Lea Wait's Blog, page 312

Notes From Hartland on Independence Day, 2014

Is there a correlation between the hot weather and the pace of life? It would appear that way today. All my favorite summer patrons are back and it’s so nice to be greeted warmly (no pun intended) time after time, especially when I can grab a book from our new shelf and hand it to them when they gave up waiting for it at the library back home. Not long ago one of my regulars from town told me that when she received a settlement for a job-related injury, she’d give me $500 in appreciation for my help over the years and I could use it to get whatever I wanted for the library. This week she handed me that check and already it’s helped buy two books we couldn’t have gotten with our current budget (High Line: The Inside Story on New York’s Park in the Sky and American Catch: the Fight to Save Our Local Seafood), plus three seasons of the TV show My Name Is Earl.

Winners get their checks

Three years ago, I was approached by Richard Randlett who grew up in Hartland and did well investing in the stock market. He wanted to give something back to the community by funding a scholarship for college bound teens from Hartland, Palmyra and St. Albans. The library had been the conduit for one such scholarship before I got here, but working with the donors had been almost impossible, because of their expectations. The form was too long and involved and in the first six years I worked here, it was only awarded once. Based on what I knew wasn’t going to work, I agreed to have the library handle the proposed scholarship under three conditions: It wouldn’t be need-based, it would be guaranteed to be awarded and the form would be simple. Richard agreed that these were all sensible conditions and we worked to get everything in place. The initial two $1000 awards grew to three by the second year and we held a simple award ceremony on the front lawn by the beautiful bench he and his wife bought for the library (an extremely popular spot for our Wi-Fi users when we’re closed).

Yesterday, we awarded three scholarships to teens headed to Husson University, Eastern Maine Community College and the University of Maine at Farmington. Unlike most scholarships, this one gets the money to the recipients before they start their freshman year, allowing them to use it for expenses associated with books, moving, supplies and tuition, an idea that helps decrease what can be a pretty stressful experience for a teen.

Zachary Ramsdell will be studying engineering and has a pretty impressive plan for doing so. He’s attending EMCC for the first two years to get basic courses out of the way at a much less expensive school. He’ll then transfer to the University of Maine to complete his degree. In addition to attending summer school at the University of Maine, he’s captain of the soccer and baseball teams at Nokomis High School.

Savanna Leavitt will study chemistry at Husson University and has a ten year plan that involves a PhD. or a medical degree and doing research in disease prevention. It is evident from the letter of support she included with her application that she’s a natural leader, a hard worker and not afraid to try new challenges, even when they’re scary.

Lindsay Mower will pursue a degree in community health education at UMF. She also has a strong work ethic, having grown up on a dairy farm as well as working on an organic berry farm. She’s volunteered as a musician to brighten the lives of patients at the local hospital as well as being a member of the Nokomis High School Show Chorus, one of the best in Maine.

As you can see from the accompanying pictures, these three exemplify the definition of the phrase ‘the best and the brightest’ and I’m thrilled to have helped this scholarship become a reality.

We have two other new programs at the library. After listening to Brianna for the last year as she talked about the sense of isolation associated with being a young single mother with no transportation, we set up a Mom’s Coffee Hour every Friday at 11 with refreshments. She was pretty nervous about hosting it, but realized it was a great chance not only to create connections, but add it to her portfolio as a work experience. She can also use it as a topic for a paper in one of her future library classes. We started this last week and when nobody showed by 11:05, she was really nervous. Another mom who is her age and had expressed interest, showed soon after and a third one arrived an hour later. We expected the group might run an hour, but they wrapped things up 3 and a half hours later and were very happy. We’re hoping word spreads so we have more moms joining the group. If if continues to fly, we’re going to bring in some speakers and skill builders. We already have a nice rug and some toys for the kids (we had six for the first session).

The other program is being run in conjunction with the food service staff of RSU 19. Starting next Tuesday, we’ll be offering free lunches to kids 18 and under as an extension of the school nutrition program. Just because school isn’t in session during the summer doesn’t mean kids stop being hungry and this should catch some of the kids in our area who often go 12 hours without eating.

When I Finish My Book I’m Going To…

Hi. Barb here.

Yesterday, I sent the manuscript of Musseled Out, the third Maine Clambake Mystery, to my editor.

