Sarah Wynde's Blog, page 82

Goodbye, red wine

I love red wine. Maybe not all of it — shiraz has always seemed a little sweet for me and I think I’ve generally not been excited about grenache — but a good pinot noir is one of life’s best things, IMO.

I’m at about 100% certainty that red wine triggers my joint pain.

Damn it, damn it, damn it.

I went out to lunch yesterday with someone who has been on a restricted diet for years and she confirmed something that I’ve been noticing: having eliminated these foods from my diet, my body’s reactions when I encounter a trigger again are much fiercer than they were before. The dull ache that I was used to living with is now a prohibitive misery when it comes back. My joints — when unhappy — feel like they have hot coals living in them, burning me from the inside out. When happy, they are unnoticeable, for the first time in years. Happy joints are silent. I like having silent joints.

I also like red wine. But it’s just not worth it. Walking, typing, bending my elbows — moving — those are all good things, too. Moving is nice! I approve of it. Enough to — oh, so reluctantly — add red wine to the potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and wheat flour pile of foods that I will miss. I can’t believe that I’m really going to spend the rest of my life without pizza. But the last time I had pizza, I woke up four hours later feeling like I was on fire, my fingers throbbing with pain. It’s not an experience that I want to repeat.

I think my next reintroduction will be rice. But I’m going to wait at least a week, because I really want to have rice back and I don’t want my rice reaction to overlap with anything else. I’ve kept hoping with the red wine that maybe it was a reaction to something else — I ate accidental canola oil yesterday, can’t I blame it on that? — but alas, it’s time to face the truth.

Damn it.

Anxiety

The dogs are at the vet.

I’m trying to tell myself that it’s a spa day for them. They’re getting their nails done, their teeth cleaned, and lovely people will be telling them they’re good dogs in crooning voices all day long.

It’s not working. They’re going under general anesthesia and I have this feeling like something heavy is sitting on my chest, shutting down my lungs. My nose prickles like I want to sneeze, but I know what I really want is to cry.

On the form I filled out, there was a question — would you like your pet to be given anti-anxiety medication? Why yes, yes, I would. And could I have some myself, please?

The problem with anxiety is that it feels so much like premonitions. My head knows that the dogs are going to be fine, but my body is sending me all sorts of messages of danger, and they’re hard to ignore. I was doing okay until the vet called. Interestingly, I didn’t breathe until he told me he was calling about Bartleby and then my breath left my body in an explosive huff. It’s not a surprise that I’m more worried about Zelda than I am about B — he’s a loved pet but she’s an adored angel, one who’s ten years old in 11 days. But that moment of panic, that fear that he might have some bad news about Z, it hasn’t left me yet. The chemicals are still churning their way through my system.

Yoga in half an hour. I hope it’ll settle me down enough to get something done today. Well, something beyond the hyperactive dusting, dishwasher-unloading, breakfast-making, cleaning-out-of-cupboards that I’ve been engaged in since the vet’s phone call. I could almost wish I had some laundry to fold, but maybe I’ll clean out some drawers while I wait to leave for yoga. Ooh, or kill some monsters in WoW. I’m trying not to play until after I’ve written but I know I’m not going to write in the next twenty minutes. And killing monsters is always soothing.

Must Write

After three weeks spent sleeping (badly) in the living room, celebrating the holidays, and having R home with the various distractions he provides, I am back in my room, with my own office space. It’s such a relief. It’s hard to be set up for life, work, and sleep in what is essentially a traffic area. The living room where I was settled is adjacent to the kitchen, so every late night cup of tea or early morning cup of coffee was a conversational opportunity for me. Conversational opportunity being the tactful way to say interruption, of course. It’s left me seriously off my stride.

But I’m out of excuses now. It’s time to get back into it or at least into something. “It” would be A Gift of Grace. The “something” could be any of the myriad of other projects I’ve started and left half finished over the course of the past couple years. Or even something new. It doesn’t matter to me what I write as long as I start working again.

