Butter 1

During my novel writing class at the BYU Writing & Illustrating for Young Readers Conference, my instructor, Louise Plummer, asked us to write something about butter. We had a few minutes, right there on the spot. This is what I wrote:

My mother greased bread pans with shortening, using squares of waxed paper she kept in the shortening can. She only made bread when I was young, before we remodeled the house. The remodel brought men into our house. Men I didn't know. Men who came, kicked up sawdust, then left. Men who never--according to my father--put in a full day's work. 

My father loved his work. He came into the house for breakfast with the smell of earth already on him. He brought raw milk, fresh from the milk tank. We'd pour it on our cereal. White rivers of cream flowed through our Cheerios. At lunch, he came inside with the smell of sweet hay or dust from the grain field. We ate meat and potatoes, and slices of bread heavy with butter. 

My grandpa was always with him at lunchtime. Grandpa never said much. He'd roll up the sleeves on his work shirt and wash up, past his elbows. He ate ice cream off his dirty dinner plate because he didn't want to my mother to dirty another dish for him. The farm was his, before it was my fathers. It had belonged to his father before that. I watched him butter his bread and chew slowly, knowing that I knew so little about him. I knew they used to have dances in the parlor of the old farmhouse when my father was a boy. I knew that my grandpa was a fine dancer. I knew he stole watermelons from his neighbor when he was a kid and that he swore a lot when he talked with old friends and when the calves were ornery. 

Handy Mom

Over the past two weeks I've:

Fixed the latch on my laptop (which wasn't working)

Jump started the car

and

Figured out how to fix the Ipod which was frozen on some weird screen

Pretty good for me, who's usually inept at everything.

Not quite Cinderella

All my daughter wanted for her birthday were these shoes. The day she got them she had a sore on her toe because she'd smashed it somewhere while wearing flip flops. So, of course, these shoes hurt to wear. Now that the sore has healed, she won't wear the purple shoes that she just had to have. I don't think she's worn them even once since her birthday. Little stinker. 

Mom's Radiation

What was it like at radiation, once she went through the doors? What did she do and think while I flipped through issues of Newsweek and watched the clock? Who did she talk to? Did the nurses remember her? Was the room too cold? The radiation hot? Shame on me for not asking—for not even wanting to know.

 I remember a day when my sister and I took my Mom to Salt Lake City. Was it for a CT scan? Seems like it was. My sister, a nurse, would know. 

 I do remember that she couldn’t eat anything, so my sister and I didn’t eat anything either. It seemed wrong to have pancakes for breakfast or stop for a cheeseburger when my mother was trying to gag down some drink that would light up like neon in the machine they would feed her through like she were on a conveyor belt. She was trying not to throw it up. She took tiny sips and then shivered. She lay back in her seat taking measured breaths. Inside the building, we sat with her in the waiting room, watching a 30ish man in bicycle shorts talk with the receptionist. “The form says shellfish,” he said. “I’m allergic to shrimp, does that count?” She nodded. There’d be no neon drink for him. I wondered to myself if that was a good or a bad thing.

 We moved to another room. When they called her back, we left the waiting room.

“I’m starving,” my sister said. I was too. Mom had told us to eat. She’d begged us to stop on the way. We didn’t. She told us to go while she was in for the scan. We hated the thought that she might finish before we were back. Suddenly, it seemed, that was the whole point of a waiting room. It wasn’t for those waiting to go in. It was so that someone was out there waiting for you when you were done.

 We found the candy machines. They didn’t take debit cards. Nope. Cash. Of which we had very little. We went out to the car and raided the glove box and the cup-holder drawer. When we’d pooled our change we bought a packet of red, coconut-covered zingers. I don’t remember anything ever tasting quite so good. I hadn’t had a red coconut zinger in years and years, since I was a kid, probably. We both wanted chocolate milk to go with them, but we settled on long slurps from the drinking fountain because we only had two nickels left.

 That’s what I remember from that day: red coconut zingers. I buy them now, sometimes. They still taste good to me. “Do you know what’s in these things?” my husband says, reading the label. Yes. Hydrogenates. Trans Fats. High Fructose Corn Syrup, or something else, equally bad. They’ll probably stay on a shelf for years and not go stale. They’ll survive nuclear war. They’ll attach to my artery walls and stay there. I just want to eat them and have my memory. They are, after all, inseparable in my mind from that day—CT scan day. 

 “I know.” I say, “They’ll kill me.” I bite into one. That is, if the cancer doesn’t get me first.

 

Oh, now I get it!

"Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."
- E. L. Doctorow

I think I needed to hear this a long time ago. Write on!!

Happy Birthday, Mom

Miss you.

Grocery Shopping

Not very often, but sometimes, I think ahead before going grocery shopping. Sometimes, I go through the ads and circle what I plan on buying that week. My daughter was at the kitchen table coloring with markers. This was one of those rare weeks when I was thinking ahead. The grocery store ads were strewn across the table. I went about doing my daily things: laundry, checking email, feeding the baby. When I came back to the table I found the Walgreens ad. I guess I must go there. Oh, and look at what I'm supposed to buy. Hilarious. Thanks my five year old. What? No vitamins or Mountain Dew?