Prior to that, I spent close to three months in Book Jail. Book jail is the place bad writers go when they have

not managed their time well
overcommitted, or
their current project is a beast that will not be wrestled to the ground.

So while I have been in book jail, I have been paying no attention to any other aspect of my life. But I have occasionally noticed my surroundings and daydreamed about what I’ll do when I get out. Weirdly, it’s not exciting travel or entertainment I’m dreaming of. It’s little things like–

1) Clean my desk.

This is where I work when I’m in Boothbay. While I’m not one to keep a pin-neat desk, it doesn’t normally look like this. Cleaning and arranging my desk makes me feel in control of my project (especially when I’m not). But there was no time for desk cleaning in the final throes of this project. (By the way, that bench gets really, really hard in the eleventh or twelfth hour of the day.)

2) Speaking of cleaning desktops—

This one, too.

 

 

3) Rebuild my Pandora station. For some reason, I’m sharing my Pandora station, so I can’t update my list of artists, so I have to rebuild it from scratch, etc, etc. I don’t find the Pandora interface to be particularly intuitive, so I knew this will take awhile–thus it had to wait until after book jail.

4) Unsubscribe from like a million email lists and e-retailers. I go through period purges of my most faithful e-mail correspondents and since I can’t find my real e-mail for all the junk, it’s time for another. I should do the same thing with my paper catalogs, too, but hey, let’s not go crazy.

5) Switch my clothes. I still have my winter clothes out. Fortunately, the weather has been so cooperative that I haven’t noticed until the last few days. But now it’s time. Summer clothes out, winter clothes away, extras to charity.

So that’s my list.

Readers, what do you long to do when you finish a project?

Guns Everywhere?

James Hayman: Yesterday, July 1st, Georgia’s controversial “guns everywhere” law went into effect. That’s a fact. The rest of what I’m writing today is fiction. And I sincerely hope it will remain so.

Had Pleasant Hills Elementary School been set among the rolling green hills of northwestern Connecticut instead of in an upscale Atlanta suburb, it could easily have been mistaken for the old Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. Maybe that’s what Derek Crosby liked about the place. Its striking similarity to the school where what most people consider the most tragic shooting in modern American history took place. Twenty young children and six staff members gunned down by a young man named Adam Lanza. Slaughtered in cold blood for no apparent reason.

On this bright September morning, Derek Crosby’s goal was to top Lanza’s score. Thanks to the Georgia State Legislature, which had recently passed its “Guns everywhere” law, he was pretty sure he could do it. He would go down in a blaze of glory, his name never to be forgotten. One of the ones the gun haters would talk about probably forever. Like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold of Columbine fame, ‎James Eagan Holmes of Aurora and, of course, Lanza himself. But Derek was sure he’d be more famous than any of them.

What he liked best about the new law was the part that said a shooter with a permit could carry his weapon just about anywhere he wanted and nobody could say a goddamn thing about it. Not even a cop. Especially not a cop. Yup, he could take his brand new best friend into any bar, movie theatre, library or shopping mall he wanted. Hell he could even take it into Hartsfield-Jackson airport. And, importantly, he could take it into Pleasant Hills Elementary School. Just walk right in with his gun in plain sight and nobody could say a word about it until he started shooting. Which he didn’t have to do if things started looking a little hairy.

In the beginning Derek had briefly considered making Hartsfield his target. Shooting up a bunch of those TSA jerks. Or maybe the whole damned chorus line of unarmed assholes waiting like sheep to go through security.   But with all the cops and security in the airport he wasn’t sure he could find a firing position that would allow him to make the numbers he wanted before they took him down. At Pleasant Hills it’d be a whole lot easier.

Of course, the new law required a permit if you wanted to be allowed to take your gun into an airport or school and Derek didn’t have a permit. Had never even applied for one. But it didn’t really matter. Because while the new law required permits, it also stipulated that when you carried your gun into a bar, library or school, no one could question you about whether you had a permit or not. No one could insist that you show them your permit. Weird. It was as if they wanted you to skirt the whole permit thing.  Hell with this law, there was no way a shooter could lose.

