Yes!!! It snowed heavily during the night and it will remain well below freezing for the next 2 days. Yay!!
All I have to do is sit here in my snuggly (very) old house and write!
My backyard at around 7 AM this morning. These 2 snowed-over slabs of concrete in the foreground are covering up the original well, back before the house had running water.
Plus, I am almost donewith my stage adaptation of Tell My Bones, my script about the life of the folk artist, Helen LaFrance. I am really, really happy with it, gang. Finally. It is almost finished. And I am just so happy with it. It’s only the 5th version… But you know, you gotta just keep on going until it clicks.
Well, the Conversations with Nick Cave that have been going on in Australia and New Zealand this month are almost over. The reviews have just been so good — and I’m talking mostly about the people posting on Instagram who have been to see the actual shows.
(I know, all you Americans out there are going, “What the fuck are you talking about?? And why do I want to know this??”)
I’m only bringing it up because I sure wish that I could have a conversation with Nick Cave… I’m just sayin’… Oh well. Such is life in Crazyland, Ohio, where nothing happens but snow… But I will settle for that for now!
I am gonna go back to my writing now. Thanks for stopping in on this snowy Sunday in the Hinterlands! I leave you with this bit of awesomeness!! (God, I love this song! I could listen to it all day. And sometimes I actually do…) Okay! I love you, gang! See ya!!
I made a pot of potato-vegetable soup this morning and baked a batch of brownies because that was basically all I had left in the kitchen and I didn’t want to go to the grocery store. Although I’m sort of thinking I might have to bite that bullet and get the little Honda Fit started up…
However. The snow is really lovely to look at, and I did have to go out driving around a bit in it over the weekend — in fact, on Sunday morning, at the bend of Cherry Valley Road (yes, I live somewhere where they actually have a road named “Cherry Valley”!), looking up a huge snow-covered hill, I saw an amazing buck in the snow!
No, not this one. This is merely a reasonable facsimile!
He was breathtaking. Partly because he was still alive. Most people out here in the Hinterlands are hunters and, come hunting season, like to kill just about anything that God created and then cook it… (That part of living in the Hinterlands is extremely hard for me to contend with, since I am an animal-loving vegetarian.)
No, I haven’t moved into the new house yet, which is even farther out into the Hinterlands than where I’m living right now. I know the snow is really bad out there. And the river is frozen solid for miles and threatening to flood later this week. (I will live far enough away from the river that it won’t pose a risk for my new house, but some of my new friends around here might have to deal with the flood). I’m not eager to move in the middle of this snowy winter. It is all causing me a bit of anxiety, but soon enough, the move will be behind me and Spring will be right around the corner! (Anyway, that’s what I keep telling the cats.)
On that happy note, I’ve gotta get some web work done here for Sandra Caldwell. Then go watch another incredible episode of Bleak House and perhaps eat another brownie!! We shall see. I hope you’re having a great snow day today, wherever you are on this planet!! Thanks for visiting. See ya!
Yes, not only is it snowing here today (yay!), but all I have to do today is sit at my desk and write!!
I also have a wonderful photo of Tommy to share! It is extremely difficult to get good photos of Tommy, because she is incredibly timid and the trauma of the recent move lasted longer for her than it did with the other cats in her colony.
Tommy on the bed yesterday
If you click on the picture, it will enlarge. And then you will see that the table lamp next to my bed is, indeed, nearly 60 years old!!
Like all the other cats in Tommy’s colony (as well as my two tame cats who recently died), Tommy is a character in my upcoming book, The Miracle Cats and the Case of the Purloined Passport, illustrated by Valerie Wares.
In the book, Tommy is “Sister Thomasina” and she worries a lot. She often says things like, “oh dear,” and “dear me.” And, of course, she wears a nun’s habit because, in the book, she’s a church cat….
“Sister Thomasina” by Val — but without the habit
On the “very fun” front — I needed to come up with a pen name for another book I’m writing and decided to use the Wu Tang Clan nickname generator this morning and it gave me the most AWESOME nickname EVER!! The irony screams out on several levels. It is too good to be believed. Honestly, it could not be more perfect for me, it felt like it came straight from God, and it set the tone for my whole morning. Sadly, I cannot share the name with you here because then it would no longer be a “pseudonym” in the strictest sense of the word… (If you have never used the Wu Tang Clan nickname generator, do it today!)
