Apple Pie

Here’s to the opposable thumb! I sliced my left one along with the apples. Amazing isn’t it how much you need both of them?

The apples in question came off my very own baby tree. I’m still not sure if it (the tree) will make it in the long run, but I want to give it e very chance. I planted it three years ago and the leader broke almost immediately. (We’ve been having some unbelievable wind storms.) I’ve been coaxing the next limb into a more upright position. We’ll see how that goes.

But I digress. I got a couple dozen apples, some of them very nice. I only found two worms, but the skins and the outer layers sustained a lot of bug damage. So apparently spraying in blossom stage is good for worms, but I’ll have to learn more about managing for other pests. I’ve heard that spraying with ordinary dish soap works. Research required.

I’ve also got some problems with fungi. Only one of the three trees I’ve planted in recent years is cedar/apple rust resistant. I did spray for that early in the season and the trees did quite well until recently. Again, more research on timing and organic alternatives.

So anyway, I have two pies in the oven. Wish you could all come and have a slice.

Here’s the baby apple tree, straps working to gradually bring the secondary limb more upright. Don’t know if it will work.
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Categories: Non-fiction Our Prairie Habitat

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Refused

The six-sentence, GirlieOnTheEdge blog challenge prompt this week is refuse. After a lot of stumbling around thinking of something to refuse, I settled upon a nation’s scar that still hurts.

People called them cowards; the government put them in prison if they stayed in country; they lost homes and families if they didn’t.

Men who refused the draft during the Vietnam Conflict paid a price for their disbelief, as did those who believed differently, and those who went anyway—and the whole country paid right along with them. I think we’re still paying.

A friend admitted he didn’t believe. “But,” he told me, “I didn’t have the courage to disappoint my dad.”

I wonder how those believers and disbelievers felt when Robert McNamara finally said, the U.S. “could and should have withdrawn from South Vietnam” as early as late 1963—I know how I felt.

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Categories: Non-fiction

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The Greatest Gift

Here is my contribution to the Carrot Ranch Literary Community blog challenge. The prompt was the greatest gift. I think the question I’m answering here is what does it cost when a son gives up on his father.

My son and his father don’t get along and that means Ben is losing half of himself. My former husband gave us scary times and he wanted to make up for it, so when he got his life under control, he gave Ben the greatest gift he knew how to give—a horse. That’s because when he was going through the worst of his own adolescence, his horse provided him solace. During summers Ben spent in Colorado with him, they rode horses and took packing trips. Those were good times for Ben, but somehow he’s lost whatever they had.

Here’s my horseman son. Doesn’t he look relaxed and competent here?

Categories: Curiosities Families Non-fiction

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Hurting for Home

I’ve been reading about regenerative agriculture and it makes me hurt for home.

For several generations now, farms have become more and more industrial, more and more unsustainable, bigger and bigger. Look at monocultures and the millions of gallons of chemicals that make them possible, and I remember the farm where I grew up. 

The knowledge necessary to farm regeneratively has been disappearing, but I know how to do it. I was there helping my family with a diversified farming operation back when that was still possible. Mostly the genetically-modified seeds and agro-chemicals weren’t even available then, so we used alternatives.

We rotated crops like alfalfa that fix nitrogen with cash crops like wheat that require it. We were a small family on a small farm, but we mostly kept ahead of weeds by chopping them with machetes—early in the mornings when it was cool.  Pests and fungi had less chance of getting a foothold in the before-mentioned rotating fields. In spring, we scooped out the chicken coop, the barn, and corrals so we could spread the animal droppings on the fields with our honey wagon (manure spreader).

We didn’t need much cash because we grew most of our own food—cattle on the rough lands, pigs, chickens, eggs, milk, butter. We had gardens and orchards. We canned and froze a lot of food. We had farm ponds and game preserves where we fished and hunted, and invited the townsfolk to join us.

