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Worst of Winter

There always seems to be one week in winter when it feels the grayest, coldest, and maybe the snowiest. And where I live that typically happens in mid-January. Certainly, for the past several days, we have been experiencing a brutal cold — although it appears the same is true for much of the country. (My daughter who lives in Florida says it was in the nippy 30s there.)

This past weekend, it was 8 degrees when I got up and the temps didn’t rise that much during the day. Sunlight streamed in from the east side of the house, but I wasn’t fooled into thinking it could be warm outside. I had to force myself to take my daily walk and carry in armfuls of firewood for the workshop’s stove. I thought “ka-ching” every time I heard the furnace begin to crank. Luckily, any snow we got was powder thanks to the cold, so shoveling was easy or the flakes just blew away.

I dreaded this week when I worked outside the home, specifically as a newspaper editor. In those days, I drove a good country road, Route 143, from Worthington, the small hill town in Western Mass. where we lived, through two others to a valley city. I began my commute at 6:10 a.m. and left work at 3 p.m. Most of the year, it was a pleasant 45-minute drive with long views, deep forests, occasional wildlife, and very few vehicles. A traffic jam typically involved three cars stuck behind a logging truck on one of the route’s steep hills.

But winter was a different experience altogether. I was obsessed with following the weather and planned accordingly. But more often than not, the worst stretch was the aforementioned mid-week in January.

That week started with the day we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day — a day off for the highway crews. Every year it seemed, we got hit with a storm and the crews would have to be called in to take care of the roads. As I drove home, I hoped my timing was good.

And, of course, the light deprivation and isolation can be really hard on some people.

When I wrote Northern Comfort, one of my three Hilltown Books, I wanted to capture this bleak time of year. This is a book about haves and have nots. One of the main characters is Willi Miller who lives in poverty while raising her disabled son alone. The book begins with a tragic accident, but it evolves into a story about hope and perseverance, much like what spring can do for us.

Here is a passage from the first chapter, appropriately called Worst of Winter, that I feel describes this time of year. Willi Miller is hanging laundry after coming home from work.

She picked her hat from the snow. The sun was low in the sky, and the dark smudge spreading from the west likely carried more snow. Willi frowned. It’d be too much trouble to take the clothes down again. She hated this part of winter, mid-January. It snowed every day, not much, but enough to keep the road crews going with their plows and sanders. Winter always has a week like this, unsettled weather, the worst of the season, of the year, as far as she was concerned. Often, it happened after the thaw, so that brief warm spell seemed like one cruel joke.

I believe the temperatures are supposed to rise this coming week. Well, it was 16 degrees when I woke up this morning. That’s a start. But being a skeptical New Englander, I’ll say seeing — and in this case, feeling — is believing.

ABOUT THE PHOTO ABOVE: Something amusing I saw outside a bakery in the Berkshires.

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Uncategorized

Give It Ten

Plenty of times Hank and I have come to the end of an enjoyable TV series or movie and have to hunt for something new. How about this one? We liked that actor in something else. Or someone we know recommended it. Or it got great reviews. Or the trailer looks promising. Okay, let’s try it.

But then, it comes down to this ultimatum: “We’ll give it ten.”

Yes, ten minutes is enough time for us to determine whether a show or movie would be something worth watching.

Often it doesn’t take that long to make a decision. The acting is bad. The storyline doesn’t grab us. It’s filmed poorly. For me, dubbed is a deal-breaker. Give me the original language and subtitles please. I can handle it.

Other times we hit viewer pay dirt although there are those days we lament “all these programs and nothing to watch.”

It works the same way for me with books although I measure my interest by pages instead of minutes. I don’t have an exact number, but I figure out pretty quickly, ten or twenty pages in, sometimes fewer, if this book is for me no matter the reviews or what best-seller lists it made. Perhaps it’s a case in which a well-known author ran out of gas with this novel. (I suppose that’s how agents and publishers make their decision when considering a manuscript although they are also mulling its monetary value.)

I know people who will finish a book no matter what. Me? Nah. I only did that when I was a student because it was required.

One of the joys is finding a book I can’t put down. Really. And I don’t mean what people like to write in reviews. But truthfully, this book steals me away from everything I should be doing like making dinner.

That’s happened many times: Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees; Sherman Alexie’s Diary of a Part-Time Indian; John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row; Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News; Russell Banks’s The Sweet Hereafter. The list goes on. Most recently, I felt that way with Daniel Black’s Don’t Cry for Me. And, frankly, I hope readers feel the same when they read the books I write.

What about you? Do you have a test?

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Hilltown Postcards

Road Bosses

Here’s another Hilltown Postcard I found in my computer’s files. This one was written a while back in recognition of the men, yes, they were all men, in charge of their town’s roads. It is fitting I publish this after two back-to-back winter storms.

Whenever I see a plow truck, no matter the town, I give my car’s horn a friendly toot, grateful to have passed over that town’s line to find the road cleared or sanded. If I can remember, I send a card at the end of winter thanking them.

