Under the Honeysuckle Vine

Hey, everybody!  It’s time for…

 Iva’s big day!  Today is the official launch date for Iva Honeysuckle Discovers the World (Disney Hyperion, April 2012). 

Iva!  Get on in here!  Everybody wants to meet you.

Iva:  Coming!  The elastic busted on my discovery shorts.  I stapled ‘em shut.

Heaven:  How’re you supposed to go to the bathroom?

Iva:  I was hoping your invitation got lost in the mail.

Girls, you’re double-first cousins and best friends, sort of.  No bathroom talk and no sniping.  Iva, look, Connie Van Hoven sent you a congratulations present. 

Iva:  It’s a miniature gardenia bush.  That’s so cool!

Heaven:  You’ll have it killed in a week.

Iva:  I will not–!

Iva, somebody wants their book signed.

Iva:  My public awaits me.  What a funny-looking kid.

Heaven:  Does this party have a theme?  All successful parties have a theme.

What do the decorations make you think of?

Heaven:  Poor people.  Don’t you have a digital camera?  Everybody has one.

The theme is about discovering and exploring.  I think it’s time for refreshments.

Iva:  Oh boy!  My favorite food in all the world, preacher cookies and cherry Kool-Aid.

Heaven:  Gackkkkk!  The Kool-Aid doesn’t have any sugar!

Iva:  It’s an acquired taste.  More for me.

Iva, do you know how preacher cookies got their name?

Iva:  Yeah, Miz Compton, she’s the one who makes the cookies, she says–

Heaven:  Don’t tell it!  Make people buy the book if they want to find out.

Bye!  Take a treat on your way out.

Iva:  There’s that funny-looking kid again.  Hey you, don’t peek at the ending.  Did he pay for that book?

That went pretty well, considering those two will never get along.  If you want to whip up a batch of Miz Compton’s Preacher Cookies, here’s the recipe:

1/2 cup butter or margarine…4 tbs. unsweetened cocoa powder…2 cups sugar…1/8 tsp. salt…3 cups quick cooking oats…1/2 cup peanut butter…1 tsp. vanilla extract.  Mix butter, cocoa, sugar, milk, and salt in a saucepan.  Boil for one minute.  Stir in oatmeal, peanut butter, and vanilla.  Drop by tablespoonfuls on waxed paper.  Cool. 

Iva:  And here’s my special Kool-Aid recipe.  Mix one package of unsweetened cherry Kool-Aid with water.  Do NOT add sugar!  Pour over ice cubes.  Do NOT make a face!  Guaranteed to put hair on your chest.

Well, there she is.  If you’re brave enough, get a copy of Iva Honeysuckle Discovers the World.  Guaranteed to put hair on your chest.

We’d only met once, at my house for lunch.  Before that we’d only “talked” by e-mail.  I first read about Donna in our local paper, a story on her family’s restaurant in Colonial Beach.  The article used her photographs.  From there I found Donna’s gorgeous blog and wrote to her.  As it turns out, we live only a few miles from each other!

Over lunch we found so many shared connections (reading, junkin’), we wondered how we hadn’t bumped into each other in the last 15 years.  Donna Hopkins, clearly my long-lost younger sister, suggested a girl’s day out.  Donna is a professional photographer and she offered to give me pointers.  I leaped at the opportunity.

It was windy but sunny-bright that day.  Because we have the same priorities, we first went to a new-to-me Goodwill where Donna bought a dress she could have worn to a U.S.O. canteen and I nabbed a 1930s Universal sewing machine.  By then we were feeling peckish so we had lunch at Goolrick’s,  fountain cherry Cokes and chicken salad on toast. 

We chose Chatham Manor for our photography session.  Overlooking the Rappahannock River, Chatham commands Stafford Heights.  Robert E. Lee proposed to his wife in the gardens.  Years later, in 1862, he stood on the opposite shore as Burnside, who took the mansion as Union headquarters, shelled Fredericksburg. 