Derek parked his Ford Ranger in front of the school just before eight o’clock. He watched the last of the school buses drop off the last of the children. Checked out a few rich bitch moms who, after dropping their kids off, pulled out of the circular driveway in their fancy SUVs, Lexuses and BMWs. When the activity outside had slowed to a trickle Derek checked his guns.

His best little buddy today would be his brand new Sig Sauer M400 semiautomatic assault rifle that his friend Bobby bought for him at the Walmart store right here in Pleasant Hills. There’d been a bunch of assault rifles to choose from, including a Bushmaster just like the one Lanza used. But Derek wanted the Sig. Partly because he liked the name. Sig Sauer. It sounded tough. Macho. Not wussy like Bushmaster.

He also liked the description of the Sig in the online Walmart ad. He’d read it over so many times he knew it by heart, “The Sig Sauer M400 Enhanced Rifle, is designed for use in law enforcement, military operations, the sporting field, as well as competitive shooting. The SIG M400 is a true AR platform tactical rifle with unparalleled accuracy. A 16-inch chrome-lined phosphate-coated barrel provides superior corrosion resistance and a 7075-T6 aircraft-grade aluminum-forged lower receiver adds to the durability and reliability that users come to expect from Sig Sauer.”

He sat quietly in his truck for half an hour, the Sig on his lap, thinking about the excitement to come. He knew there might be a few teachers carrying. Maybe a security guard or two. But with the advantage of surprise he could take them out before they knew what hit them. Then it’d just be little kids running everywhere. Little kids screaming and bleeding and dying while he picked them off one, two, maybe three at a time. Maybe he’d start with the girls and then switch to the boys. No. That was making things too complicated. Derek Crosby would be an equal opportunity slayer. He’d shoot without worrying about the race, religion, gender or religious or political orientation of his victims. Derek started breathing faster just thinking about the blood, and the screaming and the little bodies falling everywhere. No one would ever forget his name. All he had to do to have his name go down in history was to top Lanza’s 26 kills by one. He figured with five hundred kids and fifty or sixty grown-ups in the place, that’d be easy. He just had to make sure to keep an eye out for any dumb-ass teacher who was carrying and blast that sucker first.

Derek slipped his secondary weapon, a Glock 17, into the holster he wore on his hip. He stepped out of the Ranger and slung the Sig over his shoulder and walked, perfectly legally, onto the school grounds. As he walked he whispered a nearly silent thank you to the Georgia State Legislature for making today a whole lot easier. He grabbed the handle to the door. Pulled it open. No one could stop him now. He was about to go down in history.

Fifty Years … and Counting

Lea Wait, here. In a few months my high school class will be reuniting to celebrate the 50th anniversary of our graduation. Fifty years! I’ve been thinking a lot about that recently.

Members of our class, the Glen Ridge, New Jersey, class of 1964, were the first of the Baby Boomers. Most of our fathers (and some of our mothers) served during World War II. Some returned with war injuries and variations of what we now call PTSD. Most returned determined to achieve the American dream: a good income, a family, and a home in a safe neighborhood.

If you drove through Glen Ridge you’d know most of them achieved those goals. Glen Ridge was then, and is now, a small, well-kept community of large and small homes close enough to New York City to make commuting easy, and far enough away so it can be heavily tree-lined and almost classically suburban. The sort of town you’d see in a Jimmy Stewart movie.

Lea’s 3rd grade class at the Linden Avenue School in Glen Ridge. She’s in the first row.

Sure - those of us growing up there assumed there were economic differences between families living in the north end of town, and those at the south end. Glen Ridge encompassed homes large enough to be called mansions, and smaller homes, in less elegant, but equally neat and secure, neighborhoods. (My home was one of the many in the middle.)

Our classmates and neighbors were more diverse than we acknowledged. We were gay and straight. We were white and black and Cuban refugees and World War II war orphans. We were Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish, although our ethnic heritages were heavily weighted toward the British Isles and Italy. But, most of the time, we neither acknowledged those difference, nor, certainly, celebrated them. There were no “black History” or “Hispanic Heritage” months. No one had heard of women’s liberation, much less gay liberation.

We played sports. We rode our bicycles on the street. We built tree houses. If we weren’t skilled at sports we escaped to books or church choirs or Scouts or art or dancing to Elvis Presley.