But not everyone in the hilltowns of Western Massachusetts appreciates the work of the highway crews. Years ago, Worthington’s road boss and a man went at it, exchanging blows, although the courts later cleared both. The man, new to town kept parking his truck on the road where he lived so the snowplow would have to back up 900 feet during a storm. The other highway workers complained they were getting hassled so the Selectboard — that’s the name of the top board in a Massachusetts town — cut service to that section of the road until it stopped.

The town of Goshen got a worker with a solid reputation when it hired a road boss in 1999. A few years before, he had a fine write-up in Yankee Magazine, which dubbed him the Peerless Ploughman, because when he was another town’s highway chief, he slept on a cot in the DPW garage whenever a winter storm was forecast.

But the man encountered a tougher storm in Goshen when he came against its good-old-boy network. He got a glimpse when a private plowing contractor drove into the highway yard, then used a piece of town equipment to load sand and salt into his dump truck so he could spread them on residents’ driveways. For pay. That’s the way it was always done.

The Goshen Selectmen fired the Peerless Ploughman because they said he was insubordinate at a meeting, but everyone knew it was more than that and some town officials quit in protest. It stirred things up for a while. Someone else is in charge of the roads now.

When I was a reporter for the Daily Hampshire Gazette, the road bosses, if they were around, were willing to take my questions about their work.

One road boss in Cummington drove me around to give me a lesson on what makes a good gravel road. By his assessment they didn’t exist in his town. There were times in spring, during the thaw, when people could only drive on their roads when the mud was frozen early in the morning or late at night. Even so, the mud could get so tire-sucking, axle-breaking bad they had to park at the end of the road, then hike in with bags of groceries and kids. 

I liked the way these men talk. They get right to the end of an answer fast. I once asked a road boss which roads were bad during mud season. He answered, “Pick one.”

At one Worthington Town Meeting, we were supposed to decide whether to buy a dump truck for the Highway Department. There was no discussion on the floor, and that got to one man, a smart-aleck newcomer I recall, who rose to ask, “$110,000 for a truck?”

Ernie Nugent, the road boss then, was handed the microphone. He said, “Yup,” then sat down.

That was enough for everyone. They voted to give him the truck.

The hilltowns of Western Massachusetts is the inspired setting for much of my fiction, including Missing the Deadline, the latest in my Isabel Long Mystery Series. Interestingly, a highway worker’s poetry is part of this story.

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Hilltown Postcards

Stupid City Folk

Years before we moved to Worthington, a hilltown in Western Massachusetts, we lived in another hilltown in the middle of nowhere New Hampshire. We learned a lot from that experience, which helped significantly during our next adventure in the country, one that has lasted a lot longer. 

We left Boston for Wilmot, New Hampshire, where we had to drive thirty minutes to get to a Laundromat and sixty for something more interesting than washing our clothes. We had two kids then, a daughter who was four, and a baby son. Our home was a one-room cabin on a dirt road, twelve-by-twenty feet, with no electricity, phone, running water or indoor plumbing. A portable toilet was in the attic and we hauled the slop bucket to the outhouse. The rent was $35 a month.

We were awfully stupid and lucky that first time in the country. We drew water from a stream beside the cabin. A hand pump was inside the house and when the line to the river froze, we used buckets, breaking first through the ice. We started the fire in our wood stove with kerosene, managing somehow not to blow up the place.

Hank sold our ’55 Mercedes, one of those a nickel-and-dime vintage vehicles that seemed awfully cool at the start, then bought an old pickup truck from a local for a few hundred bucks. Hank was getting into country living, a little carried away as usual, this time about fitting in with the local folk. Certainly an old beater would help, but on our first long ride, the brakes failed, and Hank, pumping the pedal to squeeze some life from them, had to steer the pickup into a field so we wouldn’t crash. Eventually it stopped.

A man, who stopped, crawled beneath the truck. He shook his head when he stood up. The chassis was so rusted it was ready to disintegrate. This truck wasn’t safe to drive. I cursed the man who sold us this piece of junk and Hank’s gullibility that he expected all old Yankees to be honest. We took off the plates, abandoned the truck, and then hitchhiked with the two kids to the cabin. 

Hank searched but couldn’t find a job locally except as a laborer for a man who put in foundations. He lasted one day working a wheelbarrow and shovel. So, he hitched back and forth to Boston, where he drove tractor-trailer, long distance, for a natural foods company until we had enough money saved to buy a VW Bug. During the week, I stayed at the cabin with the two kids.

The neighbors on that hill in Wilmot were exceptionally friendly. One bachelor farmer, Clayton, plowed the top of our driveway for free because he claimed it was a good spot to pull over when two vehicles met on the narrow road.