I’ve always loved Chatham for its air of melancholy, sad statuary in slightly bedraggled gardens.  Spring softens the edges of Chatham’s brutal history with wisps of wisteria and bouquets of forget-me-nots.  We took pictures of cherry blossoms and bleeding heart and grape hyacinths poking through dead oak leaves.  Thanks to Donna, the statue photo above and the bleeding heart shot below are straight out of my camera! 

But as much as I love taking flower pictures, I felt that restless tug toward the unexpected.  Something not so polished and pretty.  We found it–a storage shed.   Nothing like a bunch of rusted tools and oddments to get us excited.  We weren’t exactly trespassing, an employee let us stay (after we’d barged in).  Donna and I snapped away, giddy over measuring spoons leaning against patina-painted beadboard . . .

. . . a tangle of mousetraps . . .

. . . a family of rakes . . .

 It was one of the best days ever!  We decided to write about that day on our blogs.  Here is Donna’s perspective.  I’ve always been grateful to the blogosphere for a chance to keep a sketchbook of my life, to connect with like-minded people, and to find new friends, some literally just down the road. 

Amazed we hit it off so quickly, Donna and I are still a little solicitous of each other (“What do you want to do?”  “No, what do you want to do?”)  There are heaps of places to go, things to do, pictures to take, cherry Cokes to sip.  We have loads of time to settle into our new roles as almost-sisters. 

Cherry blossom tree at Chatham Manor (1771) on Stafford Heights in Fredericksburg. 

Have a joyous Easter, everyone!  Eat lots of jellybeans!

One week from today, Iva Honeysuckle Discovers the World is officially out  and the world discovers Iva Honeysuckle!  To celebrate, Under the Honeysuckle is holding a special pub launch party and everyone is invited!

Iva:  Everybody?  Euple Free and Swannanoah Priddy and Mr. and Mrs. Priddy, even though they never talk to each other?  And Mama and Aunt Sissy Two and Lily Pearl and Howard?  Daddy and Uncle Buddy?  And Hunter and Arden?  And Miz Compton?

Me:  I said everybody, Iva. 

Iva:  Not Heaven.  I won’t come if Heaven is.

Me:  It’s your party.  You have to be there.  And you can’t leave out Heaven.  She’s your very own almost-the-exact-same age double-first cousin.  Her feelings would be hurt.

Iva:  Well, okay.  But only if she’s last on the list–Sweetlips and Yard Sale get their invitations before Heaven does.

Me:  Stay tuned for the humongous snit Heaven Honeycutt will pitch when she finds out she was invited after a hound dog and a cat.  

Iva:  And don’t forget the reporters at the Uncertain Star. 

Me:  There’s only one reporter, Iva.  You make sure Lily Pearl has her clothes on.  See y’all April 10, right here at Under the Honeysuckle Vine.

Iva:  Bring money!

The bad week started week before last, actually, with the news that my husband would need surgery on his right lung.  We knew this was a possibility, but hoped the lung would improve on its own.  We both took the news in stride, but five days later, I had a nervous breakdown in Wegman’s.

If you’re going to have a breakdown, Wegman’s is the place to have it.  It’s so crowded that one almost-sixty-year-old woman pitching a hissy fit in the middle of the Asian food bar is hardly noticeable.  I felt as jagged and ugly as those chain-sawed pirates.

My week continued to shred.  Persnickety had to go to the vet and came home with 5 new medications.  The earthquake knocked our chandelier from the ceiling.  I received a dismissive rejection on the novel I worked on for a year that was even more jarring.

Though I banned myself from grocery stores, I managed to get my hands on a shocking amount of sugar.   I quit exercising.   Irritable and jittery, I went back on Prozac.  This sounds like a simple solution, but, like many people with a mood disorder, I tend to resist medication.  It feels like failure, especially since I’d been doing so well without it. 

Except for one good day out with a friend, I spent last week flapping around the house like a cabbage moth in a Mason jar.   I searched for salvation in Kohl’s and on the Internet, letting myself down even more.

Finally Saturday came.  I packed my “field bag” (an old leather briefcase I got for $1) with my notebook and Canon and Nikon cameras,  and my husband and I set off. 

