You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Many would consider Cassia’s family wealthy, but a close look would find that their money is tied up, mostly in real estate and the restaurant – investments that allow the family to be its own boss in working together and serving the surrounding community.
Imagine yourself with a million dollars. Where would you put it to do the most good?
My wife brought in a big green caterpillar, fatter than my thumb and longer than a finger, then asked if I knew what it was.
Nope.
Then she informed me it’s a hornworm, our first one she’s found on our tomato plants in the two decades we’ve lived here. And she was terrified. Said they can devour not just whole tomatoes but the plant too, as well as peppers, eggplants, potato plants. Well, it’s a long list and if you find one of the goliaths, there are bound to be more.
That stirred up memories of the three little woodchucks that showed up one July and reduced our six thriving Brussels sprouts plants to sticks. The very thought of something like that recurring still strikes terror.
A gardener has to be watchful.
summer begins by one system, but remains Midsummer by the other wherein May Day, August 2, and Halloween initiate the change of seasons and Christmas then falls in the middle right up to the vernal equinox or well beyond as far as sunlight falling on the Earth is concerned winter’s over on Depression-era linoleum encircled by tuxedos and stovepipe hats
Naturally, you invent some things when you’re writing a novel, and you bend some others to improve the fit.
But some other elements deliberately stretch reality, hopefully with good reason. Besides, that’s why it’s called fiction.
For example:
Once I had gone back to better unify the stories of Cassia, the basis of What’s Left, and her father, I then saw a possibility of pulling two existing and somewhat problematic novellas into an overall more unified volume. (Yes, I’ll argue that what I have is something other than a conventional series, even when some of the characters appear in multiple novels.) And, I should emphasize, Cassia is far from the scene in the pieces I’m addressing, the ones that now involve Jaya, the center of Nearly Canaan, in a capstone work.
By weaving Jaya into the two novellas, I could pull them together. And since “Nearly Canaan” was set in three distinct parts of the country – Great Plains, the South, and Pacific Northwest – reflecting places where she had lived with Schuwa, a third section was required, one reflecting their interlude in the Ozarks.
Here, my imagination took over, along with some elaboration of earlier research. I might add that the Hodgson Mill cornmeal found on many supermarket and kitchen shelves has a personal connection – its founders were distant kin from North Carolina who spelled their name like mine at one stage in their migration to Missouri. I have to admit that “Miller at the Springs” is especially satisfying for me.
Together, the three form The Secret Side of Jaya, plus a little more.
I must admit the collection is deeply personal for me and leave it at that. I offer it to you, all the same.
While we’re at it and geography’s on my mind, I should also confess that in “What’s Left” and Daffodil Uprising, when I recast the town of Daffodil by moving it to the Ohio River and throwing in a touch of Dubuque, Iowa, from the Upper Mississippi, I was acknowledging a sense that southern Indiana gravitates toward the big river along its southern border, even though no place along the waterway is only an hour from Indianapolis. Poetic license, then. The Hoosier state was settled largely from the south – in 1850, nearly half of the households had roots in North Carolina, where many Quakers had fled because of the slaveholding culture. And then recasting that Indiana into the Ozarks, I turned heavily toward the use of photos and related documents, somewhat the same way I did in another series about what you don’t know when I tackled my Mediterranean poems.
And I’m somehow surprised that Baltimore, as beloved as it was in my residence later, has never come up in my fiction. And it won’t. The personal drama was mostly banal or I just never got to know the place well enough to go more than skin-deep.
Readers of Vanity Fair magazine may be catching a similarity between its back-of-the-issue Proust Questionnaire each month and many of my Tendrils postings this year. One difference is that when interviewing a chosen celebrity figure, each question gets a single answer, while Tendrils, with its listings of ten items, demands a full count on both hands, one-two-three on to one-zero.
The questionnaire itself, attributed to French author Marcel Proust (1871-1922), became a popular “confession album,” a kind of Victorian parlor game. When published by his son-in-law, the French president, it was subtitled “an album to record thoughts, feelings, etc.”
Frankly, they’re usually difficult for me to tackle. More personal than I usually navigate. But doing them as an exercise for Tendrils has had me reviewing much of my life from a fresh perspective, and maybe also is giving you a better idea of what makes me tick.
Still, some of them haven’t prompted a full ten responses from me. Here are some examples.
~*~
Anyone up to answering one or all of these now?
At one point in my novel What’s Left, Cassia’s aunt Pia returns to tradition by adapting a head scarf, just like the women in her Greek ancestry.
She’s always had her own distinctive style, no matter how radical or conservative she turns.
And she’s gone from being the wild child into becoming the family matriarch.
Who in your life has done a 180-degree turn and remained essentially the same?
remember after two months racing highway construction crew deadlines your Indian dig crew unearthed an infant’s grave that justified the stall but nightfall forced departure and returning the next morning, you discovered the skull smashed, bones scattered across drunken greed, ignorance, or hatred that strikes repeatedly, yes, the repeated sound, as you relay it Take care
They cross boundaries and break rules but have strong intellects. You need them but also need to be wary of them, especially when it comes to your wife or daughter.
In mythology, they appear across cultures, and not always as an animal or immortal. And we’re not talking about trick-or-treat night.
Take a look, here are ten.
Jnana's Red Barn 