Sayings & Stories

From the old days to today…

An Old Adirondack Hermit

2 Comments

water pump (2)

The picture here is of the rusty old water pump on the “shallow well” in the backyard at the Homestead…Pa found it in an old Adirondack dump back in the 1950’s and we’ve used it “decoratively” ever since 🙂

When I was just a little kid (before kindergarten-age), there was an old Adirondack hermit living in the woods up and around our area. He had a grizzly beard and looked around 75 or older; he walked with a sort of stooped gait, wearing a cap of some sort over his white hair.

For quite a while he had a “shelter” built deep in the woods, and he camped out there pretty much all year round. We didn’t know his name, but continue reading…

Fear and Loathing in My Kitchen

2 Comments

I come home from work to face villains in my kitchen.

It’s been a long day, and I felt quite virtuous to have contained myself to a salad and some plain roasted chicken for lunch.

chips

First the open bag of potato chips sits there, staring at me with a “Come hither” pose.

I resist and pull back in terror. But before I get more than one step away…

leftover pieI shift my head just a bit, and there is the single piece of apple pie leftover from Sunday dinner. It’s lonely, desolate, and exuding the need to join me (maybe with a nice cup of tea).

“No!!!” I shake my head and back away even further.

brownies

Just as I’m certain I’m in the clear, the dark, chocolately goodness of last night’s leftover brownies sings a siren song to me, inviting me to taste just a crumb. “A little bitty crumb won’t hurt you,” it whispers in a seductive purr.

Sigh.

In the end I succumb to half of the piece of pie. So far I’ve held off from devouring the rest, but who knows how long I will be able to be strong? Eating a celery stick isn’t going to cut it. I suppose I could drink some water, but that ruby port over there is looking far more enticing… 🙂

Anyone else have nutritional struggles, especially when you’re really trying to be good?  Sigh…

Nostalgic Music

2 Comments
big band

Credit: Blubrry Podcast Community

I took a ride to my hometown, this past weekend, to re-deliver my mother to The Homestead where I grew up after she’d been out of state for several weeks, visiting one of my older sisters.

I took my husband’s vehicle, which has a year’s worth of satellite radio available, and since my iPod wasn’t working, I started to play with the dial and found one of my bittersweet loves: 1940’s music.

This is probably another area where I’m a bit strange, since continue reading…

On Coffee – and my latest book

4 Comments

coffee framed“As soon as coffee is in your stomach, there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move…similes arise, the paper is covered. Coffee is your ally and writing ceases to be a struggle.”

Honore de Balzac (1799-1859)

Oh, how I wish the last sentence of this was true for me. Well, it is some of the times, but not always. Usually, I pour myself a nice cup – like the picture above (I just got that cup this year, when visiting farther north, because of the moose on it…more on that in a minute). I bring it over to my desk. Sometimes, I take a sip, but often I’m waiting for it to cool a little. And then, if I’m writing, like I was this morning, I get so engrossed in what I’m doing that I forget all about the coffee and by the time I look up, it’s stone cold.

So, I guess in that way, de Balzac’s statement is true: I just don’t need the coffee actually in my stomach to make it happen. 🙂

So, I decided to purchase that moose cup because I liked it – and I use visual focal points as inspiration when I’m writing. Coffee cups hold a special place in my heart: when I was working toward publication the first time, way back in the 1990’s when traditional publishing houses were the only way to go, I had a coffee cup of the NYC skyline. I looked at it to set my goal and continually remind myself that I was honing my craft toward signing a contract with a major player in the industry. I did and ended up writing seven books with HarperCollins/Avon. But the publishing landscape has changed and broadened, thankfully, and now there are other wonderful opportunities as well.

But back to this cup;  it plays off the title of my upcoming general fiction/women’s fiction novel Moose Tracks on the Road to Heaven. I’ve just added a book description for it to my page of Contemporary books. You can read by clicking on the title above or the link here.  I’m still working on the release schedule, cover, etc. – but the manuscript is finished, being edited, and should be released into the world by next spring. Exciting times for me as a writer, as I haven’t had a brand new book out since 2007 (BTW, the three historical romance novels out there under the name “Mary McCall” are not by me but by a different writer altogether).

