The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu and Grace Harlowe

Working on the bookshelves in the loft above the living room and came up on some real treasures. I have always been drawn to old books--mainly the sort my grandmother might have read in the very early 1900s--and evidently I stowed a bunch of them up here.

One such treasure is The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, with the intrepid Nayland Smith, "a tall, lean man with his square-cut, clean-shaven face sunbaked to the hue of coffee," who is out to stop the fiend in human form known as Fu Manchu.

I find it great fun--opium dens, poisonous centipedes, a mysterious dealt green mist, a beautiful Circassian slave, dacoits, lascars, poisoned darts, cellar dungeons--it's a later Sherlock Holmes and an early version of James Bond. And the book includes illustrations from the moving picture!

Quite a bit tamer is Grace Harlowe's Fourth Year at Overton College. The eighth in a series about the redoubtable Grace, the book gives a look at college life for girls in the teens of the last century. There are little rivalries, progressive dinner parties, masquerades, plays and play-writing competitions, but scant mention of classes or courses of study.

Grace does a mild bit of sleuthing when she recognizes a criminal from one of her previous books. And when a "newspaper girl" who is a rather prickly member of her class, writes up the event and includes Grace's name after being asked not to, the rest of the book is devoted to turning this unpleasant girl around and making her see what true college spirit is.

My grandmother always lamented that she hadn't been able to go to college. I wonder if she read these books--she was just the same age as Grace.

The back of the book gives a fascinating indication of the many popular books available for young people at the time. I'm sure, like Nancy Drew, they were written by syndicates of hard-working, underpaid, ink-stained scribblers 

Touchingly earnest, the lot of them.

College girls, class of 191_, out for a stroll.

                                                              

A Field of Daisies, Updated

 

In 1973 John and I decided to escape the ever-expanding suburbs that were wiping out the old Florida where we’d grown up. We ran away in search of a new home.

On a day in early June, we found ourselves sitting in a mountain pasture, watching the daisies stirring in the breeze and listening to the hollow sound of a pileated woodpecker hammering on a tree. The sky was Carolina blue and all we could see in the distance were mountains, green with trees and the occasional pasture. Except for an old cabin behind us and two tobacco barns just below the field, not another building was in sight. Breathing in that sweet mountain air, we decided we were

home.

  
It was the beauty of the place that bewitched us – those rolling ranks of mountain ranges in hazy blues and purples, the lush early-summer greens of the poplars and locusts, maples and walnuts, the orange day lilies crowding the banks of the creeks and branches, the blue of chicory that reflected the sky, the white of the lovely Queen Anne’s Lace . . . the beauty that seemed to be everywhere we turned. We fell in love with the scenery, took a leap of faith, and bought the sixty acres with the barns, the cabin, and the field of daisies . . . and then, as we spent the summer camping out in one of the barns, we fell in love with the people and a whole new way of life.

 

Fifty-three years later  and we've never regretted that leap of faith. And every time the daisies bloom, I remember that magical day . . . sitting in the field of daisies and deciding we were home. 

When School Was Out

                                                       

Photo from Pixabay by leoleobobeo

Tomorrow is Josie's last day of school and it has me remembering when I was her age and the joy that summer vacation brought.

Summer meant going to the beach with my parents for a week or sometimes two. And it meant going barefoot, something I wasn't allowed to do at home for fear of hookworms. Sandcastles, drip castles, shell-collecting, jumping up and down in the gentle waves of the Gulf of Mexico, playing shuffle-board--an ubiquitous feature of beach rentals, watching pelicans glide in dignified files just above the waves . . . the beach back then in the early Fifties was full of delights and there were no towering condominiums.

And the rest of the summer stretched out before me in a warm haze . . . playing outside with the kids on the block till lightning bugs rose up out of the grass and mothers began to call us home in spite of our protests that it wasn't dark yet and we could still see, riding my bike, reading Oz books and Nancy Drew in my hideout under a bush in the yard . . . no classes, no planned activities, no schedule . . . it was a time of dolce far niente--the sweetness of doing nothing.

1925 and Beyond

"Rainbow Fairies"  It's 1925 and my mother is seven. She's the tall one second from the right --- and I've unearthed yet another scrapbook in my workroom cleanup. My grandmother was a meticulous recorder, and I'm enjoying this look at my mother's past.

                        First grade-- look at the clothes and the Very Serious expressions. There are samples of my mother's schoolwork in each grade but I'll spare your those.

Wilson Junior High in Tampa, Florida. My mother's alma mater . . .and mine and John's as well. What's more, the same principal (Miss Bush) was still in charge.

Girls just gotta have fun--even during the Great Depression.

                                                                     

Like the Cat Ate the Grindstone

Little by little I'm working my way through the repository of my past.  There is so much to look at and so many memories . . . The picture above is one I'll keep as it is one of the few I have in which my mother looks truly happy. (She and I are on the left. I was probably three.)

