Exploring Grandma’s house, I set a ladder into the attic. As if waiting for me, a leather-bound journal appeared in a stray sunbeam next to the ladder. Opening it, I journeyed back to 1886. With Great-Grandma, I watched workmen lay limestone foundation stones, level them, and frame the two stories with gables. She couldn’t wait to move into her very own space. At the end, she wrote that things started moving mysteriously. She heard noises. She described a ghost in the attic: brown hair, green eyes, dressed like me. She even noticed my silver barrette—her barrette that I’d inherited along with the house.
Ridin’ the Rails
In the movies, when you buy a DVD, you can get outtakes. I will post outtakes from my current novel as I rewrite and revise. The year is 1937. In the following scene, my character, Connor William Conroy, has jumped a freight in Roseville, California so he can get back home to Nebraska. He found himself in a boxcar with three other men.
Circled around on the floor, the men went back to their card game. Skinny dealt an ace of spades, face-up, to Steelrunner, Shillelagh passed, and Skinny dealt himself a king of hearts. “I’ll deal ya in next hand,” he said to Connor.
“Poker?”
“Five card stud. What you doin’ in Roseville anyway, kid?”
“Aw, I just finished up a couple of years in a CCC camp up at Tahoe and then I came here to see my cousins before I head for Nebraska.”
“Heard about that outfit,” said Steelrunner, throwing down his cards. “I’m out. Wha’d you do up there?”
“Oh, we built trails and campgrounds, cut some roads so people can get around.”
Skinny threw in some matchsticks. “I’ll bet two.” Skinny won the hand and turned the cards over to Connor. “Name your game.”
“Ya got jokers?”
“Yup.”
Connor shuffled, long fingers quickly fanning the cards. “Five card stud, deuces and jokers wild.”
As the men played, they talked about their homes and where they’d been.
“I watched the fires go out in Pittsburgh,” Steelrunner said, throwing down his hand. “Full house.” He looked at the others and scooped up his collection of matchsticks.
Connor frowned. “Fires?”
“The steel mills. You could see the glow for miles around. See, there was this hill—kind of a high spot—probably a mile or more from the mills out in the country. I’d go and look sometimes when I was off work.”
“What’d you do?”
“Stove tender.”
“Stove tender?”
“Yeah. See, in the steel mills there’s this whole battery of stoves to heat the blast furnaces. I had to run them stoves. Then they went out—steel workers like me wandering the streets lookin’ kinda dazed. They didn’t give us no warning. One day the mills was runnin’ and next we was out of a job.”
“Same with Cleveland,” Skinny remarked as Connor dealt another hand. “At one time, we made a hundred fifteen different makes a’ cars in Cleveland. We was number one in automobile production. Then, cars moved mostly to Michigan and we made parts—and then, like Pittsburgh, a guy’d go to work and the gates’d be locked. Nobody around. Like a ghost town.”
“Made good money ‘fore that,” Steelrunner remarked as he picked up his cards.
Connor looked around at their faces.
“Hit me,” said Steelrunner.
“Me too,” Shillelagh growled.
Skinny knocked the floor.
“We was doin’ all right, even after the crash,” Connor said. “Pop had money in three banks—lost ‘er all. But we was growin’ crops and prices weren’t bad.”
Skinny took a card. “Had me a house and a car—a Packard—a little bit of money to lose on the ponies down at Thistledown Racetrack. Then one day I didn’t have nothin’—no job, no money, no credit. Didn’t take long to lose the car and the house. Wife’s livin’ back with her folks.” He threw down a match. “I send ‘em a little money when I can.”
“Raise ya two,” Steelrunner said, throwing in his matchsticks. “Yeah, I had me a car. Wasn’t married, but I was goin’ with this really luscious tomato. Then, boom. No job. Pretty soon no money. Then no girl.” He shrugged.
Shillelagh folded without a word.
“I’ll call,” Connor said, throwing in three matchsticks. “How about you, Shillelagh?”
The older man sucked on a matchstick for a few moments, studying his cards. “Aw,” he said, “I was a banker.”
The other three stared.