Sound like a lot of work? Maybe, it was but we did it together—when it rained and we couldn’t get to the fields, we went fishing. It wasn’t always idyllic. Sometimes it was really hard, like when a storm wiped out an entire year’s crop. But when the wheat got hailed, there was still corn and cattle and pigs. Farm economics demanded we get bigger—and bigger—or die and that broke my father’s heart. Literally. I’ll never forget all the farm equipment lined up in the yard for the farm sale.

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Categories: Families Non-fiction Our Prairie Habitat

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Mom’s Cardinal Rule(s)

This six-sentence blog challenge prompt from GirlieOnTheEdge is the word cardinal. I’ve been thinking about my mother this week, I guess, so here’s another bit of Ella Mae-ism.

Cardinal: the color of a tufted red bird that sings “pret- ty,  pret-ty, pret-ty” to his mate; the color of garments in the Catholic hierarchy; the color of the handmaid, Offred’s cloak; and a rule of primary importance.

My mother’s cardinal rule for her female children (that’s all she had) was, “You can do anything you want if you work hard enough for it.”

That translated into things like, “Can’t never done nothing, he died a long time ago,” and “Ignore it (your little aches and pains) and it’ll go away,” and my favorite, “Stand up, speak up, and pick up your feet.”

So, like the queen whose husband was off fighting a war when his enemy surrounded the castle, I stood up straight and tall and pretended I feared nothing, I spoke up for myself (the employee’s union didn’t hurt) so that I could advance with my male colleagues, I ignored a lot of “stuff,” and NEVER, EVER accepted can’t.

Now I’m revising my sixth book, even though I didn’t get started with this kind of writing until I’d retired.

And as for picking up my feet, I still work out barefoot (do almost everything barefoot) because the toe I drag always trips me when I wear shoes—sorry Mom.

Here’s Mom looking almost as shell-shocked as I suspect she was, but that’s another story.
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Categories: Families Fiction

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Bobbi Bowen

This week, the Carrot Ranch Literary Community 99-word challenge prompt phrase is true grit. For many reasons, my mother’s life provides an example of true grit. Here is one:

In 1937, at fifteen, my mother quit school and went to work singing in a nightclub—to support herself and her parents. For the next seven years, she dodged pinching fingers and groping hands. She traveled the Great Lakes and Eastern Seaboard and got stranded, alone, without a job. For three days, without food or shelter, she hit the streets until she found another, but as soon as the Army started signing women, she joined, then she got an offer for her own radio show that she couldn’t take because she already had a contract with her Uncle Sam.

My mother’s stage name was Bobbi Bowen. At least in uniform, she was guaranteed three squares a day and a roof.
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Categories: Non-fiction

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Two Protagonists, Yikes!

For my listeners: Due to technical difficulties, my recordings sound like it was made from inside a barrel. I apologize, but I’m simply out of time.

My current work in progress centers around two main characters. I’ve read that that’s against the rules, and I understand why–more so every day. The point of these two characters is to explore how much a stable family (secondary characters) can contribute to healing deep psychic wounds and whether a pair of committed, self-aware individuals can heal themselves and one another. How can that happen?

This novel is the third in a trilogy. I didn’t intend for it to get this massive, but there you are. In the first novel, I introduced Bobbi Bowen, stymied by economic depression from her desire to attend art school, and then I inflicted her with repeated sexual assaults, betrayal, and near starvation. In the second, I introduced Connor Conroy, a Nebraska farm boy, thwarted in his desire to attend college, who spent years traveling the West as a hobo and then got sucked into World War II as a combat infantryman. The third, my work in progress, puts them together, complete with their psychic traumas, to see if there’s a way for them to heal and thrive with only the rudimentary mental health care available in Nebraska at that time.

I’ve just begun my second draft and find that the point of view jumps from one headspace to another with breathtaking frequency. I knew at the outset that point of view would be tough in this novel, but I’m only beginning to realize the depth of the challenge. I’ve thought of using an omniscient narrator, but I prefer more immediacy.

