Month: October 2012

Old friends are the best!

5 Comments

Growing up, I was the oldest kid in my neighborhood by a couple of years.  There were only a few other families with kids around as we lived in an older neighborhood.  A couple of kids were three years younger than me, a couple were five or six years younger than me, one was nine years younger than me.  The closest kid my age – my best and oldest friend, and my maid of honor both times I was married, she is awesome – lived three and a half blocks down the street.  While that wasn’t exactly far away, the situation didn’t exactly lend itself to easy visitation, either.

After my mom passed away, my dad used some of the life insurance money to replace our sidewalk (which really wasn’t sidewalk so much anymore as it was part of the yard) and to build a garage.  One day when I was eleven, my sister and I and the aforementioned best friend were riding our bikes around the newly-poured driveway and garage foundation (the garage had not yet been built).  One of the neighbor kids wandered over and wanted to play with us.  She and my sister were pretty good friends, even though my sister is four years older.  My sister has a talent for making friends – I think she was good friends with every kid in our neighborhood at one point or another.

Anyway, we decided that we didn’t want to play with her that day.  As a rule, I never wanted to play with this particular girl as she always kind of got on my nerves.  But how many people always love all their siblings’ friends?  Anyway, since we didn’t want to play with her, we told her to go home.

This didn’t go over very well. At all.

Ten is for friends

22 Comments

 

Yesterday I wrote about my mother’s diagnosis with cancer.  Despite all the treatment she received and all the prayers said on her behalf, the cancer spread rapidly and she died the year I was ten, one short year after her diagnosis with breast cancer.

My mother was 31 years old.

I have now lived nearly two thirds of my life without my mother.  I remember her, but not as well as I would like.  I am lucky that I have had people to ask about her over the years.  She also evidently enjoyed writing, as I once found a notebook filled with poetry and a partially-used diary along with a couple of papers she wrote while in college.  I treasure these things for the insight they’ve given me into a woman I barely got the chance to know and for the insight into the child that I used to be.

Ain’t nine fine?

5 Comments

As you can see from the strap around her neck, shutterbug-ism runs in my family. 🙂
Photo courtesy of Martha DeGroote

Well, no, actually.  At least, not for me.  If you thought my seventh year was bad, hold onto your hats.

When I was eight, my mom went back to school to become a medical transcriptionist.  She finished her program a year later and was offered a job at a local hospital where she had interned while studying.  But within a month, it was clear that all was not well.  A visit to the doctor, followed by a mammogram, confirmed the truth.

She had cancer.

A mastectomy was scheduled and chemo was ordered.  But with a diagnosis of advanced breast cancer, a cure was a longshot.  She did everything she could to beat it.  Prayer after prayer was said by more people than I can count.

We spent a lot of time together that year, visiting places like the Grotto of the Redemption in West Bend.  But we also spent much time apart, as she traveled to the Mayo Clinic and the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics for treatment.  She even got on an airplane for the first time in her life and flew to Texas to visit a childhood friend.  The time apart was hard on me, as I was very close to my mother.  But it was not as hard as what was to come.

(c) 2012.  All rights reserved.

Write on through to the other side

10 Comments

Yesterday afternoon started off wonderfully.  I put the boys down for an early nap (they were both a little grumpy – must have been something in the air) and sat down to get some work done on chapter three.  All was going swimmingly for about a page and a half and then…apathy settled in.  My mind began to drift, the slightest noise was a disturbance worthy of hopping online, and I think I spent a good twenty minutes staring off into space looking at absolutely nothing.

Not wanting my rare and peaceful afternoon to be a complete waste, I decided to force myself to write, something I am notoriously awful at and about.  Explanation: I am terrible about making myself do things, especially things I’m apathetic about.  Also, when I posted it to authonomy, The Lokana Chronicles received many comments about pacing because I hopped from scene to scene to scene.  The problem?  I quit writing the scene well before I should have.  As a result, I spent a lot of my revision time adding onto existing scenes and praying I wasn’t just adding fluff.

Since the story wasn’t flowing well, I decided to work on my pitch.

Eight is great! Well, sort of…

6 Comments

Ah, eight.  Eight is great!  Two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate?

Okay, that was kind of random.

First Communion cake – my decorating skills are improving!
Photo by Kay Kauffman

For my kids, eight was a pretty great year.  Both of them participated in the ritual of First Communion at our church and were surrounded by family and friends as they celebrated the holy sacrament for the first time.  Tomcat was privileged to gain two new baby brothers within a month of each other during his eighth year, while Miss Tadpole spent her very first night away at Girl Scout camp.

Such a pretty smile!
Photo by Kay Kauffman

Miss Tadpole attended Camp Tahigwa, the very same camp that I attended myself as an eight-year-old.  I was so excited; I had never been that far away from home before and the brochure made everything look super fun.  With Puppy by my side, I could face anything that camp threw my way. Or could I?

Lucky seven? I don’t think so.

