Within four or six blocks from our driveway, one of us strikes up the song. We don't make a long performance of it, just a quick, twangy couplet. Off pitch, most likely, but in tune:

"We're on the road again/dee-doodle-deedle doh-dee-dee-dee."
​
It's kind of nice cap on the list-making, packing-and-stowing, what-else-are-we-going-to-need phase of a road-trip. It marks the start of a long book-on-CD (this time, Midnight Crossroad by Charlaine Harris), the continuing dispute with the GPS, and the best the snactitian can manage. 
​

You know how in The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins has the occasional, intense longing to be home, with the kettle just beginning to boil? He goes on the adventure, but he suffers with homesickness.

I don't think I've felt that for years. I get home, unpack, and start climbing that Matterhorn of dirty laundry. I turn the hot-water heater back on, pay the bills, make sure the cars start and the refrigerator hasn't keeled over...but I'd be just as happy to bounce right back out the door and have the next adventure already.

Before winding our way home again this time, we hope to sail the Flying Scot NACs regatta, do a bit of roller coasting at Cedar Point (billed as the Roller Coaster Capital of the World), and wrangle some farm chores...
​

A tall glass of iced lemonade beaded with condensation.

A pillow-lined nook on the porch overlooking open water or a garden.

The warm breeze carrying the scent of seaweed, or pine, or fresh-cut grass clippings. 

And some books.

I had the enviable job for a while of reviewing new books for the erstwhile Tampa Tribune. I'd go into my editor's office with a big empty LL Bean tote and then stagger out like a bookwormy donkey. I'd review books that I liked and ditch the ones I didn't.  
 
As a job, it didn't pay very well, but I did get to keep the books.
 
These days, I don't gobble up piles of reading material. Even with the bounty of the public library easily within reach, good books seem thin on the ground.  When I do find one, I wish I were still writing reviews. Word of mouth only goes so far.
 
And hence, a couple of summer reading recommendations.

If you are a fan of Stephen King's apocalyptic masterpiece The Stand, let me humbly suggest Joe Hill's The Fireman.

The parallels –– each a brick-sized opus with a New England setting, a fatal plague devastating the country, a pregnant heroine –– are entertaining but not distracting. Both books take place in the near future and tackle deceptively complicated moral dilemmas –– as is the wont in apocalyptic fiction.

The disruption of society in Stephen King's The Stand sets the stage for a showdown with capital-letter Evil in the form of Randall Flagg. In The Fireman, the enemy is less showy (not a Big Bad, as Buffy would say), which gives Hill's suspense an edge: what does victory look like when the evil is not separate?
 
Hill's take on the calamity is not a super-flu but a fungal plague that sets its victims on fire. His descriptions are vivid, his pacing brisk (hold on!), and the characters reveal themselves with a nice, writerly economy.  

The Fireman requires a chunk of time; and if you haven't budgeted some hours on the porch, you may have to forego sleep to finish the book. 

But isn't that what you're looking for in a summer read?

It's not fiction at all but the memoir of the author's friendship with Lucy Grealy. Grealy, of course, wrote the Autobiography of a Face about her lifelong struggle with facial cancer, facial reconstructive surgery, and a longing to be more than her own appearance. Patchett is the award-winning novelist who wrote Bel Canto, The Year of Wonders, and Commonwealth.

We spend a good portion of our time, we humans, trying to identify and categorize all manner of creatures, including one another. (Is that a boy or a girl? What kind of accent/haircut/outfit is that? One of ours or one of theirs?)

And, even when we can't identify, we sort things as either "good" or  "not-good."  

Any little kid can tell you that dolphins are nice and good, while sharks are mean and scary. 

Anyhoo. ​

​Judging is arguably how we survived for hundreds of thousands of years of evolution: correctly id-ing food vs. non-food, sorting bad guys from among the good folk of the world, drawing clever parallels between similar things.

"What's past is prologue"* even with as spendthrifty a pen (keyboard) as this one.  

*This quote from of course, The Tempest. Act 2, with Antonio and Sebastian piffling away on shore.

And with the prologue passed, the point of my piffle:
While strolling through my tiny kingdom, I find myself not just trying to name the plants, but also sorting them by my lights as bad or good.  ​I spent a studious half-hour or so on figuring out what these four plants were. Each with a maybe yellow flower, each growing rampant on the Would-Be Farm. Each a familiar mystery.