Our families were the centers of our lives. But inside many, if not all, of those houses on those tree-lined streets, our families had secrets. We didn’t talk about parents who drank heavily, or took too many pills, or vacationed with business associates. We didn’t talk about emotional or physical or sexual abuse. We didn’t talk about fathers we rarely saw .. mothers who were frustrated at being housewives, or who struggled to keep up with their neighbors … gay relatives .. single parent homes.  But they were all there. Not all of us looked forward to going home in the afternoon. But, other than

The home I grew up in with my sisters, parents & grandparents. My room was on the third floor.

the playing fields or the library or friends’ houses, there was nowhere else in town to go.

The Russians orbited their first satellite when we were in sixth grade, and the United States, scared and horrified, began its race to compete. Academic standards increased almost overnight. By the time we were in seventh grade we were tested, assessed, and classified in advanced classes, average classes .. and others. Of course, because society wasn’t yet comfortable differentiating between students, although every one of us knew exactly where we fell in the educational order, none of that was publicly acknowledged by the school.

We were focused on the basics. … history. English. Math. Science. But girls still took home economics and boys took shop, as we saw Kennedy elected, prayed for the Russians to back off during the Cuban Missile crisis, watched Civil Rights demonstrations in the south on our black and white televisions, and then, in our senior year of high school, saw Kennedy assassinated and the Beatles appear on the Ed Sullivan Show.

As our country raced to get to the moon before the Russians, education was seen as the tool to make us “The Great Society.” Competition was part of our everyday lives. In seventh grade we had a class in how to prepare for college, and several times a month we took national tests, both for what they revealed and to familiarize ourselves with critical SATs and National Merit exams to come. In high school we took advanced science courses .. .although the teacher of one told us no girl had ever gotten higher than a C” in his classroom. No matter how hard we worked .. turned out he was right. No one, student or parents or administration, questioned it. We took Latin, French, Spanish … and  typing (to prepare to type college papers.) Some of us struggled through advanced math classes and Advanced English and American history. Many who took those courses did well in advanced placement tests when we were seniors.

Boys played football and basketball and tennis. Girls were cheerleaders and played field hockey and learned folk dances. We worked on the high school newspaper and the yearbook and were members of foreign language clubs.

We also grew up socially. We wanted to have girlfriends or boyfriends, and some of us did. Others didn’t. Some of us went to the prom. Some of us went to Civil Rights demonstrations. We listened to rock and the Beatles and Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and the Kingston Trio. We lived less than an hour from Broadway, but most of us saw West Side Story at a movie theatre. “Peace” was something rising in our consciousnesses. We didn’t know it then, but some of us would go to Vietnam. Some wouldn’t return.

About a hundred and twenty-five of us graduated from Glen Ridge High School in June of 1964. Most of us went on to college; some dropped out; some eventually got advanced degrees. A few went into the service or got jobs.

We saw each other, sometimes, when we visited our parents in Glen Ridge. We grew up. We got married, or we didn’t. We lived our lives.

We had been given a mission by President Kennedy (“As not what your country can do for you ..”) and by our parents and teacher. We were to make our world better.

In some ways, we did that. In others, we failed miserably. But many, if not all, of us tried.

And now it’s fifty years later. I haven’t taken a poll, but I suspect most of us are now grandparents.

Those grandchildren are growing up in a world much more open than ours was; a world in which there are not as many secrets. But also, due to reliance on social media and technology, they are growing up in a world missing some of the connections we had to each other as we were growing up.

Nationally, our school systems are failing in many ways, and the idea of “besting the Russians” in technology and the sciences seems laughable. Instead of being the products of some of the best schools in the world, today’s American students are behind their counterparts in fifteen or twenty countries.

Civil rights. Women’s rights. Gender freedom. Our generation has made major differences in social issues, although we still have a long way to go.

But we have only begun to make inroads on environmental issues, including global warming. Today there is more difference than there was fifty years ago between the “haves” and the “have nots,” and between political parties. We’ve lost two of the great equalizing factors: excellent education for all and well-paying middle class, blue and white collar, jobs that enable those at the bottom of our economic structure to step up. The gaps between the steps are, for many people, too large to cross.

The future success of the United States may depend on our creating opportunities for those who fall between those gaps.

This October I will gather with many of my classmates to celebrate, to reminisce, to remember classmates no longer with us, and to think back over the past fifty years. Although not everyone in our class was lucky enough to make it this far, most of us have.