I just spent ten minutes alternately pondering the word, “working,” and thinking about chocolate. This is not a productive use of my time. Maybe I should go redesign a website instead? Or, I suppose, work on my taxes. Finalize some insurance paperwork? Lots of options, but apparently even writing a basic blog post is beyond my writing ability at the moment.

Christmas memories

I was — am — determined to get back on track on this fine Monday morning. There will be writing! There will be prompt answering of emails! There will be no furtive checking on my garrison status in World of Warcraft, or worse yet, just getting a little bit more XP, maybe ten percent of a level, so I can get another character into Draenor.

Well, eventually there will be some of that, but not until after I’ve written 1000 words and at least spent some time pondering the ywriter file of A Gift of Grace.

Among the email answering, though, was a second email from a favorite relative. I never answered the first, it got lost in the piles of emails I haven’t been dealing with during the holiday chaos, and because I felt guilty, I took the time to send her a long note about our holidays. It made me think about our holidays — as an overview — for the first time.

They were really nice. Really, really nice.

And this is a thing worthy of writing down so that I will remember it in future years, because honestly, the holidays have pretty much sucked for a pretty long while, so having a lovely holiday — well, it’s a thing to savor.

On Christmas Eve, R and I had a miserable fight on our way out to breakfast. End result: I went to breakfast on my own and ate blueberry pancakes and bacon and drank coffee. They were pretty good pancakes, although probably not worth the gluten-penalty, and maybe that fight and the resulting decision to enjoy my own life had something to do with the rest of the holiday? But the fight was about going to church. R was unpleasant when he discovered that was part of the plan for the evening. I told him that at 18, he was an adult and certainly didn’t need to go to church if he didn’t want to. We could take separate cars to Leesburg so he could leave before church, he could excuse himself from the evening’s festivities entirely, he could wait at the house while the rest of us were at church, but I was certain that he was capable of solving his own problem in a reasonable way. And meanwhile I, as the mother of an adult, had no intention of putting up with sulkiness and a bad attitude over something as trivial as spending an hour in an way that wasn’t pleasing.

R chose to go to church. And by the time we got in the car to go to Leesburg, ruffled feathers had pretty much been smoothed down and if there was a little stiffness, it was not worth noticing. That was the last unpleasant part of the next three days. Leesburg was a lovely family time — cousins and friends and grandparents. We exchanged presents, ate appetizers, drank wine, and yes, went to church. The songs were too slow, the sermon could have been better and the electronic candles were cheesy, but the beam on my dad’s face as he looked at the full pew behind him, with his daughters, grandsons and granddaughter was the reason I was there and absolutely worth the price of admission. I’d guess that it was the best Christmas present of his year, maybe the best one of many years.

The next day — Christmas — C and I were both up at 5. By 6, she was texting R to tell him it was time to open presents. I sent him a text, too, and his phone must have been buzzing like mad, but he didn’t stir. At 7, she brought him coffee in bed and told him it was time to open presents. The presents were just about perfect or maybe the audience was enthusiastic. R gave me the latest Patrick Rothfuss book (worthy of a blog post of its own because of writing-inspired thoughts), B gave me the DVD of Kiki’s Delivery Service, C gave me sparkly lights for my bedroom, new grill tools, and the cutest little gluten-free soy sauce fish. Also socks that use the word “fuck” which might just have become a holiday tradition. I can’t remember a year when I’ve had more perfect presents. (Although that said, last year C gave me an electric tea kettle, which has turned into a possession that I wouldn’t know how to live without.)

After presents, we had brunch. Bacon, fancy scrambled eggs, coffee, mimosas, while we watched movies, including C’s pick, Toys with Robin Williams (which is a seriously weird movie), mine (Kiki’s) and R’s (Howl’s Moving Castle). Eventually, B and C headed off to pick up his kids, and R and I went out to Korean food for dinner. We’ve had Korean for dinner for three out of the last four years (not last year, because he was in Seattle) and it’s turned into a nice little Christmas Day tradition. After dinner, I read my book in a candlelit bath and drank a chocolate martini and felt quite decadent and very content.