Right to left: the nettle is easy, but as it turns out, it's not common nettle, but Tall Nettle. The second is Garlic Mustard, then Cypress Spurge. And finally, with the dandelion-y leaves, Marsh Yellowcress. 

Tall Nettle (Urtica procerea) is a stinger: tiny hairs on the stem will give you a dose of formic acid and histamine that feels a bit like the bite of a fire-ant.  Dried, it's used to treat scalp problems, while traditional herbalists would suggest applying the stings to arthritic joints –– sometimes the cure is worse, wait, no, it does in fact work.
Nettle also nutritious: steamed or cooked as spinach, nettle is full of Vitamin A and calcium. So while I want to say it's a bad plant, it's got its good points too.

Garlic Mustard (Alliaria petiolata) is a garlic-scented member of the mustard family. Shocker, I know, with a name like that. Pretty solidly a baddie, although it's edible from top to toe. I will be grazing on this plant next spring, knock wood.

Cypress Spurge (Euphorbia cyparissias) is a recent (1860-ish) immigrant to the country. It's an ornamental that spreads rapidly. Its seed-pods detonate and can broadcast seeds up to five feet. Whoa. It's poisonous to horses and cows (but not sheep. Go figure.)  
​While the milky sap is poisonous to humans, it has been used to remove warts. That's something.
Cypress Spurge has some other traditional medicine uses, but I'm going to keep my gloves on and pull it as a weed. 

Marsh Yellowcress (Rorippa palustris) is a mustard and a cress, which is all to the good. It's native, it likes the boggy wetlands that stripe the farm, and it is edible raw (ooh! peppery!) or cooked (add a little olive oil and balsamic vinegar. nom nom nom). 

Is it ironic that I am basically re-discovering the common knowledge of my hunter-gatherer ancestors?

Sometimes a person just needs a silly song in a different language.

​!Hay Machete!

Once upon a time, the Would-Be Farm was buried under the Laurentide ice sheet. Then it drowned under great Lake Algonquin, and then it was wild open country.

For millennia, these meadows and rocky outcroppings were the stomping grounds for wood bison, wolves, and of course, the Iroquois Confederacy. (Jeff continues to keep eyes peeled for an arrowhead).

Then along came the Europeans with their pesky notions of land-ownership.

I'll gloss past the colonization. We know the basics: the French trappers and traders, the priests, the English settlers, the Revolution. Now, to zoom in to the details of that little corner of the world that catches my attention. In 1791, New York State was strapped for cash and land speculation was all the rage.

Leading to the Great Macomb Purchase of 1791.

This back-room deal sold off nearly 4 million acres of Northern New York for a whopping 8 pence an acre. Of course the sale was meant to encourage economic growth and settlement; the land was meant to be earmarked for Revolutionary War veterans.

Heavy sigh.

Nothing new under the sun: scheming and greed resulted in a solid scandal and several fortunes lost and made and not a lot of veterans hammering swords into plowshares. 

There is so much future to dream into reality with the Would-Be Farm: what else is it to plant a bunch of twigs but to wish an orchard to life?

But it's comforting to find out a little about its past.

To know, for instance, that the flowers (the iris and violets, hosta and columbine, lungwort and daffodils) probably came from this 100+ year span of women before me who cared for this farm: Julia and Harry farmed the land from their wedding in 1937 until 1980. Julia's mom, Georgiana was probably born on the farm in 1868, and spent her 80 years on this bit of earth. So nice to meet you! I hope you like what we are doing with the place.

References and reading material

https://npgallery.nps.gov/pdfhost/docs/NRHP/Text/64000558.pdf
 
​https://www.britannica.com/topic/Iroquois-Confederacy
 
http://www.omdhs.syracusemasons.com/sites/default/files/history/McCormick,%20Daniel.pdf
 
http://www.mlloyd.org/gen/macomb/text/mansion.htm
 
https://archive.org/stream/ahistoryadirond00clubgoog/ahistoryadirond00clubgoog_djvu.txtwas w
 
old abandoned buildings of northern new york http://oabonny.com

http://mlloyd.org/gen/macomb/text/amsr/wt.htm

​https://localwiki.org/hsl/Macomb%27s_Purchase

​http://www.ushistory.org/us/19e.asp

One of my favorite nephews was helping me shuffle boxes of stuff from one place to the other recently. With that mix of patience and impatience native to the under-20 crowd, he did not express the slightest flicker of curiosity.