“Don’t blame me for this mess,” he said, glancing around at the others then staring at his cards. “Just had a little family bank in Arizona between Flagstaff and Kingman on Route 66. Took care of the little businesses and ranchers ‘round there. We had a few tourists come through, so there was a motel and café. We did okay for a little while, but when the markets crashed the big banks started callin’ in all the cash and we didn’t have anything to loan, so the little businesses and ranches went out of business. Then we just dried up and blew away. Can’t believe I’m talkin’ about this stuff. Bums like us don’t talk about home—’specially not with strangers.”
“Must be the kid here,” said Skinny, eying Connor who spread his hands, palms up. “I’ll call,” Skinny said.
Steelrunner threw down four aces and scooped up his winnings—again. “That CCC place musta been a good place to work.”
“The best,” said Connor. “You wake up every morning to the smell of pines and spruce and a thousand bird calls. I couldn’t name them all—even half.”
As they unrolled their bedrolls and spread their blankets, he kept talking about Tahoe. The older men listened to Connor’s tales about the woods, the kind of place they hadn’t seen lately, but they volunteered more information about themselves. Connor stretched out on his left side, facing the others with his elbow cocked and his head resting on his hand.
“We camped in the forest. I learned all kinds of stuff—how to build a shelter with a few pine boughs; how to snare a marmot, ‘course I already knew how to butcher it; how to . . . gee, all kinds of stuff.”
“Say kid,” said Steelrunner, “I heard tell about some wild man people see up there from time to time. Say he’s all hairy and great big. They call him a Sass . . . catch or something like that.”
“Sasquatch,” said Connor.
“D’you ever see one?”
“Nope. But I’ll tell ya, we had somethin’ big rustlin’ around camp at night. Had a bunch of fifty-gallon oil drums stacked at the edge of camp to fuel our tent heaters. A coupla nights we heard the loudest racket, but nobody wanted to go out in the cold to see what was goin’ on. Well, in the morning we found them damn oil drums scattered all over to hell and gone. Took a couple of guys to right ‘em and roll ‘em back. Happened a coupla times. I don’t know how one normal critter could throw them things around like that.”
“But you never saw him?”
“Nope. Nobody did. Didn’t want to climb out and look.”
“Bet you’re gonna miss that place,” said Skinny.
“You bet. Nothin’ like it. In the summer we worked down on Lake Tahoe. Went swimmin’ in that crystal, cold water . . . and listenin’ to the Truckee River running in during the night when we were all rolled up in our tents—and the pine smell.”
“Yeah,” said Skinny, “Maybe we should of stayed around there and been mountain men. I bet we could shoot or trap enough food.”
“Sure Skinny,” Shillelagh interrupted, “you know how to survive in the wilderness.”
“I could.”
“Sure you could.”
“Couldn’t be much worse’n the way we’re gettin’ by now.”
“You might be right there,” said Steelrunner. “So did you sign up for CCC in Nebraska?”
“Nah, Came out here to see my relatives. I got a job for a while, pickin’ blackberries, stickers festerin’ in my fingers all the time. Then I picked them sticky prune plums, and then avocados and then I ran out of stuff to pick. The orchards already had all their hands, so I signed up for CCC.”
When the train reaches Salt Lake City, Connor’s plans make a drastic turn-around.
Countdown
We were starting high school and my friend Harold had asked me to join him in his basement to watch an experiment. He often invented fun stuff in his little lab and sometimes the results were real knee slappers.
He’d set up shop in the far northwest corner of the basement where nobody ever goes. I was thrashing through cobwebs when he told me what he intended to do. Instead of turning and running like any sane person would have done, I stuck with him while he finished his preparations.
He had me hunker down behind a bunch of dusty old boxes. “Watch this,” he said.
Before I had time to think about what he was doing, he struck a match and lit a fuse he had hanging out of the foundation.
“What are you doing?” I screamed.
“Ten.” he said.
“You’re not really going to blow that thing up,” I said.
“Nine.”
“Come on, Harold, you’ve set your little experiment under the sill plate of your own house.”
“Eight.”
“Harold, this isn’t funny. You could blast a hole in your house.”
“Seven.”