My new book is a complete departure from the medieval historical romance I wrote previously and it’s very personal, as it’s inspired by my own background and some personal events and people. There are still more historical novels in me, I’m sure, and I will likely be adding to my title list in both genres…but for now, I’m going to celebrate this book, which was more than five years in the writing! 🙂

The Difference A Day Makes

Leave a comment
image

Sunshine outside my window this morning

Yesterday I posted about Rainy Days. Today, the landscape is entirely different, as you can see from the picture above, taken from the same vantage point as yesterday’s photo. The trees, decked in all their autumnal glory, seem almost to glow in the sunlight today, backed by robin egg skies and puffy white clouds.

But the change isn’t only in the outside world.

Today, my spirits are lighter. I’m making a concerted effort to focus on the positive around me and inside me, and to take baby steps toward keeping that balance I spoke of before. I, like many busy people who work full time at fulfilling but demanding careers (in my case two separate careers: teaching and writing), while also trying to be good spouses, parents, children, siblings, and friends, have times of feeling overwhelmed and unable to climb from beneath the pile of responsibilities, pressures, and even sadness or sense of helplessness. Lately, I seem to be having too many of those times.

But just as the world outside my window changes, so can I. Not much around us is truly in our control, but that much is.

My dear late father used to tell all us girls that, while we couldn’t control what happened to or around us, we could control our reaction to it. And therein lies a wealth of wisdom. In the years since his passing, I’ve found myself shifting away from remembering that like I should. I continue to miss his common-sense support, his unconditional love, and his wisdom-filled reminders. Sometimes I let the cares and worries overwhelm my days.

Today is a new day. Each day is a new day: a fresh page to fill with the writings of our own stories. Anne of Green Gables author Lucy Maud Montgomery captured the essence of this wonderfully when she said, “Isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?”

I’ve had a version of that quote posted on the wall of my classroom for 26 years. It is nice. And I’m going to try to remember that whether the rain comes down in torrents, the ice and snow blow and bluster, or the sun shines down…life – and each day in it – is what we decide to make of it. 🙂

Shades of the USSR Night Train

5 Comments
image

Waiting for a night train in Upstate NY

I live in a pretty suburban area (well, it’s a small city, surrounded by rural areas). We drive everywhere in cars, and the nearest (tiny) train station is about 20 minutes away.

Hence, it’s been a couple years since I’ve been on a train…and much longer since I took one at night. In fact the last time I rode a train at night was when I was 21 and an American student, living and studying in the former USSR.

Just this past weekend, I found it necessary to take a train at night again (long story involving some other travel and a death in the family, necessitating my attendance at the wake in another city). It was only an hour long train ride, from point A to point B, but waiting in the old station  – pretty much every train station in Upstate New York is “old” – and then standing at trackside, for the train to come in, brought to mind that other time and place from two and a half decades earlier.

I got used to riding the night train during the months I lived in the Soviet Union. It was the most common form of travel in and around the cities (primarily Leningrad and Moscow for me), and my “free” time after classes, which I used to explore palaces, museums, and the countryside around, usually brought me back into the home station during darker hours.

But I always felt and was “safe” because there was virtually no crime on public transportation or on the streets at that time (the citizens were too fearful to step out of line, and there were soldiers with big guns wandering all over the place)…but the atmosphere was oppressive to say the least.

My latest night train experience, I’m happy to say, was a little different (and the seats were more comfortable too). 🙂

The Real Things Haven’t Changed…

Leave a comment

A favorite quote by one of my favorite authors:

Laura

“The real things haven’t changed. It is still best to be honest and truthful; to make the most of what we have; to be happy with simple pleasures; and have courage when things go wrong.”
                                                                    ― Laura Ingalls Wilder

“A Country Kid”

Leave a comment
Ravine without Rebecca_edited-1

The ravine near the Homestead, where I’d find all sorts of natural treasures

I was always proud to bear the designation “country kid”, as opposed to what we’d (affectionately) call our metropolitan counterparts: “city slickers”. For most of my life, I didn’t know many kids from the city. There were only two who had the right to that title in my little world: two sisters from inner New York City who came up to live with our family through the “Fresh Air Fund” every summer. Over the years, those two girls (and later their two younger sisters) became a true part of our family, and we’ve kept in contact with them for the more than four decades since their last “Fresh Air” visit.

In the past five years, though, this term has also applied (in my imagination) to a very important character in my upcoming novel, which is based loosely on my fun, crazy, tragic, poignant always love-filled life growing up as one of seven daughters in an old-fashioned family living in a little “Cape Cod” style house at the foothills of the Adirondacks.  Of course he’s a fictional character, but I had a great time playing with the stereotypes again and utilizing some of the fun and teasing that can develop between people of two different social experiences. Maybe it’s not a surprise that one of my favorite childhood stories was “The Country Mouse and The City Mouse”!