I hope we also take the time, individually or collectively, to think about our next years. No; we don’t have another fifty years. But we may have ten. Or twenty. Or perhaps even thirty.

I hope we use them wisely. For ourselves and for society. For our grandchildren.

We are the first Baby Boomer class. We’ve lived through a lot of changes in our world. We created many of them, good and bad. We can’t afford – and our country can’t afford – for us to stop now.

There’s still work to be done.

Join in “The Goldfinch” Debate

I’ll admit it straight off – I loved The Goldfinch.  I had that wonderful, rare feeling when you read a final sentence and close a book, letting yourself linger for as long as possible in the author’s world.  I had a thought I’ve rarely had —  I realized that the book had changed me for the better.  I came away with such a message of hope, and I vowed right then and there to write Donna Tartt and tell her how much her words meant to me.

Vicki Doudera here, reporting on events that happened  back in March.  We were visiting our oldest son in St. Croix, and I read the final sentences of The Goldfinch on an incredibly beautiful and remote beach. I told my daughter that she needed to read it as soon as she could, and, as soon as we were back in Camden, I lent it to my mother so that she could be similarly impressed.

Except she wasn’t. Mom was lukewarm about the book, absolutely hating the whole middle section when Theo was living with his father in a haze of drugs.  My daughter started the book once she finished her first year of college, but she thinks it drags and has yet to finish it. And guess what?  She is not alone. Lo and behold there are a whole passel of critics claiming The Goldfinch is childish, poorly written, and contrived.

Back in April, The Goldfinch won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. I felt vindicated, agreeing totally with the judges that it’s a book that “stimulates the mind and touches the heart.” But now I have to wonder – who’s really right? Those who love it, like me and our own Stephen King, or those who find it lacking?

My latest issue of Vanity Fair has a provocative article weighing in on the controversy, available on line here. The story raises the BIG question of what makes art “art.”  As interesting as the article is, even more compelling are the comments at the end. It’s amazing how varied they are, how divisive the book really is.

Did you read The Goldfinch? And what did you think? Is it Pulitzer-worthy? Did you wish you had written it? And — would you read it again?

Weekend Update: June 28-29,2014

Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Vicki Doudera (Monday), Lea Wait (Tuesday), Jim Hayman (Wednesday), Barb Ross (Thursday), and John Clark (Friday).

Happy Fourth of July to all our US readers!

In the news department, here’s what’s happening with some of us who blog regularly at Maine Crime Writers:

From Kaitlyn Dunnett: I’m having a drawing for an ARC (Advance Reading Copy) of Ho-Ho-Homicide, the next Liss MacCrimmon Scottish-American Heritage mystery. To find out how to enter, scroll down and read yesterday’s post from me. I don’t actually have my ARCs yet, but they’ll be arriving soon. The publication date for the hardcover edition is October 28, so the winner will get to read the book months ahead of everyone else.

 From Barb Ross: The audiobook of Clammed Up has been released by Audible. It joins the already-released audiobook of Boiled Over. To see it on Audible, click here.

Also, my Maine hometown paper, the Boothbay Register (an old-fashioned broadsheet–and I mean the old, broad, broadsheet size) did a great story on Boiled Over and me. See it here.

From Lea Wait: Saturday afternoon, June 28, at 3:30, I’ll be talking about my Shadows of a Down East Summer at the Mainely Murders Bookstore, Maine’s only mystery bookstore, on 1 Bourne Street in Kennebunk. If you’re in the area … stop in! I plan to bring a few Winslow Homer wood engravings as “show and tell” items, since Homer is a character in the sections of my book set in 1890 Prouts Neck, Maine.

From Kate Flora: One of Maine’s most fabulous summer events is Books in Boothbay on Saturday, July 12th, a book fair at the Boothbay Railway Museum featuring Maine authors of all stripes and genres. Many of us will be there, and we hope that you will be, too! We’ll have a basket of books and Maine goodies to give away, and nothing is more fun than being in a room where the creativity simmers in the summer air.

An invitation to readers of this blog: Do you have news relating to Maine, Crime, or Writing? We’d love to hear from you. Just comment below to share.