Harold had always been a nerd, but where he got the plans for his bomb, his little bomb as he called it, I had no idea.
“Six.”
“What are you doing?”
“It’s called an experiment. Five”
“An EXPERIMENT! You’re gonna blow up your house.”
“Just a little mixture of chemicals. Four.”
“Where’d you get the recipe?”
“Did it in science. Three.”
I could see he’d timed his fuse perfectly.”
“In the open, it just fizzles a little. Two.”
“But this is an enclosed space.”
“One.”
He paused.
“Zero,” I said.
Smoke started pouring out of the little hole in the foundation. I ducked behind the boxes and in a moment I heard an explosion and a spattering of stuff, probably concrete chunks, against the boxes.
Harold jumped up and yelled. “It worked! It worked!”
Well, he didn’t blow up the house. He did make a hole in the foundation and burn a little section of the sill plate. His dad made him do the repairs–with supervision, of course.
Emotional Clues In Short-Grass Prairie
I grew up in a family like a short-grass prairie. Very little shows above ground, but the roots run deep and they’re inextricably intertwined. I want to write about people like that, but it poses a serious challenge. I find my readers asking for more emotion, but the very lack of demonstrativeness is a large part of the point.
My writing challenge for this week, specifically for the book I’m rewriting and revising, is to develop an array of very subtle clues to the emotions of my characters. I need to do it without tears, or the kind that stand in the eye. I have no slamming things around, no yelling, no visible cringing. I need gestures that reveal the world, almost imperceptible changes in expression . . . maybe even atmospheric clues that provide foreboding.
Have you developed a basket of such clues for your own writing—or even for your own emotional life?
Traveling Again
I’ve been out of town for the Nebraska Book Festival in Lincoln and tomorrow I leave for the Nebraska State Fair, so I’m spending my time trying to catch up all the caning and freezing I need to do to preserve my garden produce. I now have 60 pints of tomatoes and the pasta tomatoes are just beginning to ripen. I have six gallons of green beans frozen and all the lovely pumpkins I expected to use for jack-o-lanterns will have to be processed and used because the bugs got to them before they even got ripe. I’m hoping the homeless shelter can use them because I’ve already canned all the pumpkin and squash my son and daughter-in-law and I can use. Any more green beans will probably go to the shelter too.
Grandma’s Comet
Grandma Hazel was 100 years old when Hale-Bopp streaked across the silent night sky at thousands of miles per second. For 4,000 years it had burned its way through the Milky Way, out of our sight.
When I realized I could see it through the back door, I asked Grandma to come look. She complied, more to please me, I suspect, than to see one more sight in a lifetime of looking. I pointed and described its position, but she hadn’t the gumption to lift her eyes. Maybe she was already out there, flying among the fire and ice.
Squirrel Yoga
From the rocking chair where I give my grandson his bottles, I look out my front door—all glass. Several times now I’ve noticed a red squirrel clinging head down to the trunk of the gigantic elm that shades my house. For all you yoga enthusiasts, I can describe the squirrel’s posture as cobra pose.
Cobra is difficult enough flat on the floor—lying on your tummy, hands under your shoulders, pushing your chest up and arching your neck backward. And then HOLD. The squirrel seems able to hold indefinitely. Since I’m always feeding the baby when I see him, I’ve been unable to jump up and snap a photo, but I have hope.
I’ve noticed another squirrel streaking up and down the tree. I recognize that one by its blond tail. I noticed it first before Mother’s Day and thought the other squirrels would bully it. I’d seen that happen on East Campus in Lincoln several years earlier. There the squirrel was black. Here, I thought I saw some nastiness at first, but the blond squirrel seems to have found acceptance.
Bruce is just beginning to focus on stark contrasts and movement, but I can hardly wait to start showing him squirrels. I remember how much fun I had showing my sons wildlife—until they became better spotters than me.
A Yellow Tent
Here’s another Carrot Ranch Flash Fiction Challenge. Ninety-nine words, no more, no less.
