Tag: novemberdaily

The firewood debacle

November 4th, 2015

I’ve had “get firewood” on our family Trello board since we moved into our house in June. In July, when we had our chimney cleaned, I asked the sweep if he had any recommendations for where to get firewood around here. He tilted his head and said, “Most people don’t share their firewood sources. It’s not easy to get good seasoned wood around here.”

I tilted my head back at him. I was skeptical. We are surrounded by forests and pickup trucks.

In August, I wrote about getting excited for autumn. In September I started calling around. I called the one number our chimney sweep gave us. I called numbers from “Firewood for sale” signs we saw by the road side. I replied to “Seasoned firewood” ads on Craigslist.

Sold out.

No answer.

Won’t deliver.

We’re flooded and can’t get to our wood.

Come get it with your own truck.

Will deliver a minimum of two cords for $485.

We wanted half a cord. We don’t own a truck. We’re not spending $500 on firewood.

For eight weeks this went on. “We can deliver a 6-foot pickup bed full.” How much is that in cords? No call back.

As of October 31, we’d had frost on the ground more than once, and we still had no wood. I was completely baffled by this. In Minnesota we had our choice of firewood options. One phone call and we’d have a standard measure of seasoned wood delivered and stacked the following weekend.

On Halloween day, before we even bought our pumpkin to carve, I was on the phone again. I finally found someone who sold in a measurement I could identify, and who would deliver. He sold in loads twice the size of what we were prepared for, but given the trouble we had finding wood, that was fine with me.

Derek, who is my new best friend, pulled his truck alongside the rack my husband built and dumped it within feet for easy stacking: a pile as tall as me of beautiful, seasoned, hard wood. He eyed the rack. “That will hold about half of this,” he said.

He pulled away, and my daughter and I started stacking. We filled the rack in about 20 minutes. I turned around and the pile didn’t look any smaller.

Hmmm.

I didn’t want to leave the wood piled there, where it would kill the grass, and we didn’t have a plan for where it would go, so I made a makeshift stand out of firewood and started stacking again.

Proud of my stacks.

There were a couple of times I thought my pyramid would tumble, like when you pull the keystone apple from a produce display and the whole thing collapses, apples rolling everywhere. I don’t think we’ll be sending our kids down to get firewood from that stack.

I love wood.

But it’s there. We have wood. Winter is coming, and we are ready for it.

Lots of wood.

For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
Salt

November 3rd, 2015

Salt on my lips when I sweat. A crust of salt on my skin when I swim, SCUBA dive, snorkel. Salt makes my eyelashes stick together, and my skin feel dry and tight, and when I open my mouth underwater, I taste the brine. Salt water stings the inner membranes of my nose if too much goes in it, drawing water to my eyes.

Salt is earth. It is flavor. It is crystal. It is crust.

Salt is foundation.

Salt is strong and vital, sold and earthy. And we eat it. We eat earth. And we want more. “Worth his salt.” Doesn’t that come from back in the days when salt was more valuable than gold?

I love thinking about consumables being precious. Not because they were rare, but because food was valued. Saffron. Spices. Salt. Do we value food anymore? Most of it is so cheap I feel like we don’t. Of course, that’s the McDonald’s aspect of food I’m talking about. Fine dining still exists, thank heavens.

But Salt. I like it on my skin. I like it in the sea. I like it in the air so I can smell it. I like it in my sweets to balance the sugar. I like pouring it into bowls, coarse sea salt especially, though Kosher will do.

There has been a gourmet salt thing recently — whole shops dedicated to pink, white, black salts. I wonder if the flavor differences are that noticeable? Or maybe it’s not just flavor but aftertaste, or compatibility with other flavors, or structure, or aesthetic. I’ve never tried a specialty salt. All of our salts are white: baking salt, fine and iodized and in a cylindrical canister; Kosher salt in a heavy box with a spout; coarse sea salt, also in a canister, though smaller and with one of those annoying plastic dispensers on top where you spin the lid to create different openings.

