Springing Ahead

I just read an article in the Des Moines Register cautioning gardeners not to get too carried away ordering spring plants just because the winter has been so harsh.

Too late.

I order plants like I buy fabric. Well, maybe not as impetuously as that. I do check the zone requirements and draw the line at fussy roses. But who can resist a strawberry and cream hydrangea or apple blossom tulips? And, for some reason, I am a sucker for any kind of sedum -- I think it's the sheer joy of the bees who tumble through the flowers.

One of the spring chores that has risen to the top of the list is clearing out trees, especially after this last go-round of ice. We lost a lot of limbs, thankfully none of which fell on the house or power lines. I hate it that the silver maples, which are brittle, are crashing down, but I'm ready to clear out the black walnuts, which are sucking the joy out of the front yard. It's clear that they are just junk trees that grew from the happenstance of a well-placed nut. No one planned them; they just are. And they just are a nuisance.

Dave's dad refused to cut down any tree, even if it was growing in the foundation of the house, and Ann Arborites, by the sheer nature of their environment, are extremely pro-tree. I'm certainly not anti-tree, but I'm over the mentality that you can't cut one down. It's sort of like deer -- I certainly don't want to shoot one myself, but I do understand that culling the herd is better for the overall health of the species.

And then they won't have to eat my hostas . . . and my dahlias . . . and my asters . . .

Cabin Feverish

Teddy is not the only one with cabin fever around here. It's not that I have anywhere I need to go or that I don't have plenty to do around here. It's just the idea of being trapped until the snow plow comes through that makes my brain go strange places.

One morning Dave and I sat around and tried to name all the NFL teams . . . and then their coaches . . . and then the quarterbacks. For someone who used to read at ballgames, I only missed two quarterbacks and one coach.

Then yesterday I got it into my head to see if I could name all of Iowa's 99 counties. I made it to 62 with a couple of "maybes". It's kind of amazing how names pop into your head at random moments. Dave and I were both upstairs yesterday -- he was working in his office and I was in my sewing room working on Pickle Dish arcs -- and I kept hollering out names for him to write down so that I could add them to the list later.

It's kind of scary to think of what's stored in your head and what you can retrieve -- and what you can't. One of my many talents is being able to name character actors from the 60s and 70s. Watch a rerun of Mission: Impossible with me and nine times out of ten I can tell you the real name of the villain and the heroine and tell you which Star Trek episode they were in.

Why can I do that? And why can't I just remember why I walked into the kitchen?

Oh, and by the way, there really is an Ida county in Iowa.

Winter Wonderland

I'm getting prepared for the next power outage. Buckets of water are on stand-by, as are the flashlights and candles. I ran the dishwasher; Dave is catching up on his laundry. And I made a salad because I got bloody sick of peanut butter the last time. Teddy has an extra box or two to play in since he can't go outside.

I'm trying to stay positive -- because it's been so frigid, maybe the ice still clinging to the power lines is brittle and will just fall off when the wind hits it -- but there's no point in playing ostrich either.

And, yet, it's still beautiful. I am so often reminded of the Emily Dickinson poem "There's a Certain Slant of Light" -- usually in the fall, but more and more this winter. About 3 p.m. the air gets a richness about it as if the cold has been absorbing sunlight all day and begins to reflect it back. The fences glimmer with ice, and unspoiled, unbroken expanses of white cover everything, like that white fleecy stuff you can buy at Christmastime to put under the creche.

I may have to finish my book by flashlight tonight and wear three pairs of socks to bed. It's a dead cert that I'll have to re-shovel the Western Passage, but for now -- an Iowa girl come home -- it's all good.

The Broccoli Speaks

from P.D. James' Talking About Detective Fiction

". . . however well I think I know my characters, they reveal themselves more clearly during the writing of the book, so that at the end, however carefully and intricately the work is plotted, I never get exactly the novel I planned."

I put the Christmas decorations away this weekend, and Dave helped me get the tree down. The holidays are officially over around here, and it's time to get back to work --which means it's time to put all my plot work into play--which means it's time to start writing the chapters comprising the whole book -- which means I'm terrified. Because what if I've got it wrong? What if I made a wrong decision -- sent a character around the wrong corner or killed off the character who's supposed to solve the murder? So I read this quote from P.D. James, who's written many amazing plots, with great relief.

I put a lot of trust in my characters, trust that they will tell me what happened when I'm not sure. After all, I wasn't in the room, but they were. And P. D. James agrees with me:

"It feels, indeed, as if the characters and everything that happens to them exists in some limbo of the imagination, so that what I am doing is not inventing them but getting in touch with them and putting their story down in black and white, a process of revelation, not of creation."