6 Comments

Isn’t she cute?
Photo courtesy of Vickie Hansen

When I was growing up, seven was somewhat less than fun.  When I was seven, my two-year-old niece passed away.  I remember sitting on my mom’s lap when she told us what happened and being nigh inconsolable.  A few years later, when my sister was seven, a girl in her class was killed in a car accident.  She and her family were on their way to church when they were hit by a drunk driver.  Her seatbelt snapped, she was ejected from the vehicle, and their van rolled right over her.  I remember thinking when we went to her visitation that she looked like she was seventy, not seven.

Finally, a race Jeff Gordon can win!
Picture by Kay Kauffman

But thankfully, seven has been a perfectly lovely age for my kids thus far.  Tomcat competed in his first Pinewood Derbyat the age of seven.  He even came in third place – not too shabby, especially since neither of his assistants (Seymour and Aunt M.) had any experience in Pinewood Derby racing.  Tadpole got a new little brother at the age of seven and was tickled pink because a new little brother meant she didn’t have to share her bedroom.  She was, however, disappointed that she had to give up her bunk beds.  Apparently she hadn’t thought of that when she said she wanted a brother.

The maternal instinct is strong in this one.
Photo by Greg Kauffman

I hope the age of seven will be equally uneventful for Cricket and Thumper.  But then again, who knows?  By that point, I’ll have teenagers running amok and things are never uneventful when there are teenagers on the loose.

(c) 2012.  All rights reserved.

Six years old and crazy already

21 Comments

I hate to make sweeping generalizations, but I think all writers are a little bit crazy in their own unique way.  Tales about eccentric and reclusive writers throughout history abound.  In my online writing group, the Alliance of Worldbuilders, every time someone pops their head into the forum thread to join in for the first time, we try to warn them that we’re all mad here.  Sometimes, they happily throw their own unique madness into the mix right along with ours and hilarity ensues.

My own particular brand of crazy began developing at a very young age.  See, there was this boy in my class.  We met in preschool and it was love at first sight.  Well, it was love at first sight for me, anyway.  He wanted nothing to do with me.  But that was only because he didn’t know me!  So I followed him around the classroom like a puppy, from the blocks to the sand table to the picture books and back.

When we started kindergarten, it was more of the same.  He made my little five-year-old heart flutter so!  But still, every time he saw me, he would take off running.  How on Earth was he supposed to get to know me if he wouldn’t stand still long enough to talk to me?  If he wouldn’t get to know me, we couldn’t fall madly in love!

But then first grade arrived.

Home

4 Comments

Once again, I’m in the mood for sharing.  I’ve just finished the second chapter of my WIP.  Yay!  Assuming my brain thaws out sometime tonight, I’ll be able to start working on Chapter Three in the morning.  There are still some important things I need to figure out and some major kinks that need ironing, but I’m still at the point where I’m just having fun and not majorly stressing.

Meanwhile, may I present a snippet from Chapter Two:

“Darling, wake up.  We’ve reached the Briants’.”

Maria slowly opened her eyes.  Every other time she had visited, Michael’s house had been friendly and welcoming.  Cozy, even.  His house, his family, was the exact opposite of hers in so many ways and she drank in the warmth and sense of belonging she felt here like a starving man set loose on an all-you-can-eat buffet.

But now, for the first time, she felt none of those things.  As she stared at the front door and thought about what she had to tell Mr. and Mrs. Briant, a deep and abiding sense of dread quickly overwhelmed her.

(c) 2012.  All rights reserved.

Kindergarten envy

8 Comments

When I was five years old, my mother cut my hair.  Well, she didn’t do it, she took me downtown to the Hair Clinic and had Angie cut my hair.  The point is, prior to the age of five, I looked like a girl.  When I started kindergarten, though, I looked like a boy.  The pictures of me on my very first day of school are about the only pictures of me in existence that look like pictures of my kids.  Several of my old teachers are still teaching at my old elementary school, where Tadpole and Tomcat now attend classes, and they’ve said more than once how much Tomcat resembles me.  I vehemently disagree with this, as he is the spittin’ image of his father and the older he gets, the more he looks like him.  But, at the age of five, with hair so short I couldn’t even put barrettes in it, we looked a little bit a like.

My first day of school. I was so excited!

There were two girls in my class who had hair long enough that it reached their waist.  Oh, how I envied their hair!  One girl’s was dark blonde; the other girl’s was red.  Every day they came to school with their hair in barrettes or ponytails or braids and every day I envied their ability to change their hairdo at a moment’s notice.

Four

2 Comments

Four.  Today is the fourth day of October, the fourth day of the blog challenge, and I must admit that I am finding myself a bit stuck.  I seem to have a shortage of four stories; I can’t remember any stories of myself at that age and the one I was going to relate about Tomcat’s first fishing trip can be found here.

But, now that I’ve been interrupted and had my poor fried brain distracted for a bit, I’ve remembered a story.  I actually had this one in mind a couple of days ago, only for it to be forgotten because I didn’t write it down (yes, I’m already suffering from CRS at 28).

Anyway…