And a reminder: If your library, school, or organization is looking for a speaker, we are often availble to talk about the writing process, research, where we get our ideas, and other mysteries of the business. Contact Kate Flora: kateflora@gmail.com

 

The Power of Lists

I make lists. I can’t remember when I didn’t. I do remember my father telling me when I was quite young that the best way to make a hard decision is to make a list of pros and cons and look at which one is longer.

I share this list-making habit with a great many many fictional sleuths, including the four female detectives I have created over the years. Liss MacCrimmon, the contemporary sleuth I write about as Kaitlyn Dunnett, makes more lists than I do. In the mysteries I write as Kathy Lynn Emerson, all three of my historical detectives, from Susanna, Lady Appleton, in the Face Down series, to Diana Spaulding in my 1888 Quartet, to the soon to be in print Rosamond Jaffrey, use lists to help them solve crimes.

As a reader, I relate to fictional sleuths who make lists. One of my favorites is Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody Emerson (no relation). In The Curse of the Pharaohs, she decides to “make a little chart, setting forth the various motives and means and so on.” By Deeds of the Disturber, she remarks that her brain “works too swiftly to be easily organized,” but she falls back on list making anyway, making one that consists of two columns, “QUESTIONS” and “WHAT TO DO ABOUT THEM.” She comes up with nine entries, ranging from “Were the splashes of dark liquid human blood?” (“Inquire of Inspector Cuff.”) to “Who is the lunatic in the leopard skin?” (“Catch the scoundrel in the act.”). In the end, this list does not prove particularly useful, but it does illustrate the way the character’s mind works and provides both a quick review of what she knows about the case to that point and a bit of comic relief.

In real life, I rely on lists. Some serve as powerful motivators. Others just help me keep track of things. The 5×7 lined tablet beside my computer is my primary personal to-do list. There can be a real sense of satisfaction in crossing off a completed task. I don’t really need to write “cont. R#2″ to remember to spend time on the next bit of my current work in progress (the second Rosamond Jaffrey mystery), but I do like running a line through that notation when I finish my pages for the day. Ditto for “ans. email” and “stretches.” That last refers to the hour or so I spend, six days out of seven, doing an assortment of stretches to relieve arthritis pain. It includes a stint on the stationary bike that doubles as reading time.

This list, broken down by day of the week, has a sub-list going on the same page. Those are items I really need to do sometime soon, but which will be squeezed into spare moments in between the items on the main list. Some of these, like VACUUM and DUST, may end up being moved along from page to page without much hope of being crossed off until the dust bunnies are bigger than our cats . . . and we have BIG cats. Still, putting an item anywhere on the page means I see it every time I look at the list. Eventually, all the items gets crossed off, even the housework.

When I’m working on a mystery novel, two other lists are essential. One is a list of characters, with sub lists of suspects and motives much like the ones my sleuth will eventually be making. Initially, though, the purpose of the character list is to work out their names. Listing all the characters highlights quite a few potential problems right at the start of the project. Are there too many characters whose names start with the same letter? Have I given a character a name that doesn’t fit his or her personality (unless that’s the point)? From the character list, I make individual character sheets and keep them in alphabetical order, then rearrange my character list “in order of appearance.” Somewhere along the way, I give every suspect a secret. This secret may or may not come out in the course of the investigation, but it helps me get a handle on what that person is like.

The other list that is a must when I write a mystery is one I call “who knows what when?” Creating this list avoids all sorts of continuity problems, but it can’t be compiled until a good chunk of the writing has already been done. At that point, I read through what I have written and make notes. If I’ve developed a really complicated plot, the list sometimes expands into a chart. Looking at it helps me tie up all the loose ends, too. And sometimes it points up things that I can change to make the story work even better.

So that’s my take on the power of lists. How about you folks reading this post? Do you make lists? Or have a favorite list-making detective? Or (bonus question!), have you ever seen the classic mystery movie, The List of Adrian Messenger? Leave an answer or comment to be entered in a drawing for an advance reading copy of the next Liss MacCrimmon mystery, Ho-Ho-Homicide. Cut-off date is the 4th of July. The winner’s name will be announced in the July 5-6 Weekend Update.

 

RHINE MYSTERY #1 — SOLVED!

Susan Vaughan here, just returned from a cruise up the Rhine River from Amsterdam to Basel.