HOWEVER, I’ve just finished editing a scene in which the POV leapt from one head to another five or six times, including a couple of jumps to a secondary character’s thoughts. It appears that this draft will be almost nothing but point of view rewriting, and that leaves out structure, actual character development, layering backstory, pacing, language, rhythm, and cutting the crap I don’t need. I even have a few scenes in which I will need diversity editing.

 This may take some time. I don’t suppose I’ll be selling boxed sets any time soon.

Categories: Fiction

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Zoning out

The word for the six-sentence blog challenge this week is Zone. I thought of dead zone, but that was too depressing, I thought of residential zoning, I thought of hardiness zones in gardening. And then there is IN the zone or zoning OUT. So here’s my GirlieOnTheEdge blog challenge.

I make my living behind a tough sheet of Plexiglass™—driving a Kenworth coast to coast.

Late at night under a waxing three-quarter moon, with a full tank, 1,000 miles of I-80 ahead before the next fill, and hardly any other traffic, I was alone at the wheel, in the zone, when I spotted the elephant in the middle of the road.

I locked up the brakes, watching the elephant get bigger in my windshield, smoke billowing from my drive tires in the side mirror, and my trailer staying mostly behind me where it belonged, not swinging around in a jackknife.

When I finally came to a stop, the elephant had vanished, so I drove to the shoulder, set the brakes, pulled on the flasher, and climbed out on the step, my hand cold on the hand grab, to track the elephant into the trees, because even Pennsylvania potholes aren’t deep enough to hide an elephant.

Three more times, I saw the elephant, her trunk waving like a benediction over the hood, somehow opening a window to a forgotten childhood trauma.

When the beast appeared during a blizzard in Nebraska, I packed it in because, if you can’t trust what you see with your very own two eyes, it’s time to get off the road and get your head straight.

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Categories: Fiction

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I Double Dog Dare You

This week for the Carrot Ranch Literary Community flash fiction challenge, we were to write something about the safe cracker’s daughter. I thought for a while about the stereotypical safe cracker, then I wondered what would happen with a little gender bending and maybe a dare instead of a crime. So here’s my contribution.

I was thirteen when Mom went to prison for cracking a safe. I’m actually pretty proud of her because she never took anything. It was just a dare.

She’d been raggin’ on my dad for not giving her jewelry—like her friends got.

“I ain’t got that kind of dough,” Pop said, “so when you rob a bank, I’ll get your diamonds.”

We knew she had the skills and what she didn’t know, she’d learn. But it was just idle conversation.

“Maybe I will.”

“I double dog dare you,” Dad said. “You ain’t got the nerve.”

But she did.

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Categories: Families Fiction

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Mama Tree

She’s three times as tall as my two-story house.

My gigantic American elm tree is dying. My best guess, going by her size and location, is that somebody planted her at about the time he built my house in 1906. That would make her 113 years old.

I’ve noticed for several years that she acted stressed. She kept growng epicormic branches—the twiggy branches that grow along the trunk. Those extra leaves gave her additional food-producing capacity.

Over and over, I noticed a stain on the front sidewalk. It looked like blood and I wondered why some small predator always killed its meals in the same spot. Then I realized the tree was shedding “blood” from a big wound.

It’s hard to tell how long she’s got—maybe a few years, maybe not. My tree survived repeated epidemics of Dutch elm disease, but whatever started her decline, I don’t think she’s going to make it. Because of her apparent immunity, I’ve saved one of her daughters. The baby’s planted where she will one day take over her mother’s job of shading this house.

I’ve been reading that trees communicate and share nutrients, even after death, through complex ecosystems of root fungi. I know that everywhere in my huge double corner lot I find her roots whenever I dig. I’m sure she’s in touch with her daughter. I hope she’s giving the little one a solid start toward a long life.

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Categories: Communities Non-fiction

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