The day after Christmas, C made trifle and in the afternoon, we went over to her boyfriend’s family for dinner with the kids. Christmas crackers with magic tricks and jokes, beef wellington with asparagus and potatoes and celeriac au gratin, puff pastry with cranberry and brie, trifle, the classic English Christmas cake with brandy sauce, chocolates, ginger cookies… it was an incredible meal in wonderful company. We shared a peppermint pig, a tradition where you put the pig in a velvet pouch and everyone takes a turn sharing a good memory of the year and then hitting this pig with a hammer. Festive, thoughtful, lovely.

I drank more coffee this past week than I’ve had in months, more wine, ditto, and certainly ate more interesting foods. But between the lights on the house (first time in years), the natural Christmas tree (ditto), the church service, and the companionship of friends and family, it felt like a real holiday. Like the way Christmas is supposed to feel, a celebration of lights and people and the triumph over darkness.

I know that I’ve believed that Christmas would never be special again. When C and I were decorating the tree, my sense of missing my grandparents and my mom was so intense, so deep. Christmas without them has ever felt like the holes were so big, the absences so profound, that no joy could ever fill those empty spaces. This year, those empty spaces were still there. But I also managed to live in the moment, to appreciate what we had, and to celebrate the holiday. Christmas might never be what it was when I was a kid, but maybe I can finally stop dreading it.

Home for the holidays

R is home from school, which makes me happy, happy.

Except that because he’s 6’4″ and the daybed available for sleeping on is not, I’m sleeping in the living room on the small bed. This would be fine/is fine, except that Bartleby, who is the smallest creature in the house (well, bar any unknown creatures like spiders or beetles), is a bed hog. I cannot count how many times I woke up last night feeling like there was no room for me, only to discover that somehow the thirteen-pound chihuahua had angled his way into half the space and Zelda and I were curled up in what was left.

I would try to move him back but he sleeps like a log in the water. You push him and he rolls closer. Whenever I would finally give up and get up enough to lift him into a better position, it meant entirely re-arranging the bed. He finally wound up sprawled across the pillow like a cat, with Zelda and me in the remaining 3/4 of the bed.

R will be home for three weeks, which means B is going to have to get a little more reasonable about sharing the bed. I’d say I’d leave him on the ground, but past experience has taught him that if he makes a low rumble on the ground closest to my head for long enough, I will give in and pick him up. He’s trained me well. But we’ll figure it out, I’m sure.

Yesterday, Ghosts was included in a mailing from themidlist.com. The download numbers were great for a site that doesn’t change for advertising: 695 copies downloaded during the day. I spent money this summer to have Ghosts automatically posted to multiple sites ($15 for 32 sites) and didn’t get results from any of them that were noticeable, plus $30 on Digital Book Today for about 180 downloads, so the midlist results are pretty impressive, comparatively. (Probably I should be writing this on my business blog instead of here — c’est la vie.) Anyway, the weird thing was Amazon’s sales ranks. The sales rank didn’t rise during the day for hours. Instead it kept getting lower. My fascination meant a ton of wasted time while I looked at the sales rank and tried to calculate the math. If 300 downloads meant that my rank dropped 3000 numbers, how many free downloads was Amazon getting? I felt like I was discovering some fascinating business news–Amazon free downloads reaching an amazing peak–but when I came home from bringing C back to her mom (at 8 or so), Ghosts’ rank had skyrocketed to about #280 in the free store. It’s dropped back to 300+ now, so that was its peak, and the numbers were just a glitch or delay in Amazon’s reporting.