First, breakfast at our favorite restaurant.  I can’t resist taking furtive snaps of the people around me.  I take these pictures very fast.  Only the baby was watching me.  After breakfast, we stopped at Paul’s Bakery for donuts (in case we feel peckish), then headed east into King George. 

I dropped off donations at the Opp Shop (where I got the $1 briefcase on our last trip), a thrift shop entirely volunteer-run and only open a few hours.  You won’t find Goodwill Goddesses click-click-clicking hangers on the racks looking for Calvin Klein.  The people shopping here are in genuine need.  All money is poured back into the community.  

From there we went to Colonial Beach.  The ospreys are back, females squatting in nests, males gliding in with sticks in their talons because the missus insisted on remodeling.  I took pictures but the kit lens on my Nikon doesn’t have much zoom power.  I had better luck at the marina at Winkiedoodle Point.  This swan came right up to me, clearly looking for a handout.  I gave him my husband’s donut and he posed prettily.  (Notice I didn’t sacrifice my donut.)

The best part of our outing was coming upon a venue of black vultures (yes, that’s the proper term).  Thirty to forty vultures stood along the highway and perched in trees like a gathering of the local Rotary.  We screeched to a stop and I hopped out to take pictures, but vultures aren’t very sociable.  They flopped into the air, clearly disgruntled at people breaking up their meeting.

When we went home, I felt the frayed ends of the previous week had smoothed a little.  The anxiety of my husband’s third serious surgery is still there, but whittled down.  My favorite moment of the day serves as a reminder:  When you feel rotten, get out with an old friend (or your spouse), wait patiently, and someone will bring you breakfast.

Most people know Central Virginia was shaken badly during the 5.8 earthquake on August 23.  What they don’t realize is we’ve had dozens of aftershocks, tremors, and smaller quakes since then.

Sunday night I was awaked by the house shaking a little before midnight.  A few hours later, I heard a crash.  You see the result of the 3.2 earthquake.

Enough already.  We are not amused.

The absolute best part of writing fiction is creating levels of meaning and adding layers of texture.  If you’d asked me about this when I was beginning my career, I would have said, “Huh?”  It was enough to juggle characters and plot and dialog and have it make sense. 

I began by layering my historical picture books with different elements, particularly in When the Whippoorwill Calls and One Christmas Dawn, both set in the mountains of Virginia.  I remember spreading out my handwritten notes on folkways, food, crafts, speech, and legends from the region, picking and choosing elements to enhance my story.

I also added superstitions.  When I was ten, I read about “good lucks” and “bad lucks” in Superstitious?  Here’s Why!, a 1954 book I checked out of the library a hundred times.  The summer I was 15, I read all twelve volumes of The Golden Bough in the library’s reference room.  My first nonfiction work, “Never Buy a Broom in August,” a book of calendar-themed superstitions, went deservedly unpublished, but I learned to use that lore to brush texture into my fiction.

Now I’m learning Photoshop Elements and it’s all about levels and layers and textures.  While I try to remember to sharpen my bicubics and make sure my anti-alias is checked, I think about how I want to process my photos.  What effect am I after?  What do I want the photo to say?  It’s just like writing, only with sliders to adjust.

I use the same process in RadLab, a popular photo-editing plug-in.  I pause my mouse over ”stylets” with wonderful names like Granny’s Tap Shoes, Cinnamon Toast, Rusty Cage, and Grainstorm.  I pile on effect after effect, mesmerized by the enhanced texture of handmade bricks, the garish light in the sky, the desaturated grass that isn’t winter-dead or spring-green, but something new and different.

When I write, I’m conscious of adding a touch of Granny’s Tap Shoes or Rusty Cage, but most of the magic occurs during the revision process.   I boost scenes, dialog, and description with snippets of regional speech, dollops of little-known legends, scraps of folklore, tidbits of superstitions, and discover new and different aspects of my characters.

