Skiing, & a Family Tree in Progress

The boys were here for a long visit -- not long enough but a day longer than normal. We took them skiing. Well, they did all the skiing, but it was lots of fun sitting out in the sunshine people-watching. And the exhilaration of the boys after they came down the mountain for lunch was contagious. They kept saying how much they loved loved LOVED the mountains. I guess after their puny East Coast mountains, Angel Fire, at 10,812 feet, was a real treat. Sort of made me wish I'd worn ski pants and had rented some equipment myself.

Of course, I got off my writing for a few days. And will remain off of it for a few more, since we're heading for Texas at the end of the week. I have such mixed emotions about going back. I miss some of the people there, and will be glad to see them, Daddy especially. But I also know that going back is hard on my SO. He is reminded of things that are easier to forget up here away from it all in the mountains. And I definitely am not looking forward to temperatures in the 70s and 80s. I've gotten used to my cool weather! And I love it!

Snowed yesterday again. I took the dog out to romp in the afternoon after it had warmed to 31! All my Texas friends think I'm crazy, but I swear 31 degrees here is so much warmer than it is down there in the super humidity. Anyway, the dog is just so joyous when we romp like that. Her little eyes dance with fun and mischief. She loves to chase a toy and then play keep-away with me, taking me further and further up the mountains with each toss and catch. We found raccoon tracks, and lots of deer tracks. My SO has been putting out alfalfa cubes for the deer and they seem much appreciative. As do the little birds who visit us every day to snack on their seed. We have mostly sparrows, but some of the nuthatch are still around as well. I do so miss my kitty. He used to love to stalk the little birds. Never caught one, but it kept his mind active. When will my sorrow over losing him leave me? All I have to do is think of him and I cry big alligator tears.

One of the writing projects I have going right now is a story about him. I don't have much yet, and it isn't easy to write so I put it aside for long spells. But it is something I want for myself if for no other person to read. Sort of like some of the journals I've kept throughout my life. I take them out now and then and get new insights almost every time I do.

Something else I have been having some fun with is Ancestry.com. When we were in Denver at the market one of the wives told me about all the research she had been doing into her family tree. In fact, a long lost cousin turned up there to spend the day with her, and they seemed to have such fun. I can take one side of my maternal grandmother's family back to the early 1700s, but other family threads are just lost. I'm hoping they're not gone for good. Why, why, why don't people write these things down for posterity? You just never know when a future generation is going to take an interest, and it would be so simple to make it just a little bit easier for them to discover information and family connections.

Onward ....

The Mountains Around Here, and Their Names

The weather has been deteriorating all night, and this morning, early, I woke to the sound of the wind howling. It's that intermittent wind I've mentioned here before. I can almost imagine it building over behind the mountains, forcing its way up and up, and then collapsing on itself and into our valley. Sometimes you can hear the fierceness of this wind, but if you step outside it's calm down on the ground. It's a high wind, and often passes right over us without bothering to come down here among the mortals. I find the mountains and what they do to weather to be infinitely fascinating.

I have been studying topographical maps online of our valley and the mountains around us. For some reason, I have to know the names of the mountains, where they're located, the names of the valleys and canyons, where they're located, the streams. It isn't an easy thing to learn. For one thing, the people around here call everything variously, almost as if they're making all of it up on the fly.

For instance, I was told by the real estate agent who sold us this house that the tall mountain to the west, the one that has snow on it even in July, that mountain, she said, was Elk Mountain. And so for months I called it that. Then my neighbor down the street, who has a envious view of that mountain through their back windows, well, they called it Gascon Peak. I then began to look through my mountain books, and could not find a Gascon Peak listed at all. This mountain is well over 11,000 feet and is pushing 12,000. I know this because of the very fact of that snow that stays up there practically year-round. So it would stand to reason that a mountain that tall, in this state, would be listed in the books. Hermit's Peak is listed and it's just 10,600 and rarely has a snow-cap past March. But Gascon Peak seems to be what all the people living right here want to call the damned thing, I guess because it's down Gascon Canyon.  So I was going to just go with it, too. Except that it just isn't really IN me to do that.

The president of our association wrote a column in our newsletter in which he mentioned Gascon Peak and Lone Pine Mesa, another interesting name that I believe people just like to say. I ran into him down at the post office shortly after this article came out. Our post office is in the valley and from the parking lot there you can see almost the entire circle of mountains around us. I asked him to please point out Gascon Peak and Lone Pine Mesa to me, and here's the funny part. He couldn't do it. He sort of gestured with his hand and gave me a vague response, and I realized that he really wasn't certain either.