Next week I’m running my first ever promotion on A Lonely Magic. Now that it finally has a new cover, I’m doing the Kindle Countdown Deal and lowering the price to .99 for a week. I’ve paid for one ad, $20 on Booksends, so I’m not exactly going crazy with the promotion. But since I haven’t finished writing the sequel yet, there’s no hurry.

Speaking of writing, I should go do some. This feels like writing, but it’s not the kind that might ever let me stop feeling anxious about my mortgage payment, so it probably doesn’t count.

But R’s home. Yay!

Binge-reading

I binge-read four books yesterday. I don’t think I’m going to post the names, despite the fact that I binge-read them (and paid for them, albeit at .99 each) because I want to write about how terrible they were.

The characters were implausible, often stupid, cliche and inconsistent. Wait, not just the characters–the books were inconsistent. In one scene a character knows nothing, in another she wins a trivia contest on the stuff she knew nothing about. A dollar amount changed randomly within a book and from book to book. The plots were ridiculously unlikely, in all sorts of ways and not always for obvious reasons. Sometimes, sure, I can see that it was just easier to do a little hand-wavium about some plot point that wasn’t important to the story, but other times, I found myself trying to decipher the reasoning behind an authorial decision.

And yet the books were fun to read.

This is seriously a lesson I need to learn. I spend so much time dwelling on minute details. Why would this character be in this place at this time? What’s his reasoning behind this choice? Wouldn’t he have eaten breakfast earlier? Why did he skip breakfast? How does skipping breakfast make him feel? Okay, maybe he needs to have breakfast earlier but in that case, why is the proprietor of the B&B not there? Wouldn’t there be other guests? If it’s just the two of them in the room, then wouldn’t he ask his questions? Okay, he can’t have breakfast then… so back to the why has he missed breakfast?

And yet, who will care? Who will notice? No one sits around in the middle of a story wondering why the characters haven’t needed to hit up a restroom in hours or why they aren’t dead of dehydration after their desperate trek through the forest running away from the bad guys. If the reader has time to wonder that kind of thing, the story isn’t doing its job.

I’ve been stuck for days on Grace, not making any progress at all. Part of that is just me. Holidays, the blues, not feeling well, wrapped up mentally in stupid stuff like the kitchen repairs, health insurance and finances… But part of it is that I’m getting stuck on the stupid stuff, on the need for absolute accuracy in who hears what when instead of flowing with the story. One good romantic conversation simmering with unrequited sexual tension is worth twenty pages of precision mapping and timelines in an actual story.

I don’t regret my binge-reading. The books were fun. And if the sixth book in the series had been available, I probably would have bought it and binge-read it, too. But I hope that what I get out of it is not just the few hours of fun, but some motivation to loosen up on my own writing, to relax and let the words take me places instead of tying me in knots.

Off I go to write.

Birthdays

My mom would have been 72 today.

At yoga this morning, I was swept by such an intense wave of sadness that I had to fight not to burst into sobbing tears. A few little tears leaked out, but I brushed them away and kept going. But it made me realize that the sad is only a step away, not as far gone as I’ve been thinking as I prep for Thanksgiving.

A long, long time ago, I read The 5 Love Languages. The basic concept is that everyone has a way in which they best express and receive love, a love language. The five are 1) acts of service, 2) words of affirmation, 3) physical touch, 4) gifts, and 5) quality time. My mom’s love language was one or maybe all of the first four. I don’t know that she cared about receiving gifts all that much, but she loved giving gifts. She liked our Christmas tree to be piled high. In years past, this time of year would spin her into a cycle of doing — decorating the house from top to bottom, baking cookies and breads to share with family and neighbors, shopping and buying and wrapping, and the Christmas music on from morning to night.

I know that it wouldn’t be better if she was here now. The last couple years of her life were difficult. She hated what was happening to her and hating it didn’t make it any better. But I miss her. I want time to move backwards and just give me another day, another hour. Instead, I think I will make a shopping list that includes ingredients for Christmas cookies. I shouldn’t eat them, but this year, I think I’m finally ready to remember and celebrate my mother as she would have liked.