Writing the first draft is like shooting a photograph of an abandoned house.  Adjusting images with bits and bobs in subsequent drafts is like sneaking inside the house for a closer peek–a little risky.   What initially seems dull is actually quite beautiful with judicious tweaking. 

Tom (not his real name) spoke to me first.  “Good morning.”  My husband and I had just finished breakfast at our favorite family restaurant and he had gone up to pay the check.  We’d seen the older gentleman sitting at his usual table on previous visits.  On this particular morning, he’d been seated across from us. 

“Good morning,” he said again.  I glanced up from digging in my purse and answered, inanely, “Good morning.  I have allergies.”   “Oh, that’s too bad,” he said.

His eyes were very blue and clear.  I guessed him to be in his early 80s.  Something about the set of his mouth and his earnestness put me in mind of my husband’s father.  I stopped rooting in my purse and gave him my full attention.  He spoke with a slight stammer, choosing his words thoughtfully, his speech lacking the flat, careless accent of native Virginians. 

He always came in the restaurant alone, always dressed neatly–button-down shirts, pressed slacks, light jackets.  Up close, I noticed he knocked his knees together, a tic of some sort.  My husband said later he believed Tom had “been somebody.”  Tom wore the aura of someone who once carried a tightly-furled umbrella and practiced moment generating function in his work.

The next time we saw Tom at the restaurant, we were eating supper.  Tom came in and asked the waitresses if they’d found his coat, he’d lost it.  No one had.  He left, upset.  The next morning, he arrived while we were eating breakfast [Yes, I do cook!  My husband's appetite is still poor from surgeries and his weight is low.  If he has a craving for something, we go out.]   I heard Tom ask the waitress what the date was.  He studied the menu intently, though it hasn’t changed in the 15 years we’ve frequented this place, as if he were going to be tested.

We met Tom at the cash register.  I introduced myself and my husband.  Tom responded politely, but appeared vague.  In the parking lot, we saw him standing by his car.  He came toward us and asked us what day it was.  His fingers fretted with his keys.  I realized then Tom had probably had a mild stroke.   He got in his car and drove off.  A corner of my heart tagged after him.

The rest of the day I thought about Tom and how he managed.  His world was a sphere of familiarity, I imagined.  The restaurant, possibly church, the grocery store.  I suspected he operated fine within its circumferance, but sometimes life poked through its pliable sides and let in chaos. 

Tom’s house could be plastered with calendars, but if he didn’t look at them, they didn’t exist.  He could X out each day on every calendar, but the second he turned away, he’d forget.  Did he just X out the day?  Was it still that day?  His hand holding the pen would tremble.

I know a few things about stroke-related dementia.  It can creep up slowly, as it did with my grandmother, ending in electroshock treatments that left her sealed in a globe of silence.  Or it can hit like a locomotive, as it has with my aunt, shoving her into a shapeless place of hallucinations and jagged agitation.

I know a few things about memory loss, too.  At one time, calendars papered the walls of my office and a huge dry-erase board loomed behind my computer monitor, yet I still went to appointments a week early (driving 200 miles to one).  I bought a perpetual calendar, believing the physical act of changing the number blocks would cement the date into my head.  But when I came back into the room, I’d wonder if I’d already changed the blocks or if that was yesterday’s date.

Eventually, I learned to deal with my memory problems.  I threw out that bully of a dry-erase board.  I have one calendar that I often forget to look at.  I keep a running list of projects and appointments on my desk and carry to-do lists on days I have a lot of errands.  I stopped pressuring myself to remember and order restored itself in our house, like water seeking its natural level.

When the boundaries of your sphere of familiarity become elastic and unreliable, you patch it as best you can.  But you may still need help.  When I see Tom from now on, I’ll speak to him first and reintroduce myself.  I’ll ask him what his plans are for the day and slip the date in if I sense a hint of fogginess.  Then I’ll let him get back to the comforting round shape of his eggs, fried over medium, before they get cold. 

I’m taking an online photography/inspiration class called “Beyond Layers,” by Kim Klassen.  This week we’re highlighting a different color each day. 