All right, on that note, I’ve got to go to the kitchen and grab another cup of coffee and then get some more writing done here! As we enjoy our snowy day, I leave you with the song that’s been in my head for several days running (it’s even been in my dreams! What’s that about??). Enjoy, gang!
Nothing but snow here today, gang!! Wow. I could not be happier! And the snow is not supposed to stop until much later tonight. So — Yay!!
A perfect day to stay in, get all cozy, and do nothing! Oops! I mean do rewrites!! hahaha. Well, whatever. Today I have decided to do whatever the spirit moves me to do. I have made a secret pact with myself to BE HAPPY!!
And btw, that book pictured up there (& below) — Snow, by Roy McKie and P. D. Eastman — was one of my favorite books when I was a little girl in Cleveland; where all it did, all winter long, incidentally, was SNOW! Yippee ki yi yay!
(P. D. Eastman was the author/illustrator of many of my favorite books when I was really little: Go, Dog. Go! (notice the precise punctuation in that title, gang — doesn’t it just kill you?? Well, it does me, the self-same gal who is frequently wearing an editor’s hat.); A Fish Out of Water; Robert the Rose Horse (although with a red cover in my day); and Are You My Mother?)
But Snow was one of those really early “I Can Read It All By Myself” books that helped you learn how to read. Well, sort of. What Snow did, really, was have really, really, really short sentences that were easy to memorize and recite by heart when you were only two, so it sort of seemed to innocent bystanders (or bysitters) as if you were reading, when in fact you were about six before you could even spell your own name because some brilliant older people who should have known better decided to give you a seven-letter name, like, Marilyn, instead of the mere four-letter name that they had given to your older brother, Adam, wherein two of those letters were exactly the same, so is it any wonder that he could spell a name like that when he was, say, six months old??
Okay, I digress!
Yes, I loved Cleveland. I loved growing up in Cleveland. I loved all that snow in Cleveland. I truly did. I will never forget the very first time I became cognizant of snow. I was probably around 2 and a half years old. It was early in the morning, my mother was already up and in the little kitchenette making breakfast. I got out of bed, went into our little playroom-type room, where Shari Lewis and Lambchop were already on the black & white TV set, and I was suddenly spellbound by the sight of all that white stuff falling all over everything outside! I jumped up onto the couch with my mouth hanging open, as I stared out the window. Then, shouting, I hurried into the kitchen to alert my mother, who calmly informed me that all that white stuff falling all over everything outside was “snow.”
Well, I was delighted by the development. (Which is a good thing, since all it really does in Cleveland for most of the year is snow…)
We had a very small house in those days — a mid-1950s, California A-Frame style — on an unassuming cul-de-sac called Horizon Drive (if you open that link, you can get a street view of it on google and see for yourself that, while bearing a name as lofty, promising, and limitless as “Horizon Drive,” it is still rather unassuming — our house was all the way over on the south corner), but to me, it was paradise. Honestly. We had a big tree in the backyard, which my brother fell out of once (proof that pride-in-spelling-one’s-own-name goeth before a fall); we had a sandbox, and a swing set. And once, we even had a little pup tent that I was determined to spend the night in even though a thunderstorm was on its way, taking with me as my provisions, a little pack of chiclets–
Original Chiclets Tiny Size
–until my mother came out and suggested that spending the night over at my Grandma’s might be way more enjoyable than sleeping all night in a tiny little tent all by myself in a thunderstorm. (Turned out that — just that one time — my mother was right!!)
Anyway, I have wonderful memories of that little house. We lived there until the middle of 1964.
And here is a shot just now of part of my backyard, looking out from the sun room door (something like 8 more inches of snow is due to fall):
Does it kill you to think they are going to demolish all of this later this year? It does me, gang, but the upside is that I am going back to New York and will be living much closer to all my friends. Not to mention, Broadway, midtown Manhattan, those great museums, restaurants, etc., etc. Focusing on that helps take away the heartache for me. And one day, all this will be years behind me, just like Cleveland…
So! On that snappy note, I am going to close this and go figure out what will make me happiest today and then settle in and do precisely that. Have a great Saturday, wherever you are and whichever breezes are blowing in your direction, gang, be they balmy or blastingly cold!! Thanks for visiting. See ya!
Marilyn's Room 