Counting blessings

I’m in a miserable mood this Monday morning. I’ve got reasons–health, bureaucracies to deal with, words that won’t flow–and part of me feels like whining about them. Instead, I’m going to count some of my blessings, because it’s healthier.

1) I have a soft Jack Russell terrier curled up next to my side who loves me with her whole heart and wants nothing more in life than for me to be happy and give her cuddles and treats. Well, she’d probably also really like it if the pool was warm year round so that she could swim every day. We’re both a little sad about how cold the water is right now. But wait, no whining! Instead, we’re both grateful that we get to play together in the pool as often as we do.

2) A ridiculously fluffy, embarrassingly small dog wandered into my life sixteen months ago and he did not throw up on my bed last night. Or on the floor, either. He doesn’t love me quite the way Zelda does, but he likes me a lot and was willing to come for a long walk with us today. He trudged along like a trooper, one step after another, for a full mile.

3) I live in a place that is warm and sunny, which meant that I could be outside for a long walk this morning and enjoy the feeling of nature. I saw a heron by the water, and they always remind me that life is full of miracles. It’s hard to believe that a bird can be so ungainly and so graceful at the same time.

4) Despite being very, very grouchy about my diet and its failures this morning, my refrigerator has food in it that is both healthy and delicious.

5) This is pathetic as a blessing, but I have modern painkillers in the medicine cabinet. And maybe it’s not so pathetic — all my joints hurt today, which probably means a weather change coming in, and knowing that I can ease my pain if I need to is a luxury that throughout history not too many people have had. It does mean that I’m lucky, really lucky. Or blessed, since I’m counting my blessings.

All right, my blogging has officially inspired me. Off I go to write more of A Gift of Grace. I’m at a part that is so fun in my head, but I’m not doing it justice in pixels. But I’m going to persist. It’ll get there, I hope.

The Sauerkraut Cult

Today–grey, misty, cool–felt like a good day to have waffles for breakfast. Instead, I had a spinach and arugula salad with a warm bacon vinaigrette. It was so good that I made more after I finished my first one. The funny thing is, it sounds all healthy–ooh, spinach salad instead of waffles–but you make the vinaigrette with bacon fat. I find it really hard to believe that a tablespoon of pure fat poured on spinach is all that healthy. It tasted great, though. Although note to self: the red wine vinegar had a little too strong of a tang, so try it with balsamic or apple cider vinegar next time.

I hit a book milestone that I have been waiting a long time for this week, and it was disappointing. For the first time since setting Ghosts to be free, I sold more books in a day than I gave away. So combined, the four titles for sale outsold the number of copies of Ghosts downloaded. Isn’t that nice? Except it was because the number of free downloads dropped to a new low. Drat. That was not how it was supposed to happen. I’m mostly kind of amused by this–it feels like one of those classic life ironies. Be careful what you wish for.

In other news… um, yeah, I’ve got no other news. My house is ridiculously clean because I’ve had a ton of energy lately. I have hung pictures and organized bookshelves and scrubbed the bathtub and done so much laundry that it is apparent to me that I should get rid of some clothes, because when they’re all clean, my drawers can barely close. Yesterday I actually did some Christmas shopping. Christmas! It’s single digits in November. This is not me. But I am absolutely committed to the sauerkraut part of my diet. Yes, it sounds disgusting–well, if you don’t like sauerkraut, which I do not–but I have literally (in the original meaning of the word) never felt healthier in my life. I’ve broken other parts of the diet–Friday I merrily ate as much gluten as I wanted at the Food & Wine Festival and then ate cheese and pate on baguette crackers when I got home–and I still felt better yesterday than my old “normal” ever did. I suppose I should be careful about giving all the credit to sauerkraut–I’m also trying really hard to eat leafy greens every day, and organ meats and seafood four or five times a week, plus avoiding the universe of foods that don’t fall into those categories–but still, the sauerkraut is the thing that most feels like a change. C jokes about AIP (auto-immune protocol diet) being a cult but I think I should start a sauerkraut cult. Well, and also, I should try some other fermented foods, too. I still haven’t made my own yet, but maybe someday soon.

