I haven’t worked for a while. A little depressed maybe; bored with my own company due to self isolation. Writing time, you know. I hope I’m back with new energy. time will tell. Anyway, here’s my contribution to this week’s Carrot Ranch 99-word challenge.
Sod house roofs were just more prairie
When my grandparents put in the septic tank back in 1951 when we got REA, they found the hewed rafters of Billy Arnold’s original soddy, wood that lay rotting in a jumble beneath generations of dirt and prairie on the level north of the house. When Grandma told me, I closed my eyes and pictured the blocks of root-frozen dirt and the roof, a growing prairie of grass and wildflowers. If I were the rabbit on the roof, would I vary my diet with some tough purple coneflower, or daisy fleabane? Perhaps I’d just stick to the succulent grasses.
“In the real world,
villains too often succeed and heroes, too often die,” says writer James
McBride — and that’s one of the great things about being novelist. “In
novels you can move matters around … you get to show the best side of people.
You get to show redemption, and forgiveness, and you get to show the parts of
people that most of us never get to see.” I loved this quote from Scott
Simon’s interview this morning on NPR. It articulates so well what I’m trying
to do.
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.
Another Carrot Ranch Literary Community 99-word challenge. Something about a carried wife. As usual, 99 words, no more, no less.
Sometimes it’s not about being carried across the threshold.
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.
Hogs are really clever, especially when they’re thwarding our wishes. These are actually my grandfather’s Hampshire piglets. We had long, white Landrace sows.
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.
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.
Those sibling fights can cause lots of damage.
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.
I never thought to ask. The dishes may have come west with Grandma Frank’s grandmother Sicily.
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.
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.
Couldn’t even wait to get inside. Had to eat his dinner in the parking lot.
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?
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.
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