Today is “blue.”  I didn’t have time to set up a still life even though I have tons of blue things around my house.  Instead I submitted this shot to our Flickr group.   This vignette resides on top of a tall bookcase.  The LP cover was given to me by the Goodwill Goddess. 

Besides announcing spring, the blue background in this cover is one of my favorite shades–robin’s egg.  It also combines previous daily colors: green, yellow and pink. 

Look for blue today.  You’ll find it in surprising places!

I’m working on a new book, mulling over the first scene.   To me, the first scene is like lifting the curtain on a stage set.  Where will the characters stand?  What are they looking at?  Unlike like my last book, this book will open with my characters in some place unfamiliar.  How will the new landscape affect them and how will they react?

The unfamiliar presents itself to us in shapes.  I need to select the shapes in my opening scene that draw out the best–and worst–in my characters.  I’m going to practice this theory on a day my husband recently spent.  We took off last Saturday to explore.

 Here’s our favorite waitress at our favorite little family restaurant.  I heard her say, “St. Patrick’s Day is the only holiday for grown-ups.”  Clearly, she was into it.  What shapes are seen in this image?  Circles!  Her earrings, necklace, coffee pot, cheekbones, the bobbing tops of her headband.  Her smile is a crescent, a slice of a circle.  Circles are pleasant shapes and put us in a good mood.

We stopped at a yard sale in King George.  The house is the former King George hotel.  The house caught my eye because it’s a series of squares.  The shapes created by the windows and porch posts create a pleasing symmetry, like the a drawing of a house by a child.  Boxes and picture frames add to that illusion.

I picked up a souvenir salad bowl and the owner filled it with stories about the house, a ghost cat, and the 90-year-old pine trees on the property.   A bargain for a dollar.  The bowl is a rounded square, easier on the eye than one with sharp corners. 

Next door was a thrift shop run by a cheerful volunteer.  I grabbed up this leather briefcase, a Kaye Gibbons paperback, and an old Kodak camera.  Price?  $1.58!  The woman told me more stories and I donated another $5.   I wasn’t sure why I bought the briefcase.  I think I responded to its dependable rectangular shape (after seasons of squashy purses).  It made me feel like Hemingway.  I plan to use it as a “field purse.” 

I made my husband stop the truck so I could photograph these two old buildings in a cornfield.  I listened to different songbirds–not the usual backyard robins and finches–and let my gaze be pulled upward.  The house and its dependency are small but tall, the peaked roofs led my eye into the blue sky, lifting my spirits.  On a cold, gloomy day, I might have a different reaction to these abandoned shapes sitting in a lonely field.

The flat land in this region is perfect for growing corn.   There were a number of little houses seemingly plunked in the middle of the fields.  Behind one of those little houses,  I spied a road that curved between the trees.  A path of wild thistle seemed to beckon me to leave the safety of the known–the solid cylindrical silos–and follow the road into the wispy unknown.

In Westmoreland State Park, people ate lunch at picnic tables and let their dogs play on the scrap of a beach.  This is a new place for us.  We’re planning to rent a cabin here when they open for the season.  We walked around to get the feel of the place.  The dock, a skinny rectangle, jutted out into the Potomac, a man-made structure connecting the shore to the water, allowing us to experience the river more intimately.  Our eyes were drawn across the river to the Maryland shore, eleven miles away.   The breeze brought the smell of fish and brackish water.

I felt both free and uncomfortable.  It was a lot of water, a lot of sky (clearly, I need to get out of my writing room more).  But it wasn’t abstract space.  This place had three dimensions.  As geographer Yi-Fu Tuan says, “When space takes on three dimensions, it acquires depth, and it becomes place.” 

A knowledge of place, Tuan goes on, is grounded in aspects of the environment which we appreciate through the senses and through movement:  color, texture, slope, quality of light, the feel of the wind, sounds and smells carried on the wind.

When I write the first scene in my new book, I’ll keep those thoughts in mind:  that the new environment will affect my characters both negatively and positively, based on their prior knowledge.  They’ll experience place through color, texture, quality of light, sounds and smells . . . and geometry.