I have written over 800 words this morning (posted on the writing blog, too) and not a single one of them belongs to A Gift of Grace. Time to change that!

A Story to Make R Feel Better

It’s NaNoWriMo. The first weekend, in fact. I should be typing my fingers off. Instead, I’m reorganizing my bookcases, hanging pictures that have been in my closet for five years, and organizing files. My procrastination abilities have soared to entirely new and unexpected levels.

However, while going through ancient CDs to try to decide if there was anything on them I ought to keep, I found a folder called “Writing.” It held the novel I wrote back when my son was a toddler, a few brief bits of a story that was my nighttime go-to-sleep tale for a long, long while, and a short story that I flat-out don’t remember. Like, not at all. Not a word. But it’s in a folder of my writing and it reads like my writing and the subject matter seems very appropriate for where we were in life ten plus years ago, so I think I probably wrote it. And honestly, I found it insanely charming. So, for you, my lovely readers, and maybe for me in the future…

A Story to Help R Feel Better

Once upon a time, there was a castle in a land where nothing ever grew. A boy lived in the castle, with his butler, two geese, and a mouse. One would think that a butler, two geese and a mouse would be plenty of company, but the boy was lonely. He longed for someone to play with.

The geese could be fun. He loved to chase them. But if he caught them, they turned and bit him and he didn’t like that much.

The mouse was delightful. He had tamed it using bits of bread and cheese from his own meals and it would come and sit in his hand and quiver its whiskers at him. But one couldn’t really play with a mouse; for one thing, it was too small. For another, it couldn’t talk.

Sometimes, he could play with the butler. But not often enough, for the butler always had work to do. If it wasn’t cleaning the silver, it was dusting the shelves. And if it wasn’t the shelves, it was the floors or the pantries or the acres of armor that always needed to be polished.

And so the boy was lonely. And being lonely made him sometimes afraid. For he couldn’t help but think how awful it would be if the geese got away, and the butler disappeared, and the mouse never came back, and somehow he was left all alone in the castle. And that thought always made him cry, even though he didn’t want to, and thought privately that he was much too old for crying.

One thing the boy liked to do when he was lonely was wander the castle in search of new books. For it was a big castle and there were lots of rooms and many of the rooms had bookshelves and many of the bookshelves held books. (Although some held other things like tiny statues of dragons or miniature tea cups or pictures of the king and stuff.)

One day, he found a room that was most unusual. It was green. But not painted green. No, it was made of green glass. And in the room were all sorts of mysterious things that he had never seen before, tools and pots, and packets and papers, and vials and bags and all sort of interesting things that one would think he would look at. But the boy was used to lots of strange objects in the castle, most of which he never understood and the butler was too busy to explain, so he ignored the things and headed straight for the bookshelf he spotted over a doorway that led outside.

The bookshelf held only one book. But it was a great big book, one of the biggest the boy had ever seen. It was even bigger than the giant dictionary that lived in the library downstairs.

And when the boy had pulled it down from the shelf and opened it up, he discovered that it was filled with pictures, as well as his words. Ahhhh—that was his favorite, very favorite kind of book. For although he could read, many times he had to sound out the words the way he had been taught and yet still never understood them. The library was filled with books that made no sense to him.

Carefully, the boy flipped through the pages. And as he did, he was struck dumb with amazement. Well, there was no one for him to speak to, so he wasn’t really struck dumb (which means silent, not stupid) so maybe it would be more correct to say the boy was struck numb with amazement. He had never seen such things.

