Life is what happens when you’re making other plans…

This morning I was supposed to wake up in NYC, where I was going to visit dear friends and tape an interview for an American Experience documentary. That life feels so far away now that I can barely believe it was ever supposed to be mine.

Instead I’m spending hours trying to source food and basic necessities. I’ve inventoried everything we have, and I’m acutely aware of just how we are using each day. We’re managing, but I’m having to be careful and inventive. I’m trying to support local businesses. I’m giving thanks for our milkman.

I’m helping my daughter work out how to connect with her friends. I’m reading letters and posts from my own friends, which make me laugh and sometimes cry. I’m walking round and round my garden, scrubbing out last year’s pots, and admiring the Lenten roses, and plotting where to sow seeds later on. I’m washing my hands over and over again… and then washing them once more.

And I’m thinking again and again of all the people I treasure, all the people who are vulnerable to this, and all the people who are on the front lines.

You are all in my heart.

A Lenten rose in the garden this morning

 

Something for the weekend: The Ra Race

I have something fun for you this weekend — a game my 11-year-old daughter designed.

My daughter loves to make games, and this summer she came up with one based on Ra the Mighty. Her model was a 16th-century game called Goose that is still a lot of fun to play today. Instead of geese, however, her board featured Ra and his friends:

 

Note the carefully drawn symbols. Some of my favorites are the cat snacks (which mean “Have a snack and miss a turn”), the leopard Aat (“Begin the game again”) and an eye  (“Yay! You found the Eye of Horus amulet! You win!).

She made up instructions, too — and even little game tokens. I loved it!

So she and my husband made a printer-friendly version. Then Ra’s illustrator, Sarah Horne, joined in the fun. So now we all proudly present to you our final game board for THE RA RACE, in full color!

If you’d like to try it out, please download the board and instructions for free on my website. We’d love to hear how it goes!

 

Ferris wheel

The fair came to our town this month, as it does every year.  So of course I went up in the ferris wheel with my daughter — the very same Ferris wheel we’ve been riding in for years.

British ferris wheels don’t have all the safety precautions that American ones do, as I discovered when she was three. I remember holding onto her for dear life, trying to keep her from squiggling under the slender bar that was the only barrier between us and the far-away ground.

She’s a much more restful companion now, and I don’t fear for anyone’s life. We laugh and wave our hands and enjoy the view. But there’s still always a moment when the Ferris wheel jerks to a stop, and we swing out at the tippy-top, and my heart skips a beat. The whole world swirls beneath us. I see clear past the houses and the hills to the distant horizon, and I think of these lines from Tuck Everlasting:

“Everything’s a wheel, turning and turning, never stopping. The frogs is part of it, and the bugs, and the fish, and the wood thrush, too. And people. But never the same ones. Always coming in new, always growing and changing, and always moving on. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. That’s the way it is.”

And I give my girl a hug.

Photo by Ashley Elena on Pexels.com

 

 

Summer into Fall

We had a glorious summer this year. And a full one, with visits with much-loved grandparents, days spent in Oxford with dear friends who we hardly ever get to see, trips to Bath and Chesil Beach….

Chesil Beach on a sunny day

…and on a stormy one.

It was also the summer I learned I was a celiac. Which meant changing my diet completely and learning to love quinoa. (Fortunately, I quickly realized that quinoa is GREAT.) We ate a lot of cake while I worked out a whole new way of baking,

Redcurrant cream cake (gluten-free, but you’d never guess)

And now it’s fall (an American word that stays with me, though everyone here calls it autumn). We’ve had a lot of chilly weather this September, which has been great for writing. I wrap myself up in my writer’s cape and spend my days deep in the third Chantress book.

But this week I’ve had to set the new book aside because the page proofs for Chantress Alchemy have come in. I am always tempted to skimp at this stage, because it takes enormous effort to read it for the umpteenth time, word for word, knowing that you can’t make any big changes. But as always, I’m knuckling down and doing the work, because there’s always stuff I catch at the end: little things like a missing “the,” and bigger things like copyedits that have fallen into the wrong paragraph.

One good thing about page proofs is that you finally see your words as they will be in the book, all beautifully laid out. This is the stage where I look and say, “Wow! It’s going to be a real book!”

Title page of Chantress Alchemy

***One last bit of news: I learned this week that an ALA Teen Tastemakers panel for Simon & Schuster chose Chantress as a favorite read. Which means S&S is offering everyone the chance to read the book for FREE on their PulseIt site until September 29th: http://www.pulseit.com/chantress

Yes, Virginia, there is a Halloween

It’s been a long week here in the Greenfield household, one that included a horrific bout of food poisoning and a round of stomach flu. If my amazing mum-in-law hadn’t come to our rescue I think we would’ve gone under.

But as it is, we’re still here, and as of today life is looking much better. Not only do we still have a couple of days left of the half-term holiday (schools in the UK close for a week in late October — wonderful idea!), but Halloween is almost here.

The last time I lived in the UK, back in the 1990s, the only people I knew who made a real fuss over Halloween were expatriate Americans. For Britons, the big night came a few days later, on Bonfire Night, November 5th.

With that in mind, I didn’t expect much in the way of Halloween celebrations when we moved here. Which made me sad, since it’s one of Sweetpea’s favorite holidays.

And then I saw this display at our little local grocery store:

Pumpkins! Bats! Weird eyeballs and skulls! Looks like Halloween to me.

But what really made me smile were these very British treats:

That last box came home with me. (Fiendish Fancies! How could I resist?)