Back to the topo maps and my endless quest for the proper names and locations. And this is what I believe I know. The infamous Gascon Peak is really Penasco Grande, and it is 11,866 feet high. Beside it is Spring Mountain, also over 11,000 and scarred by a fire from about 7 years ago that began in Maestas Canyon below. Behind Spring Mountain, and barely visible from our valley is Elk Mountain, a sister mountain to Spring Mountain. Just in front of Elk Mountain, and blocking the view, is Bluebell Ridge, which runs right up to the back end of Hermit's Peak. There is a bald spot on Bluebell Ridge that keeps a snow-pack in winter, and that bald spot is called Bluebell Park. And finally, in front of Bluebell Ridge, hovering around the lower valley is Lone Pine Mesa, a very nondescript part of the larger loop of mountains. Lone Pine Mesa is in fact covered with pines, spruces, and other forest evergreens, but maybe at one time in its life it had a single pine. Who gets to name these mountains and why are they named as they are?

Another thing that I managed to find out, definitively is, that our house sits at 7600 feet, probably the reason I struggle to breathe every other day. A flatlander, born and bred at an altitude of about 6 feet above sea level, finds it hard to breathe when she climbs a ladder, let alone walks, talks and lives at 7600 feet. I'm hoping that someday this will stop being a struggle for me. Because I do so love these mountains.

Onward ....

Going Into eBook Once Again

THE PASSION OF DELLIE O'BARR became available on Nook today. Odd that it came out on Nook before Kindle, but Kindle should be out before the week's up. I like having my books available again, even if it is an electronic version. I got 1099s from both Barnes and Noble and Amazon for sales of LILY last year. Surprised me. I knew I'd been getting little deposits from them, but it adds up.

Re-reading THE PASSION OF DELLIE O'BARR to catch mistakes made in the conversion process is what got me interested in working on the old screenplay again. I have been doing more of that over the last few days. My son and his partner will be here mid-week next week, and shortly afterwards, we are making our three-month trip to Texas, so the screenplay is something I can take along more easily. But once we get back from Texas, I am going to set it aside and get back to the endless novel. I'm really chomping at the bit to dig back into it.

It is fun to work on this screenplay, although I'm sure I'm going to have to cut easily half of it before I'm finished. I like learning a new way of writing, delving into the mechanics of it, and just finding methods to get the story done through dialogue and action. That just has to be good practice for novel-writing, too. In prose it's often too easy to cop-out with a lot of narrative and internal monologues. Not possible with a screenplay, or anyway, not AS possible. I am seeing more and more movies with voice-overs than I ever used to see, and for the most part, it's in movies where the script has been adapted from a novel. But I'm not quite good enough at this yet to do that effectively.

Anyway, I think I'm really looking at this screenplay as more of an exercise. I do understand that it's even harder to have a screenplay produced than it is to have a novel published. And I'm not sure I would be willing to put in all the necessary work that would go into that process. I've had some dealings with movie people -- producers, directors, writers, etc -- and they live in a totally different universe than I do. Truth is, I don't want to live in theirs, so there you are.

On another note, I've felt the need to fill my loose time with some money-making endeavors. I've started selling again. Ladies fashion blouses this time. It's a new line of merchandise for me but not a new concept. Selling is basically selling, no matter what the product. Hopefully it will turn out to be lucrative. Otherwise, I'll quit.

Onward ....

A Tribute to My Mother

Yesterday was Groundhog Day. Don't think he saw his shadow here, but anyway, I can't remember what's supposed to happen if he does or doesn't. If it means winter is almost over, or that winter has a long way yet to go. Either one is OK with me. We had another two inches of snow overnight, and I like it when it snows. Every window has a beautiful scene outside, while it's warm and cozy inside. Good time for making soups and stews, which are a couple of things I seem to do all right by up here in this altitude.

Yesterday was also the 18th anniversary of the day my mother died. I often get the date confused with the 4th of February, which will be the 20th anniversary of the day my grandfather died. Both days have a poignancy for me, but for now, I want to focus just on one.