I have always loved dogs. Here I'm at my Aunt Mamie's in Troy, Alabama. My grandmother and I rode the train from Tampa to attend Mamie's daughter's wedding. I was a flower girl. The ring bearer was a red-headed little boy named Rusty. At the reception I asked the piano player to play "Home on the Range" and he did.

Kindergarten at Seaborn in Tampa. And my brief ballet career.

1959. Senior year at Plant High in Tampa. John and I were "going steady." He gave me a ride to school every day in his Model A.

I had to save out this picture of Justin to show Josie (who scored another goal in last Saturday's soccer game.)

And then there was a whole mess of materials from the quilting classes I taught back in the early 2000's.  Not to mention patterns and instructions for the many group quilts I helped with.

 I've heard of people's lives flashing before their eyes when they were in a perilous situation. Well, I'm not in such a situation; my life is crawling before my eyes at a slow and crowded pace. It's so much information and so many memories that I can only do a small amount at a time--like the cat ate the grindstone.

                            

Twenty-Two Years Ago . . .

I continue in my purge of my workroom. After recycling the manuscripts of my Elizabeth Goodweather novels, I turned to the stack of notebooks that contained the printed material of  ten years or more of writing classes, publicity pieces, interviews, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Out with them! But I'm conscientious enough to want to recycle all that paper which means removing it from the plastic page protectors and also tearing off any staples. And in the course of this, getting a nostalgic trip back in time. Lots of good classes, good students, good memories.

Then I hit a notebook with printed out emails from my early efforts in 2002 to find an agent--and a representative sampling of rejection. There had been around sixty but I only kept the positive ones--the ones that said nice things about my writing while gently turning me down.

Then there was the excitement of an offer from an agent, my acceptance, and her attempts to sell that first book. More positive rejections and finally the decision to put that first novel aside and try again with what became Signs in the Blood.

It was like reliving that roller coaster of emotions when, a year later, my agent began trying to sell SIGNS. And oh, the joy and edge-of-my-seat tension when the agent let me know that Kate Miciak at Bantam Dell was interested!

The rewriting, the adding a subplot, the tweaking the ending, as emails flew between Kate and my agent and me. At last, the contract! A modest two book deal!

And then all those memories went into the recycling. It was nice to remember the excitement, and my agent's great sense of humor. And I still got a thrill at seeing Kate's encouraging words.

But, the nice thing is, I don't miss any of it. It was all a fine experience and I'm glad I had it. But I'm happy not to be writing into the wee hours, trying to make a deadline. 

Been there. Done that. 

Memories . . .

                                                           

Fifty-some years ago when we lived on a lake in Odessa, Florida, we frequented a small country store called Fox's Corner. It was run by a grumpy feller and his bad-tempered little feist dog.  One day we were outside the store with our elderly beagle cross, and the feist took exception to her presence. He came boiling out of the store to launch an attack. 

His owner came running after him, yelling, "Get back in here. What do you mean, comin' out all stiff-legged and agitatin'?"

Pure poetry. We still use that phrase.

Another memorable usage is 'Flehmensing.' Moving to the farm and acquiring cattle, we became aware of the characteristic behavior of a bull around cows--he rolls back his upper lip and sniffs at the cow's lady parts to determine if she's in heat. We eventually discovered the technical term -- "Flehmens response" and shared it with friends. Not long after, we heard one of those friends describing an unattached fellow at a party-- "You ought to have seen old _____, he was flehmensing round all the women."

Buried in Paper

So it was time to tackle my workroom. It's cold up there in winter and hot in summer so this is my grace period. It 's where my quilting stuff is, and it's where I wrote five of my novels. Nowadays, I don't use it much--the light is better at the dining table  for painting and I no longer make quilts as my back complains after a half an hour at the sewing machine. 

Which means that the room has degenerated into a cobweb-covered repository for twenty some years of stuff, much the same as the scenario in my friend Gretchen's card above.

Currently I'm sorting through the paper trail of my alleged writing career: outlines, proposals, chapter by chapter records of various books . . .

. . . the occasional attempt at a haiku . . .

. . . more chapter by chapter records, as well as vast quantities of research for each book. And there were the talks that I gave at bookstores and other venues . . .

. . . and the accumulated lesson outlines of many years of teaching writing.

Really, it's sobering, tossing out  (recycling) the record of so much work. But it's that much less for the young uns to deal with eventually. And it's a pleasant look back at some interesting times.

And here and there, I come across something funny.

 

A Road Not Taken

                                                                 

                                        

When I was a junior in high school, my mother began to despair of ever getting me off her hands. My grades were A's and B's--not good enough to make Honor Society, maybe, in my mother's opinion, not good enough for college. I had dated a bit but wasn't one of the "popular" girls. I was okay looking but never enough to suit my mother, who was something of a beauty. I was happy--but she wasn't.

