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A non-Meme Monday


I don’t feel like meme’ng today and couldn’t find anything worth the effort of stealing for that purpose anyway. Today I want to hear from you, my gentle readers.

I am rewriting the first chapter of my memoir. I have the chance to pitch it to an agent who represents a friend of mine and I need at minimum the first three chapters written and polished. I am going to write some version of a recent post on Will’s last months in hospice. And I just want to say, I appreciate those of you who took the time to comment and offer your take on my disclosure dilemma.

Whenever I question writing and trying to publish the memoir, I hear from people who say “Write it. I want to read it.” but they never really say why or what it is they think I will be writing about that intrigues them sight unseen.

Rob is semi-busily composing his chapter in his head. His first months after Shelley died, I think. But as he pointed out, our lives have been intersected only a short time in comparison to the length of our lives overall and certainly our first marriages. What makes our story worth knowing? Worth the time it would take to read?

I remember a snarky comment – not here – that I read directed at Rob and I shortly after we married that went something like,

“I don’t need to hear about relationships and marriage from two people who’ve been widowed less than a year and been dating and then remarried for about a total of  two minutes.”

And though I think that sometimes “seat time”  is important, it does not necessarily make one an expert either. I have run across more than a few widowed people who believe that it is years out that gives when insight and the moral authority to speak to the generalities and larger truths of surviving a spouse, and yet some of the widows I most admire for their choices, compassion and wisdom aren’t even as far along in the journey as I am.

And anyway, my experience is atypical in terms of circumstances and the order in which I went through things, so I don’t see it as modeling for anyone.

At the conference I attended in May, I had a chance to sit with a publisher from South Africa and I quizzed her on the marketability of memoir. She said that from a personal standpoint the reason people read them baffled her. She found books on surviving tragedy more depressing than uplifting and a little bit voyeuristic, not in a good way. 

I suppose I have things to say in terms of dating after spouse loss, remarriage, family blending. I hesitate to get all “how to” though. I prefer the facts and how it played out personally with people taking or leaving it as they will.

So, here I ask again, what would you want to know – bearing in mind that I am as likely to really tell you as not – in terms of my memoir. Don’t be shy. But don’t be a snark either.

Body Heat


The last few days have been scorching and this practically on the heels of my whining about a dud summer. We don’t have air conditioning, central or window box. Even the heat waves we can get are not long enough to warrant the expense of a central system, but as our bedrooms are the dormer attic type, we caved and purchased one of those room units that vent to the outside via the attic. It only cools the upstairs and that’s with doors open, but it makes a difference in the quality of one’s sleep.

I grew up without air conditioning. When I was about fourteen, Dad purchased a unit for the kitchen window that basically cooled the kitchen and living room. The summer I left for university, for reasons I still don’t know, Dad decided to install central air. So while I was sweltering in a dormer attic room of Currier Hall, my siblings were living the life of Reilly with central a/c and another out of character purchase for my father – cable television.

Air conditioning was erratic in my apartment years. Sometimes I had it. Mostly I didn’t. It wasn’t until I was 33 and a first time home owner that I lived in true comfort during the sweaty Iowa summers.

When I moved to Alberta, Rob assured me that “heat”, “humidity” and “summer” were near mutually exclusive. The summer we got married, we had a heat wave of 30C or better for nearly a month and a half. Although the humidity really isn’t taxing on a non-native used to summers when it sometimes equaled the temperature, sleeping in an attic bedroom that never cooled was exhausting. Throw in the whole newlywed thing and we were both wrung out zombies for the first few months.

Last night reminded me of that summer. I was baked to the point of migraine. I woke once in the middle of the night and fleetingly realized that one could probably fry an egg on my stomach – and this was in a room with the a/c running its little motor out.

Today the winds have shifted a bit and there is a slightly cool caress in the breeze, but we are exhausted with the effort of keeping hydrated and staving on spontaneous combustion by whatever means necessary.

Hunting The Crimbleworm #fridayflash


Hunting the Crimbleworm

Crimbleworms are crunchy like carrots from the crisper and best served chilled with shredded cabbage and cucumber slices over a bed of crisps crackling from the pot.

Being the youngest, Jasper and I were sent to dig the crimbleworms though it meant rising long before the double sun and trekking two hours into the Tweed Forest which ranged the whole back side of the property we farmed at the time.

“Be grateful its not kraken I’ll be sending you for,” Mama would say with a swat of the wooden spoon that was an extension of her own hand when my brothers and I were wee. Pap had whittled it from one of the large branches that overhung near half of the veggie garden. He battled the shade until the day he died.

The Tweed is gone now. Even the charred cremains of the old wood have long since been blown to destinations far off, but when I was a girl, it was grand. Not a bit like The Otherworld that shadowed it and whose door is no longer marked, or gods be hoped, accessible.

Crimbleworms spent their days deep in the loam around the Spiraling Oaks but for a few hours just before the dawn when they would poke their wee blank blind faces above the dirt. For what? I daresay no one knows. But Jasper and I would perch like crows on the bench like roots of the oak with eagle eyes on the ground, a trowel in one hand and basket in the other and wait. It was important not to strike too soon or the ones not yet close to the surface would be frightened back to the root system.

Jasper would count off in a whisper that echoed in the stillness before full light, and when he said,

“Thirty.”

And we would leap like the tigres Old Mam told tales about in the firelight before bed.