My relationship with my mother was tempestuous, to put it mildly. We often went months without speaking, generally because of some way she perceived that I had slighted her. She was quick to hold grudges, even against her children. She went to her death without speaking to my brother. She also had a nasty habit of saying critical things in a hurtful way, and in what my aunt (her youngest sister) called of being tit-for-tat on everything. When she sent out Christmas cards she made a list. If someone on the list reciprocated with a return card, they got a check beside their name. At the end of the season, those without a check got crossed off the list and those names would not get a Christmas card the next year, maybe not ever again. She also expected quick Thank You notes whenever she sent a gift. If she didn't get that Thank You, the gift recipient would hear from her. She was shameless about such things.

People are complicated. Mother was certainly no different. She could be difficult, yes indeed, she could. But she also delighted in holidays, would rather get a sentimental card or note than a funny one, or even a gift. She would sit vigil bed-side when someone was sick or in the hospital, and take over food to the family back home. She loved to dance. And sing. And did both rather well. I remember teaching her The Twist when I was about 9 years old, which made her only about 35 but I thought she was ancient, and so funny for wanting to learn the latest dance craze. Of course, long after The Twist was well out of fashion, Mother continued to do the dance whenever what she called "a fast song" was playing. I think she Twisted way into the 1980s.

She loved to play games, and was also good at most of them, most of the time, especially complex games with tricks and trumps and partners. Although she couldn't be called a good sport because she lost poorly. I remember once when she was playing Monopoly with me and my brother, and was losing pretty badly. When her token (always the Tophat) landed on Park Place, which my brother not only owned but had added several houses to, she refused to pay the rent and instead picked up the board and tossed everything on it across the room. So much for good sportsmanship, but later, probably feeling a little remorse over her behavior, she made peanut butter cookies. She let me dip the fork tines into sugar then mash the dough flat before she put them in the oven to bake. I was proud of the cookies she claimed we made together.

Once when I was in the fourth grade, Mother came to school to have lunch in the cafeteria with me. It was parents' week, and she took off from work to be with my class that day. She wore a boat-neck pullover top in a color of blue that perfectly matched her eyes. Her hair was done in a kind of Jackie Kennedy pouf, and her skirt hit her just at the knee. She wore the pair of fake-pearl cluster clip-on earrings my brother and I had given her for her birthday, and I thought she looked beautiful. When she appeared at our classroom door, I jumped up from my desk and went to take her hand, pulling her into the room to meet my teacher and the other kids in class. I seem to recall that there were a couple of other moms there that day, but mine was surely the best, and prettiest, mom on the planet.

As the years go by, 18 of them already, these sweet memories are the ones that have taken over inside me. I have not forgotten the arguments, the clashes, the butting of heads that she and I did as I grew into womanhood. But it does me more good to dwell on better memories.

At the end of her life we seemed to silently agree to believe in the good that was between us, the love, the devotion if not outright adoration. She was so sick, had lost all her hair and finally couldn't get out of the hospital bed set up in her front room. I spent one afternoon shortening her nightgowns so they wouldn't tangle beneath her, and applying Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion to her bald head because the new hair coming in made her scalp itch.

She struggled with her oxygen hose, and came and went in a drug-induced fog that made her grouchy and abrupt. She ordered me around, ordered Daddy around, too. She didn't have enough breath to couch her orders in kindness. The afternoon I spent sewing up her gowns, she interrupted my task endlessly. Do this, do that. Come over here and help me. I felt like a jack-in-the-box that day, jumping up and down from the sewing in my hands. Finally, she said to me, "Cindy," in a sharp tone that I knew would be followed by some sort of order from Colonel Mom. I sighed and prepared to put down the sewing yet again.

"What now?" I said, probably with some impatience in my voice, too. I looked at her and could see the glaze that had settled over her eyes. Whatever thing she had wanted me to do for her this time was lost in the pain killers, the confusion caused by the tumor in her brain.

Finally she said, "Come over here and kiss my head." She sounded forlorn and pitiful. I laid aside the gown I was hemming, got up from the couch and went to do just that. Her tiny new hair smelled like Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion. Her skin felt baby soft against my lips.

These are the memories I choose to keep close to me. I do this for myself as much as for anyone. It's easier to forgive than to hold onto hostilities. And it's a painful thing to lose your mother, no matter how difficult she might have made things from time to time. So much of your own self-definition is tied to your mother, and to those early days. These are things I see more and more clearly, after all these 18 years without her physically in my life.

Onward ....