Still, his doubtful expression as he slid the carton (Marked "A-16") into the back of the Honda made me want to explain a little.

"I haven't unpacked that box since before your Uncle Jeff and I got married," I ventured. Which would make it the equivalent to the Jazz Age to him. 
"Toss it!" he said, then, reluctantly, "Why?"
"Because there was space?" I said. "Because I never got around to it?"
"Huh," he said. "Welp, that's the last of the pile. Anything else?"

There wasn't, except my continuing impulse to explain.  And of course my own curiosity.

​I hadn't unpacked the box -- or possibly even peeked into it –– for a very long time.

​Under a layer of yellowed St. Petersburg Times packing paper, an old acquaintance gazed back at me.

So it's not a book that is going to have a revival, like Beryl Markham's West with the Night*. It's not a book I'm going to read again, ever. But I don't want to forget it. And so it has waited in a cardboard box lo these many years.

Wide Wide World essentially fired up the country's book publishing industry. The novel was huge. It outsold David Copperfield in England.

But Susan Warner did NOT make a fortune from it.  She and her sister started writing after their father lost all the family money in the panic of 1837. The girls were poor and writing was their best option to keep body and soul together. They managed, but they did not enjoy the life of bestselling authors. Susan went on to publish a book a year until her death at age 66. The Warner sisters have been mostly forgotten.

Mostly: they did manage to pass along their family property, Constitution Island, to the US Military Academy at West Point.  The island is part of the campus, although their house (Warner House, natch) is presently in a state of disrepair.  

​Sic transit gloria mundi. 

Resources:

*A quick essay about West with the Night.

What Katy Read: Feminst re-readings of "classic" stories for girls, by Shirley Foster and Judy Simons, University of Iowa Press, 1995.

Child brides in present-day US

Goodreads page for Wide Wide World

https://www.enotes.com/topics/wide-wide-world-susan-warner

"Loving The Wide Wide World: a novel, its fans, and their fictions" essay by Jennifer L. Brady, Harvard.

Margaret Atwood on "Women's Novels."

http://www.inspirationalarchive.com/1730/the-history-of-jesus-loves-me-this-i-know-song/

Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism, edited by Nancy A. Hewitt, Susanne Lebsock. University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Nineteenth-Century American Women's Novels: Interpretative Strategies by Susan K. Harris, Cambridge University Press, 1990

"Panics, Gifts, and Faith in Susan Warner's Wide Wide World" in From Gift to Commodity: Capitalism and Sacrifice in Nineteenth-century American Fiction, by Hildegard Hoeller, University of New Hampshire Press, 2012.

Susan Warner and "The Wide Wide World" by Mabel F. Sltstetter, The Elementary English Review, Vol 14, No 5 (MAY 1937), pp115-167.

The oddest images prompt stories.  

My writing friend Kate Raynes has the knack for locating just the right picture to springboard her fiction into the stratosphere. Or maybe it's the knack for writing unsettling stories related to those offbeat images. Go read some of her stories (don't overdose!) and tell me –– chicken or egg? 

I like a photo for warming up or for simple fun. Today the personal-care products seemed to be staging a drama just for me.

Story 1 –– Charged
They were both ambushed by the amorous impulse. It hit them as if their batteries had been given a big zap of power. It was maybe too much juice. They both suspected as much, but what kind of fool turns a back on the chance at big love? 

When they could reach one another, they necked like kids. Their kisses were all the sweeter for the hard job they worked, because who knew when they'd be spent? All their vim washed down the drain. It would be over too soon any way they looked at it, but they would make the most of their time.


Story 2 –– Like Lizards
The electric toothbrushes were at it again, she thought, must be the season. Pairs of lizards would be intertwined on the back patio, and snarls of snakes could be expected under the old apple-tree. The sukebind would be blooming, and the good lord alone knew what would happen after that. 


Story 3 –– Evidence
It wasn't healthful, but she seemed to be unable to stop herself from using the key she'd gotten from him those months ago. She turned the well-oiled bolt, opened the door, and there she would be again, walking through his apartment. It happened more often than she liked to admit to herself. 