Being a country kid means a lot of things to various people. To me, it meant the opportunity to live much of my childhood outdoors. During school months that meant an hour or two in the evenings and any weekend time not taken up by dance lessons or play rehearsal for whatever production I or my sisters were in…but in summer, it meant hours upon hours roaming the woods, investigating and enjoying nature. Many an evening at dusk, I would come home with burdocks tangled in my hair and dirt smeared on my hands, knees, and usually my shorts (from my unconscious habit of wiping my dirty hands on whatever was covering my legs).

5 of 7 daughters Mary and Deb

Me (on the left) with my sister Deb when I was around age 8, with long hair probably hiding snarls just behind my ears, and holding one of the walking sticks we would find and use to hike all over the woods

In fact, until I was around 12 and began to notice boys, I used to try every trick in the book to stop my mother from having to “help” me with my long hair. This included brushing or washing it. I told her I wanted to be a big girl and do it myself (using all of my acting skills) mostly because I didn’t want her to see the ever-growing matted snarls I had that I could never be bothered to comb through, instead just covering them with some brushed out hair over the top of them to hide them.

The picture at the top of the post is a location of much of my summer wandering, sometimes by myself and sometimes with a couple sisters, friends, or Pa (in those days of the late 70’s/early 80’s, we didn’t need to worry about kidnappings and such if we were out there by ourselves…it was a sense of freedom I so enjoyed and regret the loss of for my own children in current society). This is a ravine less than 200 yards from the Homestead. The base of it is dry in this picture, but you can see where the water would run  after snow melt and rains. The ravine was formed when glaciers moved through, carving out the Adirondack mountains after the Ice Age, and I was always finding interesting and wonderful things along its sides and bottom.

More than once, I found evidence of a prehistoric leaf or creature left in the fossilized shale. Growing or fallen along the bottom of the ravine I’d find plants of all kinds, flowers, leaves…and of course the occasional animal or bird carcass or bleached white bones. I learned quite a bit from examining the weathered skeleton of an owl, the skulls or jawbones of several small animals like opossum, fox, or raccoon. And once we stumbled upon the body of a large golden eagle whose wingspan was more than five feet.

I’ve lived and travelled both nationally and abroad, but nothing compares to the wonderful, free, nature-and-love-filled childhood that I enjoyed. I guess the old saying is true: there’s no place like home!

A Gift from the Heart

1 Comment

Pa sewn art

I stumbled upon this piece of “sewn art” in the attic recently. It’s something I made when I was around seven years old. My sweet mother had recently taught me a bit of hand-sewing, beginning with showing me how to thread a needle and complete simple tasks (like replacing buttons or making hems).

I’m not ashamed to say that as a child I adored both of my parents (and I still do). However, I’m not saying I never got angry or frustrated with them; I did so pretty regularly, all the way into young adulthood. But I kept my frustrations to myself 99.9% of the time, because I respected and loved them. Unlike in the world today, where many young people (whether on TV, in the classroom, or in one’s own family) often seem to have little compunction about speaking whatever they feel at a given moment without any kind of “respect” filter in place, I always tried to treat Pa or Ma with deference for who they were and are as people and the role they play(ed) in my life.

Maybe I was helped in that by being a pretty sensitive kid; the only thing a teacher, the elementary school principal (another story I’ll share soon), or my parents had to do to make me contrite (and sometimes even burst into tears with regret over whatever naughty thing I’d done), was to look stern and tell me they were disappointed in me. I never wanted Pa or Ma to feel that way about me, and so perhaps that’s why I wasn’t much of a rebellious child, teen, or even adult. Oh, I knew how to have a good time, and I did my share of stupid and even risky things in my youth, but the ways I tended to push the boundaries were pretty mild compared to some of my peers in the 80’s.

Anyway, back to this piece of “art”. I can distinctly remember sewing it as a present for my father for either his birthday or Father’s Day in the early 1970’s. I remember the effort the project took, but that I didn’t mind working really hard at it, coming up with the idea and then picking through Ma’s bags of fabric scraps to find just the right colors (regal, dark red and sparkly gold, so it would look important and wonderful when it was finished).

I painstakingly cut out the golden letters and “border” and then sewed it all together, placing a golden bow at the top. This was it: a most elegant and fitting gift for my beloved “Pa”. Looking at it from a more mature perspective, its drawbacks are clear, including how asymmetrical and ragged it is around the edges. But when Pa opened it, he reacted as if it was sewn perfectly and expertly from the finest fabrics…treating it like something precious and even doing me the honor of having it professionally matted and framed, and hanging it on the wall next to his bed.

