Old Man Luedecke hired a backhoe to shovel a path through chest-deep snow to his woodland cabin, where everyone tumbled inside with gourd banjos and mandolins and fiddles and drums, and me and my camera, too, to capture a bit of it all.
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Willie Stratton is loud. And it makes us quiet. Everyone-there-with-their-mouths-hanging-open quiet. He wails and stamps and even on his own, it's blistering. He's a really nice guy. But not when he plays. When he plays, the whole world smiles and shakes.
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Tea parties and dance halls and lemon yellow picnic gingham, made by hand, with scissor snips at the seams. They find me in antique barns and Frenchy's bins. I am their Josephine Baker, and they are my rainbow tribe of orphans.
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Until we let go of being right, we remain in an endless loop of a You Did A Bad Thing—No, I Did A Good Thing gridlock. It’s an expensive one. It costs energy and turns everyone sour with its touch. It’s a parasite that entrenches deeper, widening the gap.
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There's a three-legged cat, a 1960s cocktail bar. She is never without Pimm's. She wears mustard-coloured tights and bright teal pumps and a black and white checkered miniskirt. Inland, she's rare to the point of scandalous. I certainly hope so, she says.
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You don't pass into made-it-on-your-own territory with a marching band and a fondant cake. You make it on your own mousetrap by mousetrap, taking it on because you may as well, and because live rodents are more icky than dead ones.
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I've been wanting to share the lazy, lovely day I had with singer-songwriter Kim Harris for ages. We poked our way through the woods across the creek on one of the fall's last golden days, bringing with us a bag of Billie Holiday and soft things and sparkly things and we played while the last leaves drifted to the ground.
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We went for pappadums and chutney and samosas. We talked about Charlie Chaplin, Lancaster Bombers, and swing dancing. We went to the most peaceful place I know because their great-grandfather never visited a cenotaph.
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Amsterdam was an infinite diorama with roses on vines and the indecipherable, en masse murmur of another language all around. It was the first time I was an outsider. It unfolded around me like a giant pop-up book, like magic.
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Mulch for the garden; the electrician for a back door light; insulation for the dining room; dad's iron fork to rip out sod and make a bed of soil along the back of the house; more trips to the greenhouse; a better axe to chop the scrap wood for kindling.
I love this list.
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Stealth to catch kids who evade the lens because they are unaware of it (bubbles and worms are more interesting) and to catch grown-ups who are too aware of it. Worrying about what nobody else sees, we flinch in front of unblinking glass.
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We assign each other homework: reading and wines, gods and shoes. The phone bleeps. We are 5,043 kilometres apart. There is nothing like fresh sawdust. We are sistering.
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I am the barest minimum, clean clothes picked out of a clean-enough pile, supper at 9, bedtime when the sun comes up. When it was time to finish, I wrote from 10 AM until 4:30 AM. 60,000 words edited in 18 hours without a blink.
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The doctors put me to sleep and went into my belly quick-quick and lifted you out! And you were so little. The littlest! They put you in the incubator and baked you like a cookie until you were big enough to come home and eat toasted marshmallows.
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What if evil thinks that it's good? Doesn't it always? … Never mind. I stare at a 90 year-old empty bottle of Kentucky Tavern Straight Bourbon Whiskey and wonder about the friendship, love, stories, and clouds on the night it was tipped dry.
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I don't know why it's always old music, but it is. Me and Billie Holiday and a coyote on pitch black sand. Me and Ben and Louis Prima in the kitchen. The sailmaker's chest, the captain's trunk, the patchwork of black and grey and pinstriped suit.
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Adult fiction? More pirates, a book three? Poetry? That plus editing, photographing, teaching. The year is stacking up. Somebody burst in and threw all the windows open and it was fresh and bracing and I think, maybe, it was all of them doing it all at once.
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You know when you rip things up or yell or slam a door? When you feel that way, there's a ball of red energy right there in your chest, under your skin, inside your ribs, on top of your lungs and all stuck up in your throat. It's red, a bad red.
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I wrote about a pirate ship and a secret clubhouse for spies, but I look grown-up. Except the babyface that got me kicked out of restricted movies until I was 26 now has the effect, a decade later, of people thinking sometimes I'm 26.
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Roald Dahl says you're a fool to become a writer, your only compensation being absolute freedom. He had more in the way of compensation than absolute freedom. He's got a point, though, even if his own point no longer applied to him.
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