranch Literary Community prompt response, two days late and a dollar short. The prompt required something found in a hutch.
Grandma Hazel and her younger sister, Edna, used to have knock-down drag-out fights. One night it centered on who would wash the dishes. After a bunch of yelling and snarling, it degenerated into hair pulling. To keep from falling, Grandma grabbed her mother’s hutch where Great-grandma Frank displayed her fancy sherbet dishes. The hutch went down, breaking all but two of the dishes.
“That’s the only time I ever saw my mother cry,” Hazel said. Grandma Frank made the girls dig a hole in the back yard and bury the broken glassware.
Sis and I have the two survivors.
Epic Visions
Another GirlieOnTheEdge six sentence blog prompt response.
If you watch the news, you see epic fire in flaring, high resolution, yellow and orange, with edges of black smoke.
If you watch the news, you see epic floods in raging, muddy currents, high resolution images showing people’s roofs and belongings floating downstream.
If you watch the news, you hear epic numbers—millions of acres burned, thousands of people’s homes flooded or burned, people drowned or burned.
Watching the news, you see whole landscapes covered in black sticks—the remains of whole forests and grasslands.
You’ll see seared animals, some of them in clinics wrapped in bandages; you see people visiting devastated homes; you see people weeping or keeping a stiff upper lip with glazed eyes; you see people trying to help with grossly inadequate resources.
Are you overwhelmed yet?
Frogs and Toads
Frogs. We didn’t see many on our farm. The ponds were just too muddy, so I can’t personally attest to the precarious existence of frogs, or amphibians in general.
Though we rarely saw a frog on our farm, my sister and I captured many tadpoles (with a rusty old flour sifter our mom gave us). We watched them develop legs and eventually released them. If we let them go too near the house, our dog would try to eat them. The attack never resulted in a toad sandwich, but rather in a dog spitting and frothing at the mouth. I always thought that the toad peed in the dog’s mouth, but I’ve learned that those little bumps behind its ears secrete a nasty poison.
I’ve rarely thought of toads as predators, but they like cutworms and all manner of insects. Unfortunately for them, snakes (in the case of my photo) particularly bull snakes like toads.
According to the conservation Website, Save the Frogs, one third of amphibian species world-wide are endangered. Now maybe you don’t care about those slimy little creatures. I ran across a photo and a paragraph about frog-spotting in Costa Rica, though, and that reminded me of the bright-colored little guy I got to photograph there. Take a look at the little guy below. Don’t you think he deserves a fighting chance?
Crystal Lake
I remember Crystal Lake as a summer destination for our Girl Scout troop’s adventures.
By then, it had silted in and about all we could see there were frogs, toads, tadpoles, water striders and maybe a bird or two.
In my Dad’s high school days, however, it had a dance pavilion with bands like Lawrence Welk, ice skating on the pond, as well as picnics, fishing, and boating in summer.
That was after mechanical refrigeration ended the lake’s ice business that filled a large ice house in Hastings and hundreds of train cars with twenty-two by twenty-two-inch blocks.
Today, the lake has been dredged and turned over to the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission and provides picnic and camping facilities next to the site of the Little Blue River dam.
I sort of miss the muddy old place I visited, as well as the bygone gathering place I never saw.
By Design
A Carrot Ranch Literary Community prompt. Ninety-nine words, no more no less incorporating the phrase “by design.”
I am isolated by design. I wanted to write my own stories. I’d been wanting to write them for years. So seven years ago, I earned my MA in creative writing and I published my first book—a family memoir I researched in collaboration with Grandma Hazel.
I closed myself in my house with a computer and printer. I wrote and revised, worked with beta readers, and edited. I marketed, too, until my grandson was born. I became his primary caregiver and an infant became nearly my only companion.
A few weeks ago, I realized I’d overdone the solitude.