History and geography buffs and those more traveled than I may already know the facts behind the mystery in my title, but many like me may not. Most of the old windmills are gone, but not in Kinderdiik, our first stop upriver from Amsterdam, a UN World Heritage site, which boasts several windmills dating from the late 18th century. We stepped off the ship’s gangplank and up onto the dike to see this view of the many windmills preserved here.

The excursion was led by a local guide, Daniel, a mechanical engineering student at a nearby university. In the workshop, he showed us the tools used to maintain the mills’ works and described how a mill works.

Yes, ladies, Daniel is a hottie—and very knowledgeable and entertaining. Our destination was the windmill that’s now a museum. Notice one sail has a canvas cover, better to catch a light wind.

A family with thirteen children occupied it last, many years ago before electricity and other modern conveniences. All those people in a few cramped rooms, and only the parents’ bedroom/sitting room had heat, a wood stove. Tiny, tiny living space. My husband climbed the steep stairs to the cramped children’s bedroom, but I had the camera. Here’s my picture of the warming pan for reheating meals, which were cooked in a small shed outside.

From the ground, the miller can control the direction of the sails to catch the wind constantly sweeping across this flat land. Looking upward at the turning sails gave me a sense of that wind power.

And my mystery: what were the windmills for?

When I think of windmills, I think of the wind powering a mill to grind wheat into flour or corn into meal. Not so in the North Holland province of the Netherlands, where the Rhine flows via a delta into the North Sea. Tides surge up the Rhine and across the delta. Big tides like here in Maine. The soil is fertile, so ancient people settled there, but it’s tough to grow crops when the fields flood twice a day—every day. Windmills, canals, and dikes were created to control the flow of the Rhine.

In the 1700’s windmills powered pumps that moved the water from the fields into canals and reservoirs. These incredibly inventive solutions to the flooding problem were phased out, and today massive pumping stations are powered by electric and diesel engines.

Next month another mystery. Care to guess what?

*** My newest releases are the Task Force Eagle trilogy and Primal Obsession. You can find excerpts and buy links at www.susanvaughan.com.

Anthropologist in Beverly Hills

Kate Flora here, reporting on my adventures on the other coast. It was primarily a trip to visit son, daughter-in-law, and the three little grand dogs. But it began, because I’ve never been there, in Beverly Hills, on and around Rodeo Drive.

Yup. Rodeo Drive. Where the diamonds in the Harry Winston window undoubtedly cost more than I’ll ever make in three lifetimes. Where giant, bejeweled and tasseled handbags in garish colors vie for ugliness awards. Where gaggles of Japanese tourists, huddled under umbrellas to protect them from the sun, press their curious noses against store windows, and every third window has a window washer busily removing the evidence of those noses.

Now, those of you who follow MCW know that I often find myself feeling a bit out of place when I leave my desk, especially in urban landscapes populated by the high-maintenance and glamorous, where the Rolls Royce is a commonplace and even the help drive BMWs. Where everyone has a team of gardeners manicuring every bush (did you know they use leaf-blowers to remove dead leaves from the shrubs so they’ll look pristine? Well, neither did I.)

And you may also know that I have a passion for shoes that I control by purchasing them only at second-hand stores and hate to spend more than $5.49 for a pair. (I’ve occasionally been heard to say that I can tell how badly the writing is going by how many pairs of shoes I’ve recently bought.) So, being a bit of a shoe junkie, I was naturally drawn to store windows full of shoes.

Drawn, mind you, but NOT enticed. And here is why: Never mind the prices, which I didn’t attempt to explore, these were not shoes that a human person could walk in. These were not shoes that a human foot could find any comfort in. These were the kind of shoes that a person might, rather, line up on a set of designer closet shelves and dust from time to time, I’m thinking about Goldie Hawn in Overboard. Possibly even keeping them under a spotlight to illuminate the dazzle and glitz. These shoes aren’t made for walking.

Something else I can tell you about people in LA and their shoes–they don’t know anything about seasons, so they’re wearing clunky knee-high boots under their black maxi dresses and orthopedic-looking wedge-heeled boots with their tank tops and Daisy Dukes.