For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
Derelict

November 2nd, 2015

Oh boy. This must be a prompt a reader left for me. I don’t know the meaning of the word “derelict.” It sounds like it should mean shabby or abandoned, like a crumbling house with broken windows, a porch that’s caved in, boards falling off the exterior. A derelict house would have once been smooth and honey brown with the color of fresh wood, but in it’s abandoned state would be grey and splintered.

Like a haunted house. The thing with haunted houses though, is that they are not truly derelict, if derelict means what I think it means. A haunted house is abandoned by the living, but not by the dead.

Growing up in Savannah, Georgia, I did a report for school on the haunted houses of our town. My friend and I borrowed a video camera and interviewed the owners of some of the stately old houses of Savannah — historical homes downtown on the squares, and the Victorian columned homes on Victory Drive. We interviewed the owners and asked them to tell us ghost stories.

The only one I remember is one on azalea-lined Victory Drive. A kind elderly woman walked us through the rooms of the house, telling us strange hauntings that had happened in each. The room I remember was a bedroom. The walls were plaster and were painted a soft color — a subtle mint or a pale blue — and the gentlewoman told us of footprints on the ceiling. The room was for visitors, and guests had awoken in that fluffy bed, looked up, and seen impressions of shoes indenting the solid white ceiling. The footprints moved as if two people were dancing.

I loved that story. It didn’t seem scary at the time, but it was daylight and there was no dancing on the ceiling.

So is a haunted house derelict? I don’t know. I don’t know if even an abandoned house is derelict. I think I need to look it up.

*Derelict does mean abandoned. Score! Thank you to LRose for the prompt.

For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
Morning was quiet. And then it was not.

November 1st, 2015

It is 6:30 AM. It used to be that our house was silent this time of day. I’d get up and write while everyone else slept. I’d make coffee. Listen to the house creak. Listen to my pen scratch across the page in the quiet.

Now, our son, my husband, and myself are all up at 6 AM. We bump into each other in the kitchen while our son sleepwalks through toasting his waffles and packing his lunch, while I try to unload the dishwasher and make coffee, while my husband makes his tea and pours his cereal. Instead of silence I hear silverware clanking, toaster beeping, kettle whistling, refrigerator squeaking, our son singing to the kittens, the kittens meowing, and the trample of kitten feet as they race down the hardwood hall and slam into walls.

6 AM is not a quiet time anymore. Today I sat down in our cozy living room chair to write, but with all the activity, I knew I’d not be able to concentrate.

For the first time since me moved into our new house, for the first time since I painted my key lime ~~studio~~ office, I am writing in a room of my own. Until today, the café table in my office served as a horizontal surface for accumulating detritis: cords, keyboards, headphones, ipod, bills that need to be paid.

Today I cleared it.

I sit now at my clean, round table. I hear the hum of the basement dehumidifier, the muted sounds of chairs scraping upstairs, the rattle of the spring in my pen. On my table are a Krispy Kreme candle, a book of matches, a cup of ice water, my prompt box, timer, and composition book, and my wrist as it swiffs across paper and smooth red wood.

For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
Could blogging be my real work?

October 31st, 2015

I’ve heard in writerly circles that when you are going deep into your craft, you can expect the first two years to be your purge time. Your detox. Your cleanse. That during those two years you’ll write and write and write, and you’ll unclog the arteries, and you’ll get the gunk out, and then your real work can flow.

It’s been four years for me, and I’m still getting the gunk out. I think about what I used to consider to be the “real” work: the pieces I’m revising for submission. The ones collecting dust in that plastic stackable letter tray. The ones I’m not working on because I don’t want to send them off for someone else to approve. That’s not the work I want to do. That’s not what I choose to fill my free time with. The “real” work is not what I turn to when I have free time on a Saturday. What I turn to is my blogs.

So I’m kind of wondering. Could it be that blogging is my real writing work? Seeing as how I’ve got a piece that’s been awaiting revisions and submission for over a year, I think it is safe to say, Yes. Blogging is my real writing work.

And with that, I’m officially committing to NaBloPoMo: National Blog Posting Month. Every day during the month of November, I will publish a blog post. I’ve got my prompts. I’ve got my laptop. I’m ready.