It hung on that wall for more than four decades, staying exactly where he had placed it, until nearly a year after his death. At that time, my mother decided (with all of her children’s encouragement) that it was time to move forward and redecorate their bedroom. When work commenced and the framed piece was removed from the wall, I received it gratefully. But getting it back marked  the end of an emotional era for me – a time of innocence, love, and respect, both given and received. I cried a little when I got it home…and when the time is right, I can still cry a few bittersweet tears now for all it represents to me of the stern, exacting but also patient man who loved me so unconditionally and taught me so much.

As a child, I made this little banner as a true gift of the heart. As an adult, I realize that as imperfect, flawed, inexpensive, and silly as such gifts might be, they are indeed worth more than all the jewels and gold the world has to offer, and we should cherish them and the memories they evoke forever.

The “Attack” Cows

5 Comments
Cow

A cow in an autumn field near my current home, looking far more placid than the “wild” cows of my story!

Let me preface this little story by saying that 1. I was raised in the country but not on a farm, and 2. If you’ve ever been close to a cow (or a whole herd of them!), you know that they’re large, solid animals.

Ok, now that that’s out of the way, here’s my (funny and embarrassing) story. I was probably around 14 years old. I’d spent the entirety of my life until then with cows as my favorite animal. Horses were a close second, but there was something about the calm, peaceful, placid sight of cows in the field, chewing grass or their cud that made me happy every time I saw them (and still does).

It was a hot day near the end of a long, dry summer, and I was home alone – an unexpected treat in my rather large family. My mother was at work and my sisters were all elsewhere. My father was due home for lunch soon, but for that hour or so the house was all mine. It was a first taste of independence, and I was reveling in it…until I heard a thumping sound and looked out the window in the kitchen door. A big black and white head blocked out the sun and the creature’s  large, dark eye rolled as it lifted its nose and bawled out a cry. There was a full grown cow standing on the back steps of the house as if it was asking to come in! Suddenly, the cow shifted and banged its head against the window a few times in succession, making me shriek and run back into the living room.

What was I supposed to do? And why was the cow acting like that? Was it scared or angry or…rabid? Tingles went up my spine and the awareness that I was completely alone here shot through me. Before I could gather my wits together, a blur of movement outside the big picture window in the living room caught my attention. Then another out the side windows, looking over the garage. I snuck over to take a peek and almost shrieked again. There was a whole HERD of cows in the yards surrounding the Homestead and coming out of the woods on all sides. They were running, mooing, sometimes banging into the fence or the house like crazed beasts. Large, surprisingly fast-moving crazed beasts.

My heart was in my throat, and I tried to force myself to calm down to figure out what I could do. Should I call the police or what? Something was clearly wrong with the cows; they weren’t acting anything like the gentle animals I’d come to know over my 14 years of loving their peaceful, placid ways. What if one of them actually broke through a window and got in the house?

They’d shifted around into the back yard by now, away from the driveway, and the thought crossed my mind that I should try to make a run for it and see if I could get to the neighbor’s before the cows “got me”.

Just then I heard a motor and some tires on the driveway. Pa was home! He made his way slowly up the driveway, and a new fear swept through me. Oh, no! Pa would be crushed by these stampeding cows! I had to warn him before he got out of his car.

Yanking up the window, I leaned into the screen, waving my hands and shouting as I saw the driver’s side door open. “No, Pa!!  Watch out! Get back in your car! There are cows loose all over the place, and they’ll charge at you!”

Pa turned to look at me, and I could see he was holding back laughter. “It’s all right” he called out to me, before proceeding to grab a stick from along the driveway and walking calmly and steadily in the direction of the “herd”, calling out a sharp “Hiya!” several times as he tapped lightly on one cow or another to guide them back toward the woods from which they’d come.

When they were all gone, he came back into the house, laughing so hard he almost couldn’t catch his breath – thanking me for trying to “save” him, but explaining that cows don’t “attack”. He said that they were probably just thirsty from the hot summer day and had likely broken through the fence of the farmer’s field on the other side of the woods. The knocked over buckets in the yard seemed to attest to that likelihood.

I know my cheeks got red, but I got a good laugh out of it, too, once I got over my mortification. And from that day onward, my family has had some fun ribbing me about the time I tried to save Pa from the “Attack Cows”. 🙂