It didn't make her feel good. His refrigerator always looked lonesome to her: not enough ingredients for a meal, leftover take-out cartons forming an archeological record of past dinners. The apartment seemed to lack something domestic. He wasn't a dirty housekeeper. He never left laundry piled up; he was as neat as a cat with his clothes. But still. 

Not as if they had lived there together, she sometimes reminded herself. She'd spent a few nights in a row from time to time, especially when they had been working on the Chapparel project, but she'd never gotten, for instance, her own drawer.

The top drawer of his dresser, she noted dully, was still harboring an innocent tumble of silky underthings from his new girlfriend. Or not, she thought with a moment of clarifying spite. Maybe it was him dressing up.

She used a pencil to lift a pair of lacy somethings out of the drawer. No such luck. They'd never fit him.

She had to stop doing this. Imagine getting caught. Caught looking at someone else's underpants. Even knowing he was out of town for at least the week, she felt shame wash over her.  She never took anything, never stole a single hair from his comb for a love-spell, or sniffed the dent in his pillow case for the hint of his unforgotten scent. Or for hers. 

​ 

He was not my favorite Bond, but he was a smooth Saint.

​And he was a pop culture icon; Amy Winehouse didn't have to explain anything past "like Roger Moore," because we got it. 

I'll skip the Nerf Herder song and also close my eyes against Roger Moore's own song stylings.  Goodbye, Mr. Moore. 

Weird, cool, and oddly entertaining:
​

How and why?  Who would do such a thing? 

I can only answer for why I found and listened to this Craftsman music as I was in quest of power-tool Christmas music, which I remembered from a long-ago NPR story about the things people play at the holidays.  The album (A Toolbox Christmas, natch) scores high in the category of odd, though not so well in the "listenability" department.

Well, kudos* to anyone who makes music.


​
*Word nerd alert: "kudos" is a singular noun that translates from the Greek as "praise." So in a grammatically correct universe, when someone is highly praised, she gets much kudos rather than many kudos. 

When asked, many of the manly American men writers of their day used to claim that writing is easy.  You just open a vein.

(Versions of the quote come from sportswriter Red Smith, sportswriter and novelist Paul Gallico, wordy novelist Thomas Wolfe, and his High-T Manliness Himself –– Ernest Hemingway. Thanks Garson O'Toole for this blog all about it.)

Um, okay, boys. Not for nothing, but bleeding is a lot easier.  

Which opens the door to the real the question: why write at all.  Why not just not write?  Get the other things on my list done. Retire or whatnot. 

I would, actually, if I could.

So far I have failed to give it up.  I've alluded to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner a time or two; it's  that poem with the old guy pestering people at a wedding, insisting that he tell them HIS story –– that's a pretty good illustration of what goes on over here. 

And yet, despite characters shouting and raising their hands frantically in the back of my skull-duggery room and a good playlist cued up, I am dipping into Reynold Price's wonderful Learning a Trade: A Craftsman's Notebooks 1955-1997. It's an annotated journal that gives me hope: in it, Price writes about his process. He dithers and wonders about his characters' motivations and choices. He revisits and re-considers his own moral position based on the things his characters do –– or what they must do, whether he wants them to do or not.

Price was a young man at start of these notebooks studying and writing in Oxford and then back in North Carolina, before he wrote A Long and Happy Life, his first novel. By the end, he's had a has successful career, including Kate Vaiden, and a dozen other novels, as well as screenplays and short stories, books with a biblical bent, and volumes of memoir. 

Here's a sample from page 77 of Learning a Trade. 

20 January 1957 LONDON
But look, isn't this story in danger of ending with a kind of cheat, that is with no resolution? What is the end going to imply?: simply that she leaves home for Norfolk or wherever? Maybe Wesley had better make some kind of gesture, however small. 

And page 129:
27 August 1960, DURHAM 
Rosacoke has told Wesley her pregnancy. His only reaction has been silence –– then question: has she known anyone else? Then simply telling her to come on, they must practice. Her own feeling through the revelation is chiefly numbness, tiredness –– though Wesley notices on her face the same look that was there on the November night (which was described then as hate). 


I haven't read the story in question, and may never do so. Can't say I am want to know about Wesley and Rosacoke.  What's interesting –– and heartening –– is that Price clearly spent a good portion of his waking life playing with his paper dolls, too, imagining an inner life for these imaginary friends, worrying about their actions and what it all means.  

Misery is not the only thing that loves company.