Once in a writers' meeting at a coffee shop, Zoe mentioned that she just wrote down what the voice in her head told her to. The rest of us nodded knowingly, but people outside the group started edging away, their coffee slopping unnoticed out of their cups. Writers and psychotics have much in common -- we both hear voices. And I'm grateful for that. It means all I have to do is listen and observe carefully. The heat's off.

Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird calls it "listening to your broccoli". I love that because putting words on a page in a certain order is often inexplicable. People have asked me how I come up with the stuff I write about or why I put sentences together the way I do. Darned if I know. I just do. Writing is more fun and productive when I let it remain a mystery. It's when I prod my characters to stand up straight and stop talking in line that the voices in my head dry up and I start to panic.

I don't have my book plotted out so minutely that it will write itself, and I can relax about that. It's exciting to see what pops up on the page, to keep discovering details and clues as I write. I've done enough creating to let the revealing begin.

The Western Passage

It's funny how quickly things can shift into metaphor.

It was a beautiful day yesterday -- unseasonably warm so I decided to go outside, make myself useful, and, as my Dad used to say, "blow the stink off". The first blizzard covered the west sidewalk under four feet of snow, and I was determined to break through because (a.) it was becoming more and more hazardous teetering through the smaller drifts to get the mail, and (b.) I'm stubborn.

It took two implements to accomplish my feat -- a snow shovel for obvious reasons and a spade to crack into the ice layer. At one point I was standing atop the drift trying to gain some leverage, and, let's face it, playing king of the hill. Happily I had climbed down before the UPS truck pulled in.

About halfway through the drift, the voices started in: "People have heart attacks shoveling snow, you know."; "You won't be able to move your arms in the morning."; "I heard about a guy who was swallowed by snow and paralyzed when the snow shovel hit him in the head." All kinds of rational stuff. But that's the way fear works in my head -- in a quiet, niggly voice that sounds remarkably like a Sunday school teacher I used to have.

Then I knew I had to keep going -- because I don't always. I let silly things derail me. I back down or go around, throw in the towel. I can't afford to do that any more because there are things I really want to accomplish this year -- finishing my novel, getting rid of our unsightly outbuildings, putting in new flower beds. I couldn't let a little thing like four feet of snow defeat me even if I did have a heart attack.

Which I didn't. And my arms move just fine this morning. And now I can retrieve the mail without having to harness the sled dogs.

A Family of Book Lovers

Christmas cards started coming yesterday, and one of them was from my cousin Sue who has taken on the yearly job of creating a Keenan calendar -- birthdays and anniversaries and other dates important to the Keenan clan. She organizes pictures for each month and often chooses a theme. This year it revolves around favorite books and reading, an apt choice for a family where the schoolteachers are thick on the ground. Most of the women have an education degree of one kind or another and are guilty of an awful lot of literacy.

I was excited because I can't remember a time when I haven't been starting, in the middle or finishing a book. Even before I could read, Mom would pile us all in the big gray rocking chair and read to us -- the Churchmouse Stories and Danny and the Dinosaur.

I used to tote around a pile of those little square books every time we traveled in the car. Then I graduated to Trixie Belden mysteries with which I humiliated my sisters by reading at ballgames and church.

When my nieces were little, I loved finding them books -- Professor Wormbog and the Search for the Zipperumpazoo and Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends. A couple of Christmases ago, I was delighted beyond words when Meredith climbed on my lap for a reading of The Adventures of Walter Kitty, the way we did when she was little.

I still like to find books for them, but now it's Water for Elephants and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. But better than that, they're now finding books for me. Samantha just handed me a copy of Going Bovine and said she couldn't wait to talk to me about it.

Keenan literacy lives on!

Scenes from a Snowy Playground

We woke this morning to another snowy scene. Light fluffy stuff this time, not the heavy-duty storm variety. Shelby County reported fourteen inches of snow after the first go, but I don't know how they knew for sure after it swirled around in the wind for so long.

It was so beautiful on Thursday -- the air was so rich and clear -- that we walked around and discovered the lay of the land in winter. It drifts high around the house and close to the fence line.

We didn't find deer tracks, but the rabbits were coming out of the woodwork. There was a path coming around the granary that rivaled the Oregon Trail.

The snow plow finally got around to us Thursday afternoon, and Dave and I were doing the happy dance in the window. If the operator saw us, he must have thought we'd succumbed to cabin fever. It funny because we didn't really want or need to go anywhere, but it was the idea we couldn't.

He didn't clear the dirt road to our west and it's kind of nice to have a private drive. More people use that road than I would have believed, and they pop up over the hill pretty fast. So for awhile we don't have to worry about being surprised.