It was the yellow tent that did it. I hadn’t camped in years, hadn’t taken out the canoe, hadn’t even jumped in a swimming pool. When I went into Scheels for hand weights (gotta keep up my strength), it was in the next aisle. It looked so bright and lovely. I would ignore the aches in my joints and brave the wilds. Like my dad, I only needed a ring of bologna and a loaf of bread—and I’d make concessions to my years. In my yellow tent I would have my turquoise sleeping bag and an air mattress.
July Flurries
Sitting in my platform rocker, looking out at the street with Bruce, my grandson. in my lap, I’m reminded of my grandmother, Hazel. She would also sit in her recliner watching the street from her own little house in town—two doors up from the Methodist Church. By the time she moved to town, her great-grandchildren were in middle and high school and they spent lots of nights in her back bedroom, especially those nights when blizzards tore through the plains.
Here in North Platte, in late July, I notice snow driven vertically across the window—big wet flakes of early, warmer-weather snow. Actually, it’s not the result of climate change I’m seeing. The snow is cottonwood seeds spreading throughout town. The man across the street told me my tree is the scourge of the neighborhood. I’m inclined to agree. All that cotton chokes the flower beds and whitens the lawn like a yard of dotted Swiss fabric. Even mild winds bring down twigs and clusters of leaves. I mow baby cottonwood trees every time I mow the lawn. I suppose my neighbors do too.
When I was a kid on the farm, though, I knew that cotton from trees volunteered in the windbreak would drift to the pond. It would float for the fish to suck off the surface. We didn’t have carp in our pond, but on those days we could get away and go to the lake we could watch carp vacuuming cottonwood cotton from the water in the bays.
I’ve tipi-camped in the Missouri Basin during February where the ancient cottonwood trees protect the campground. No cotton that time of year, but a thick, wool, Hudson Bay blanket kept our beds warm, even when fifty-below winds scoured the bluff tops above us.
Here in summer, despite the annoyance of cotton and twigs, the gigantic tree provides shade from morning sun. A spreading American elm takes over throughout the middle of the day. I frequently look at the tree and consider having it removed, especially now when I’m watching flurries of cotton. But I would miss the shade and the cost of cooling the unshaded house.
Biking the Hill
Grandma’s Hill
My family lived on a farm at the foot of Grandma’s hill. My sister and I used to ride our bikes to Grandma’s. These were ordinary girl’s bikes with back-pedal brakes and no gears. We rode down our north lane to the gravel and looked a half-mile west, all of it hill—steep hill. Undaunted, we would start pedaling. Within a few yards, we stood on the pedals, pumping as hard as our legs would pump. I don’t remember ever riding all the way to the top.
But, oh what rides we had going home!
A Man or a Mouse
Years later, my oldest son was a little boy when he stood at the top of that hill with his bike. Grandma saw him before he hopped on, but not soon enough to stop him. He wiped out about halfway down. When she got to him, she asked what he was thinking.
“Well,” he said, “I thought ‘am I a man or am I a mouse.’ I guess I’m a mouse,” he said, lip quivering.
And yet, like Grandma said, he did it even when he was scared.
Sandwiches
My sister and I used to ride our bikes to Grandma Hazel’s house almost every day. When we got there, we were always hungry. (That was a really big hill.) We went immediately to the ‘fridge and built sandwiches—two slices of white bread, a slice of bologna, a slice of American cheese, some lettuce, a slice of tomato, and a few cucumber slices, mortared together with Miracle Whip sandwich spread. We tried a few other ingredients such as carrot slices and a bit of zucchini, but the carrots fell out and the zucchini didn’t add any flavor to our concoctions.
Sandburs
Grandma’s place, like ours, was a farmstead and a lot of sandburs grew there—the kind with the hard seed set off by a stiff spear, like a unicorn’s horn. Sis and I called them puncture vine because we often found them in our feet. We found them in our flat bike tires, too. We’d pull out the sandburs, but we had to walk our bikes home down that wonderful hill that gave us such thrilling rides when our tires were round.
My Aunt Nina, who lived with Grandma, declared war on those sandburs. In about two years, she’d pulled and burned every sandbur on the place and we never got a flat tire at Grandma’s house. I wish we could have persuaded her to repeat the performance at our house.