Hard Decisions

                                                                               

thought

I took advantage of a cooler day to attack my workroom, the place where I've made many quilts and the place where I wrote all six Elizabeth Goodweather novels. These days I tend to be mostly downstairs, unless Josie insists we go up to what she calls her 'office.'

Drifts of dead lady bugs, wasps, and stink bugs were on the desk surfaces. Everything was dusty. So I began--removing everything and cleaning. And, thought I, time to get rid of some stuff. I mean, really, your grandmother's badly chipped and worn sugar bowl, sitting here on the windowsill, filled with paper clips, bits of string, and desiccated bugs. . . it looks like a crazy old lady lives here.

Well, yes. But that sugar bowl has history. It was probably a treasured wedding gift with its silver overlay. But by the time I knew it, it was coverless and chipped and lived in the warming oven of the stove, keeping the sugar dry. It came to the table and went back to the warming oven daily.

But that matters to no one but me. I imagine my sons and DILs shaking their heads as they toss it in the trash.

So I'll do it for them--but keep a picture for myself--maybe try to do a watercolor.

This pitcher is another survival from my grandmother's kitchen. But it's in perfect condition. Nope, not tossing this. Putting the pencils back in, after cleaning out the dead bugs.

A Rolodex. Between my cell phone and my laptop, I have all this. Still, a quick flip through--yikes, how many of these people are dead!  Office supplies. Wite-Out? C'mon. Into the garbage bag along with the rock-hard erasers. I moved on to the immediate file folders, finding much to discard. Odds and ends and ideas that never came to pass--out they go.  Outdated business cards--mine and those I collected from other authors, goodbye.

There was one perfect jewel of a memory-- a note from the Graham County, NC Sheriff's office.

It was January or February, early 2000's, back before we all had cell phones. Justin was farm-sitting near Chapel Hill and I got a sad call from him. A snowstorm was in progress, driving was unsafe, and he was out of food. 

Not sure what I could do about this, I suggested he break into the absent owners' house and scavenge. Or maybe there were some potatoes still in the ground.

He assured me he would be fine. So I waited till the next day to call him (landline.) 

No answer. I decided he was probably out digging for potatoes. 

No answer the next day. Now I began to have visions of him lying in the potato patch, felled by a tree limb that had collapsed under the weight of snow.

I began to email or call those of his Chapel Hill friends who might have heard from him. No joy. He might have fallen off the edge of the world, as far as they knew.

In a last desperate move, I called the Sheriff's office in his county. The woman who answered and to whom I told my story was kind and sympathetic. She promised to send a deputy out to make sure Justin was okay, if he was there.

Not too long after that, I got a call from Justin. Shortly after talking to me three days before, he'd braved the elements and driven to a girl friend's house where he was safe and warm and enjoying the authentic Thai food her mother prepared.

He'd been alerted to my distress by a number of his friends calling, Dude! Call your mother!

Keeping this little reminder. Maybe framing it.

Next up for the purge was the card file where I kept names and emails of fans, other authors, and assorted book people. Most had been collected in the pre-blog, pre-Facebook days when I did a newsletter called The Goodweather Report. Now most of my communication is through FB so it was time to toss this file. 

But first. a quick flip through the cards. Alas, so many folks departed. But many who are still in touch, mostly through the blog or FB.  It was nice to see so many names I remembered.

Back then, I wrote little notes on the cards if the person had told me something I wanted to remember.

Then I came to this card--in my scrawl--a copy of an email that then-me probably thought now-me would enjoy.

                                                                                    

I am a new prospective reader who does not like sex or violence in my books. Thanks.

I wonder what I told her.