Happy Easter, or No Event in Your Life is Wasted When You're a Writer

Eggs dyed with onion skin and pansies

Happy Easter, for all those who celebrate it. I've been thinking lately about how much of my own life, both incidents and feelings past and present, I use in one form or another when I write. For most of my growing-up life, my family traveled to Boynton, OK, and had Easter dinner with my grandmother.  When she decided it was too much trouble, my mother began hosting the family gathering, which became the new tradition throughout my young womanhood. The old folks are gone, now, and my immediate family is scattered across the country and the world. But even though my Easters are much smaller these days, members of my family still adhere to the old Easter dinner menu we knew as kid.

We always had a ham. When I was small, in Days of Yore, the ham wasn’t vacuum packed and spiral cut, it was a big old bone-in hunk of meat, marbled with fat.  It wasn’t bought at the store, either.  It was raised from a piglet, butchered and smoked by one of the family members still on the farm.  By the time we were going to Mama’s, the sty-to-table ham was no more, but she made up for it by tenting and slow cooking the thing with brown sugar and mustard glaze, and clove buds stuck all over the top.

My parents never bought chocolate bunnies and eggs and colored jelly beans for us, but we did have to have our Easter eggs. My sisters and I pestered our mother to let us dye the eggs for weeks before the day, and finally she couldn’t stand it any more and let us make a mess of the kitchen several days ahead of time. We used those commercial dyes that come in little pills, but recently, largely because of my old-time housewife research, I've been dying eggs with onion skins and flowers. Which is kind of a mess, but beautiful and certainly cheap.

My husband’s very large family had their Easter egg traditions, as well. Don is the seventh of seven children, only two of whom were boys. His only brother, whom I will call “Mac”, was nine years older than Don, so Don remembers their relationship as being one of his tagging along behind Mac and allowing himself to be talked into whatever mischief the elder came up with. One year, Mac and Don loaded up several hard-boiled eggs, snuck out to a nearby field, and spent a happy half hour throwing the eggs at a telephone pole. I loved the image so much that I used it as the inspiration for an incident in my second novel, Hornswoggled.

In fact, one entire chapter in Hornswoggled is about a giant family Easter dinner like the ones I remember from my girlhood, with all the mamas, aunts, sisters and cousins bustling around grandma’s kitchen, readying a massive dinner for sixty-five.

The kitchen was literally a hotbed of action. The spring day was cool, but the heat of the wood-fired, cast iron stove, combined with the harried activity of nearly a score of women, served the make Grandma’s big kitchen uncomfortably hot.  Grandma Sally herself stood in the center of the floor at the hear of the kitchen table, directing the action like a trail boss.

So, happy Easter, all.  Now, go forth and make some memories that the kids will think of fifty years from now with such fondness that one of them may write about them in a novel.
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p.s. I loved Rick's entry on titles, below. Titles are a constant source of bother and worry for me. Perhaps I shall muse upon the problem when next I blog.

Life is Short. Tour Small Towns.

Donis here, feeling blue. I just spent an hour on the phone with an old friend from Tulsa whose husband died a few days ago. She and I have known one another since we were seven years old, and for most of our growing-up and young-woman years, we were BFFs. Even though I moved to Arizona in the 1980s, we have kept in touch and always got together whenever I managed to get back to the home country. I knew him pretty well, too. I was in their wedding over forty years ago.

This has been coming for a few months, so it was not unexpected, but it was not a particularly good passing. My friend is in that weird numb state right now, which everyone who has ever lost a loved one knows about. It's hard when you realize that you now belong to the "grandparent" generation, and you and your compatriots are the next to go. For most of our lives there was a buffer generation between us and the bitter end. No more. I don't mind the idea of joining the choir invisible myself, but for the past several years I've lived in a state of dread over losing my nearest and dearest. It's enough to drive you to take up Zen. Live in the moment and enjoy the day as best you can.

Holding forth in Ajo, Arizona

Anyway...on a less depressing topic, I took a few days off for Thanksgiving, but the next couple of weeks are full of promotional activities for the new book, All Men Fear Me. One of my favorite events in this cycle was my November 20 trip to Ajo, Arizona, far out in the desert, half-way to California and almost all the way to Mexico. As long as you're reimbursed for you gasoline, never pass up invitations to do events in small towns, my friends. Everybody will turn out and you'll feel like a star.

Holding forth in Boynton, Oklahoma

Nine years ago, after my second book came out, I did a book tour in Oklahoma. I hit all the big towns and did well, but we ended the tour by going to Boynton, where everything began, back in the misty past, when my great-grandparents moved to Oklahoma at the turn of the 20th Century. It was raining cats and dogs when we left Tulsa that morning, so I didn’t have much expectation of a successful event. But my expectation was wrong. The talk was held at the Boynton Historical Society building, in a 20X20 room that was bursting at the seams with people – and believe it or not, I wasn’t related to most of them! A gorgeous feature article about me and the books had appeared the day before in the Muskogee Phoenix newspaper, on top of a feature in the Haskell News, and folks had hauled out their canoes and rowed to Boynton in the rain from all around the vicinity. We even had a woman there from Oklahoma City! (130 miles away) It was a gratifying experience, to say the least, since crowd made me feel like some sort of celebrity. I sold every single book I brought with me, and could have sold a lot more if I’d had them. Pretty good for a town of about 400.*

So take advantage of every opportunity you are offered, big or small, and don't pass up the chance to eat ice cream if you want it. Because you never know.
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*Boynton now has fewer than 200 people. In another nine years it will have disappeared altogether.