Camp NaNoWriMo word count: 39,039 by 6:30 Friday morning, 26 April 2019

On our way home from two nights away (“We’re on vacation!”), we stopped several times. Gary bought a double-scoop ice cream cone. I bought batik fabric. One of my favorite fabric stores in Wheeler had a sign in the door. After 35 years, the store had closed. Last October! Such a lovely store and such lovely people we will miss. Next door in the antique mall, twenty feet from the front door was the table we had decided we needed just a few days ago. Round, 42” in diameter, and paintable. Probably a hundred years old and ill-used, but exactly what we were looking for and inexpensive. It has already been painted many times over the oak, so no guilt when I add three more coats of dark green. 

This morning I will need to find something to share with my writing friend. Most of what I have accomplished in the last week is the novel and I cannot very well print of a couple of hundred pages to share. A chapter? The shortest chapter? Something else? Seriously, everything I have worked on is long. 

This morning I reversed order of the first two stories in my novel-in-stories, LISL. I had moved an afterword into chronological order at the beginning. (Yeah, I know—it is always hard for me to keep things in chronological order. My literarily seems to happen in chronological order. I connect the hereandnow with an event when I was six and with something I hope to do next year. All of my writing is written out of order. All my stories longer than a few pages skip around in time. That alone, should have been a warning.)

LISL, set in Arizona in th early 60s, now needs a read, start to finish. It need close attention and revision, though I have spent hundreds of hours on its individual parts and the stories as a whole. I could see, even in my swift review, that I may have done some things right, and there is an overall tension and some humor. (Humor—not Homer—seems to be coming back to me after all these years.) And doing that is just one more way of avoiding the tedious task of summarizing the other novel, EMD. As to the latter, I have just read a review of two memoirs about the deaths of mothers:

“ ‘Our mothers are our first homes, and that’s why we’re always trying to return to them,’ writes Michelle Filgate in her essay “What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About.” But when a mother dies, leaving her child without the home of her love, that task of returning is supplanted by the task of grieving. Grief, then, becomes the new home.”

The review suggests another scene for the Arizona stories. And I have written a brief preface: 

He would say later that he did not know how he survived his last summer in Arizona. They were not free-range children but completely feral. They wandered out of the yard, off their block, and into the desert where none of them were killed by snakes or falls or as a result of getting lost. They were innocent and careless and their foolish adventures were wild with fun and full of fear. And through it all there was the chaos of his family, the loss of his mother, of what it all meant.

It is a short novel, but technically it is also a cycle of stories and not at all short for a collection of short stories, which is how it is disguised. 

I am sitting up in bed, the doves coo-cooing to one another. It is flirtation and I am in love with my home, with the skim of spruce-tops I can see from over the curtains in my bedroom, Gary bringing me coffee, the promise of labor.