He had books with pictures; pictures of aeroplanes and automobiles, pictures of trains and tractors. But this book was filled with pictures of plants and flowers and vegetables. And not just pictures. The boy quickly realized that the book contained instructions for how to grow plants and vegetables and flowers.

For the next weeks and even months, the boy was far too busy to be lonely. Every day, as soon as he’d woken up and eaten his breakfast and fed some crumbs to his mouse, he dashed off to the glass room, where he planted seeds in the pots, using the tools and dirt that were in the room.

Can you imagine his delight when his first seed sprouted? Perhaps not for you take it for granted. You see flowers all the time. But for this boy it was magic, the way the little green sprout poked through the dirt, the way a leaf appeared and then almost overnight unfurled, and then grew more and more leaves.

The boy loved it. He couldn’t play with his plants, but he could talk to them, and he could pretend that they listened.

One day, he decided that it was the right season to try planting plants outside. He went out and he dug in the dirt and he furrowed the ground, and he made holes and he planted and he watered and he got wet and dirty and messy and he had a most amazing time.

And his plants grew. Somehow in that land where no plants grew, his plants managed to grow. Perhaps it was because he loved them so much. Perhaps it was because he watered them so carefully. Perhaps it was because he fed them, first with plant food he found in the green room, and then with compost that he carefully created using directions found in the big book.

One day, he was outside watering his plants, and he realized that something strange was resting on one of his flowers. He walked a bit closer. Do you know what it was? It was a butterfly. He looked at it in amazement. He’d never seen such a thing.

From that day forth, more butterflies came to his garden. And with them came other bugs. Ants, bees, cicadas, grasshoppers, beetles, ladybugs, spiders, aphids…he didn’t like all of them. He especially didn’t like the ones that ate the plants. But at the same time, he had gone from being someone who knew only four other creatures: the butler, the two geese, and the mouse, to someone who knew who many other creatures. And he did like that. (The geese were happy too. Although they had been perfectly content with the food that was regularly delivered by air drop, fresh bug become their favorite appetizer.)

What do you think happened next? Geese are not the only ones who like to eat fresh bugs.

One day the boy was outside, and he heard a strange noise. It was unlike anything he’d ever heard before. Tweet-tweet, tweet. It was a bird. The boy was entranced. He had thought the butterflies were amazing, but the bird actually spoke. “Tweet-tweet” he whistled back at it, and the bird darted off in fear.

But the next day it was back. And the next summer, it was back with friends.

And the year after that, there were mice. And the year after that, a cat showed up to chase the mice. And then one night, the boy spotted a raccoon, prowling around. Soon after, the geese put up a ferocious squawking one night when they realized that there was a fox nearby.

And the boy kept planting and tending his gardens. As the years went by and he grew older and older, he planted more and more. And some years, he would plant in different areas and let his old gardens run wild.

By the time the boy was very old, the butler and the two geese and the mouse had all died. And the thing the boy was afraid of had happened: except that it hadn’t really happened at all. He knew thirty birds, maybe more. He knew cats and mice and raccoons. And his geese had had goslings and they had had goslings and now he had many geese. And his mouse had met a nice girl mouse who’d moved into the garden and they’d had baby mice and now the boy had many tame mice.

As for the butler—well, when the boy grew he decided that no one needed to polish the acres and acres of armor. So when the butler had grown old and tired (many years before he finally died), the boy advertised for a replacement, only for a gardener not a butler. And the gardener who came in answer to his ad was a nice girl who loved plants as much as he did. And fortunately, she also loved children too, because they had seven of them. And when the boy was very old, the castle was a very crowded place to live and the country was green and lush and beautiful.

And the boy was not lonely and he was not scared of anything. And although he knew now that one is never too old to cry, he seldom did, for he was very, very happy.

The End

PS If I ever reach a more fiscally stable place, I am so going to find an illustrator and turn that into a children’s book, after a little editing, of course. It makes me want grandchildren just so I can read it to them.