I also heard that I won Clayton’s approval when I turned away one of the men on the hill who paid me a surprise visit while Hank was away. The guy was one of those doomsday-types who was building a bunker-like home deep in the woods, and I was definitely not interested. Clayton watched the man’s truck pass his house, twice, within the span of several minutes, a detail he reported with amusement to Pat, my fast friend on our hill. Pat invited us to share meals with her family and to raid her library. Sometimes I used her washer. The snow piled up that winter, and I towed the kids on a sled along the road to her home.

The battery-operated radio pulled in a public station after I rigged its antenna to touch the iron skillet hanging on one wall, and weeknights at eight my daughter and I listened to the serial reading of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. We liked The Long Winter the best. In that one, the Ingalls family survived a fierce prairie winter by braiding straw to burn for heat, rationing food, and listening to the music of Pa’s fiddle. We could relate to that story.

I cooked our meals on a two-burner propane stove: soup, and lots of oatmeal and pancakes with Clayton’s maple syrup. We had squash, apples, potatoes, and cabbage we bought at a farm. Stored in the cold attic they kept nearly through the winter.

One week Hank got caught in a snow storm on his truck route in Maine, so he couldn’t make it home. I honestly don’t remember how I found out since we didn’t have a phone. Maybe he relayed a message to my neighbor, Pat.

I was running out of split firewood, so Pat showed me how to use a maul to split the oak and maple logs length-wise to size: raising that heavy tool over my head, then using the strength of my belly and legs to make a good slice.

Chopping wood. Drawing water. Washing cloth diapers by hand. My day was spent immersed in the most basic of chores. Sometimes, it felt as if we were playing pioneer. Certainly, it was good training for the next time we attempted rural living. We would be smarter.

We lasted in Wilmot until the late spring. The two-and-a-half-hour commute one way was too much for Hank.

We did look at another house in Wilmot to rent, a rambling farmhouse with amenities like indoor plumbing and electricity. But I was wary of the rattraps and boxes of poison set around the house.

In the kitchen, the previous renter jotted a diary of sorts in pencil on the white kitchen cabinets. A woman, I guessed, wrote about the miserable weather and her wretched loneliness. She noted the dates of storms. “God, not more snow,” she wrote beside one. The entries stopped abruptly mid-winter and I wondered what became of her. 

We lived next in Boston, Seattle, and then Boston again before we moved to Worthington, and this time we did a better job with country living.

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Isabel Long Mystery Series

When a Cat Becomes a Character

One of the amusing parts about being an author is having people ask if a character could be someone they know in real life. That happens a lot with my Isabel Long Mystery Series, which is inspired by the hilltowns of Western Massachusetts, where I live. I’d like to think that I’ve created such authentic characters, readers believe they could be living among them. But, no, I made them all up.

Missing the Deadline, no. 7 in the series, has an exception: the cat is based on a real being — our cat, Stella. They even have the same name. 

The fictional Stella is the pet of Gerald Danielson, a literary agent who was found shot in the head and left to die outside his Meadows Falls home. Gerald survived but is not the same hotshot agent who moved there from New York City. The cops ruled it an attempted suicide, but the person who hires Isabel feels differently.

Gerald lives with his devoted sister and has an aide who assists him. But his cat is the one who brings him comfort when he’s feeling agitated. Having witnessed how animal can do that in real life, I wanted to use that observation in this novel. (I also didn’t mind giving the real Stella a plug.) 

Gerald’s Stella is a stray that just showed up one day and took a liking to him. This Stella is also a Maine coon cat, who is particular about humans. She doesn’t pay any attention to Isabel when she comes for the first interview. Here’s an excerpt in which Gerald’s sister, Wendy, who has taken over the agency, talks about her brother. 

“Sometimes at night I read aloud from their manuscripts and he tells me in his way which ones we should consider. He appears to like that. And he has his cat, Stella. She’ll sit on his lap for hours. Inside. Outside. It doesn’t matter. That helps a lot. You can see her right over there. He calls her Stelzee.” 

Wendy points toward the window seat on the other side of the room. A cat, a Maine coon breed in multiple shades of brown, I believe, is curled, presumably asleep, on a mat in the sunlight. She shows no interest in meeting us.

My best guess is that non-fictional Stella lived on her own after being dumped by her owner during Covid. A good friend, who started feeding her outside her home, put a notice on Facebook looking for a home for the cat. And so she became ours. I named her Stella, so I could channel Marlon Brando when I call for her outside. We do call her Stelzee as well.

An amazing assassin, Stella spends time outdoors, killing any rodent that dares to come near our house, and indoors, often hours lying on Hank’s extended legs. All it takes is a light touch from a human and she purrs loudly. Stella has only sat on my lap twice and after three years has finally gotten used to me holding her in my arms but not for long. 

Eh, I don’t hold it against her, obviously not if I make her a character in my latest mystery.

Missing the Deadline was released Dec. 21 in Kindle. (Paperback readers will have to wait a couple of months, my publisher’s rule.) Thank you if you read my book.

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