Yeah. I’m thinking these are folks who probably wouldn’t survive well in Maine. None of this footwear was adapted to walking anywhere, never mind how they’d navigate rocks or trails or even less than perfectly even sidewalks. I imagine the six inch stiletto on cobblestones or bricks. The maxi dress hem getting caught under the heels of those big black boots. I wonder what it would be like to live a life where clothing and footwear is decorative instead of functional. I imagine them being chased by a bear or suddenly meeting an irritable moose. Jumping from the boat or kayak to the dock. Out weeding the garden.

And yes, since it was LA, and I’m a huge Pretty Woman fan, my husband and I did have one of those

Julia Roberts moments. We’d spotted a tee shirt in a store window that my husband liked (he generally hates to shop) and popped in to see if it came in a different color. One of the clerks was fussily arranging something in a display. One was gazing absently about. The third, a small, oddly-dressed man in his sixties (oversized white t-shirt and baggy wheat-colored pants hanging low and cinched by an oversized belt) was engaged in oleaginous praise of another older man, taller, handsome, and wearing shorts, t-shirt, baggy sports jacket and some kind of light straw summer hat. He was calling to the two women to join him in affirming how wonderful the customer looked. The other potential customers, us, (we were the only other people in the store) were ignored. Finally, he took a break from the praise to ask what we wanted. We inquired. He shook his head and turned away, as though rubes like us simply weren’t allowed to shop in his store, or my husband should have known better than to inquire about THAT t-shirt.

Travel broadens one’s horizons. Still, I am very happy, despite the fabulous vegan food at Shojin, a lovely weekend at the Ojai Resort and Spa, and a trip to the always spectacular Getty, to be back at my desk, imagining worlds I can control, and where my characters choose sensible footwear. But I can imagine Thea, already 5′ 11″, donning a pair of those stilettos, or the biker-chick gladiator sandals, and becoming even more intimidating. We shall see what happens in the next scene.

Quick, Before It Freezes

     Hello again from Sarah Graves, out in the garden in Eastport, Maine, where the peas are getting tall and the potatoes are showing on the first day of summer.

Gardening in Maine is like surfing in Alaska. You can do it, but you’ve got to pick your moments. Not that there aren’t some fantastic gardens in Maine, and garden writers, too. Katherine A. White’s Onward and Upward in the Garden, for instance,  is a door into summer even in January, useful and inspiring.

I doubt my garden will ever be anything like hers, though. For one thing I’m a lot less picky about what goes where. Colors, shapes…with the limited time I have, I tend to work more on keeping things alive and less on who plays nice together. Also, hired help is pretty thin on the ground around here; what we don’t do ourselves doesn’t get done, for the most part. Also, deer! The magnificent vermin are on the hunt, now, to fatten themselves up before autumn, and they gorge at will unless the plantings are non-tasty.

Deer like hosta leaves, but these hosta are so huge that I think the deer might be afraid of them. I’m even a little cautious about them — they look as if they’re waiting for some unwary gardener to turn her back, whereupon they will fold shut upon her. And then…well, there have been little bone bits found around the stems of these vegetable behemoths. I wonder whose they are? At any rate, it’s too bad the hosta don’t find the deer as tasty as the other way around.

These poppies don’t have to be gardened at all, which is my favorite kind of bloom. They are all over Moose Island, great wide drifts of them that self-seed bigger every year. People mow around them, but once they’ve bloomed you can yank up the raggedy, untidy foliage or run the mower over it, and they’ll still return the following spring. Talk about easy-care…they are so determined to survive, it’s just about impossible to kill them. Their only fault is that the blooms don’t last very long — one good rain and they’re done.

There’s a certain kind of spot at the corner of an old house that is made for a hydrangea. No other flower will do, and it has to be a blue one, which means you need to test the soil, add acid or alkaline depending on what you’ve got there, and then if you’re lucky you’ll get the traditional bloom in the traditional color. Here’s my attempt, just started this year, to cultivate this for-me symbolic vegetation. Symbolic of what? Of days gone by, I guess, but not entirely gone…as long as gardeners are still cultivating the blue hydrangea.

And then there’s what to do once the gardening is done for the day. (Which never happens, there’s always something more wanting attention, which is another reason why it’s good to have a dog.) On Moose Island, to cool off after digging and weeding and pruning and fertilizing and mulching, you just… well, you get the idea, right?