So, at the time my friends and I were beginning to think about college choices, my mother sent off for a catalog for Katharine Gibbs--a famous school in New York known to turn out girls headed for careers as executive secretaries or, perhaps, secretaries who married wealthy bosses.

Katie Gibbs required their students to dress properly. In the Fifties this meant dresses, stockings and heels, hats, and white gloves. Along with typing, shorthand, and office management, Gibbs girls were coached in deportment and taught "proper" styling-- hair, dress, makeup.  and they were housed at The Barbizon Hotel for Women where, along with a curfew and a no men beyond the lobby rule, they could enjoy a number of amenities.

My mother, who loved New York and was bored with her own life, thought it would be wonderful for me. Maybe her ugly duckling would become a swan. I balked at the white gloves. Besides, I didn't want to be a secretary. Maybe an archaeologist? Or a veterinarian? But no white gloves.

The Katherine Gibbs application never got filled out. And in my senior year, I surprised everyone, including myself by being one of four National Merit Scholarship semi-finalists in our class of around 900. (The other three were straight A students.) Now college seemed to be where I should go.

That year too I fell in love with John, who I'd known since we were in kindergarten and who is now my husband of 62 years. And my life has been far removed from New York and white gloves. Though over the course of seven novels, I got pretty good at typing.

All this came back to me when I read The Barbizon-The Hotel That Set Women Free. It tells the story of The Barbizon and the women who lived there--some Katie Gibbs students; some Guest Editors at Mademoiselle magazine (Joan Didion, Sylvia Plath, Gael Greene, to name a few;) and an assortment of would-be actors and artists, hoping for a break (Grace Kelly, Ali McGraw. Betsey Johnson.)

It's a fascinating study of women's quest for freedom and self-fulfillment that covers about seventy years. The Barbizon finally ceased its women-only policy when it came apparent that women no longer wanted the curfews and sorority house ambiance.

It's a fascinating look at times past from the female point of view. 

HERE is an excellent review.

Bittersweet

Yes, I'm appalled at the unconstitutional actions in Iran and the loss of life. The Ayatollah was a despicable tyrant and I don't weep for him. But there are so many despicable tyrants in the world, some quite close to home. And I've already let my congressmen know my feelings.

But that's not what this post is about. 

                                                           

I've been using my down time to go through my photo files and get rid of duplicates and sub par or simply confusing (as in, why did I take that ?)pictures.

I came to several conclusions. I take a lot of pictures of critters, Josie, sunrises, trees, flowers, leaves, food, and not that many of other people, except on occasions like Christmas.

These pictures reminded me of how much has changed--and how much hasn't. Christmas looks much the same every year, the house also, though getting shabbier. There are always pets,though the cast changes. And the view and the flowers and trees remain the same.

This below was a wedding. Madelon, who was a part of the writing group that got me started was getting married and a bunch of us made a quilt. 

Alas, Madelon is gone now. And that's the bitter part of sifting through the past--so many folks who were a part of my life are gone.

As are beloved pets, my garden, the chickens . . . so many things that are no longer feasible or sensible for us now.

I'd almost forgotten that I once taught quilting at our local community college branch.

I must have taken thousands of day lily pictures over the years. I can't resist them.

A Thanksgiving meal that couldn't be beat--and another friend who's gone now.

And Dog Club--Maggie, Bear, and Jack, plus Eddie, an honorary member. All sorely missed. 

I deleted well over a thousand pics--my storage was getting full--but I have many left to remind myself of the joys of the past years.
                                                           
                                                             

Up Close and Personal

Getting up close and personal with furniture stirs up memories. This little rocking chair, for instance, was given to our older son, back when we were still in Tampa but preparing for the move to NC. 

One of our students (I think it was Leslie Mead) told us that it had come from NC and was locally made of rhododendron branches, and she and her family thought it would be nice for Ethan to have it.

It traveled back to NC with us and was much used by three-year-old Ethan and later by Justin. And now it sits by our heater and is one of Josie's favorite reading spots.

This old cedar chest also came from Tampa. Just before moving, we were looking for a cedar chest and answered an ad in the newspaper. The seller was an older lady who, as it turned out had known John's grandfather. She was intrigued that were were moving to NC and told us to be sure to have a mud room--which we eventually did.

The chest was painted black--even its brass hardware, but John stripped  and refinished it. It's a beautiful thing and very useful--it holds most of my quilt collection and serves as  a coffee table.

I look around our house and it's full of memories--things from our parents and grandparents, things we've made or been given. Things that we're so used to that we hardly see them any more -- until we get up close and personal with the cleaning rag.