Best of all, our new neighbors say there will be a bit of trick-or-treating on Halloween night. I’ve laid in a small stock of Cadbury treats, I’ve got a pumpkin outside my door, and I’m getting Sweetpea’s costume ready to go. It’s a happy time.

What Halloween treats are you really looking forward to this year?

Loving your work

When it comes to loving my work, I could take a few lessons from Sweetpea, my 3-year-old daughter.

Sweetpea loves to draw. Crayons, markers, sparkle pens, colored pencils, even a plain black pen from my bag — they’re good for hours of entertainment. And what she draws is wonderful. Her flowers and frogs and families are charming, and her curly-tailed pigs practically oink right off the page.

“Which one is your favorite?” I ask her at the end of one drawing session.

She spreads out half a dozen drawings — some recognizable to me, others not — and studies them.

“I love them ALL,” she says, her face aglow with happiness.

I wish I could say the same about my own work, but as I revise this novel, my critical eye is in the ascendant. And that’s necessary, even good — at least to a point. But on days when my blasted internal editor starts stomping over everything, I think about Sweetpea, and her delight in ALL her work. And I remind myself that while it’s important to see ways of making this novel better, it’s also important to take pride and pleasure in what I’ve done so far.

Do you find it hard to love your own work, or does that come easily to you? What aspects of your own WIP make you happy? Whatever you’re proud of — a character you love, an enticing prologue, a wonderful bit of dialogue, a devilish plot twist — I’d love to hear about it!

Roman holiday

When I see the small sign that says “Roman villa” on our way to the grocery store, I know I’m not in Massachusetts any more. David, who grew up with Roman ruins, is pretty blase about this, but not me.

So yesterday we packed a picnic and followed the sign down ever-narrowing country lanes, until we spotted another, less legible sign near a farm. Sweetpea was delighted when we parked the car by the stable, in the wake of two horses, and followed the stony trail down the hill.

And then we were there, sharing the ruins of a 60-room Roman villa with a herd of sheep:

This villa was built in the 4th century A.D. and included multiple bathrooms and central heating. Those Romans knew how to build.

When excavators discovered the place in 1813, they found an intricate mosaic floor in one room:

Some of us, however, were more interested in sheep.

After we were done exploring, we sat in the warm sun and feasted on biscuits and cheese and grapes and plums. Sheep bleated and blinked, and a breeze rushed through the tall grass behind us.

It was a quiet, green hour, the kind where whole centuries slip away, and time stands still.

“I’m glad we came,” David said.

I’m glad, too.

Thankful Thursday

It’s been a busy couple of weeks, made more complicated by a bad cold and back strain, but I have a lot to be grateful for, too.

(1) I was granted UK permanent residency last week. It was a nerve-wracking appointment, not least because we needed to bring Sweetpea to the Immigration Center with us, but she charmed everyone’s socks off and I now have a shiny new page in my passport (with a truly dreadful picture on it, but then I’ve yet to have a passport photo that wasn’t).

(2) I’m making steady progress on the WIP. Maybe 85% of the way through?

(3) I’ve managed to drive our family car on a British motorway. Think interstate highway, only left-handed: Yikes!

(4) I’ve discovered sticky toffee pudding, a divine British delicacy that has inexplicably escaped me until now. Last Saturday night, David and I sat in a cozy corner of an 18th-century pub and lapped this right up (oh, dark crumbly cake! oh, melting pool of butterscotch!). Warmest thanks to my mum-in-law, who offered to babysit.

(5) I’ve just bought myself this:

85% cocoa! And Fairtrade, too, which makes me happy. I’m thinking this bar might just work some magic of its own, and power me through the rest of the Enchantment book.

Mothers and daughters

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to have Sweetpea grow up in a country so far from my own. England is a long way from the Adirondacks, and not just in miles. I’m staggered sometimes by how different Sweetpea’s childhood will be from mine.

Right now Sweetpea still says “to-MAY-to,” not “to-MAH-to,” and her reference points, from blueberries to zucchini bread, are mostly American. But I know that will change after she starts nursery school in September, and I know it will take some getting used to.

So I’m doubly grateful to have had a chance to read Jeannine Atkins’s subtle stunner of a book, Borrowed Names: Poems about Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madam C. J. Walker, Marie Curie and Their Daughters. Grateful first, for the poems themselves, so striking and absorbing that they took me completely out of myself. And grateful, too, for the reminder that no daughter grows up in the same world as her mother, even if she grows up in exactly the same place.

I love Jeannine’s work, and I’ve been looking forward to this book for a long time. But even I was amazed by what a treasure trove it is. Every poem is told in the voice of a daughter, starting with Rose Wilder Lane, moving on to A’Lelia Walker, and finishing with Irene Joliot-Curie. Reading them was like listening in on family conversations —- the kind that happen late at night, when memories cast long shadows. With every word, you can feel how strongly these daughters and their mothers are bound to each other. And also how there is a nevertheless a gulf between them, one that both widens and narrows over time.

One of the temptations in writing historical fiction is to include a fact simply because you researched it, but there is no such shoehorning in Borrowed Names. What you’ll find instead is a wealth of revelatory detail: the crackle of the kindling that burns down the Wilder homestead, the sweet luxury of coconut oil in Madam C. J. Walker’s hair, the fraying skin on Marie Curie’s fingertips. These details center us in these women’s lives –- and in jeannineatkins‘s skillful hands they become metaphors for emotions that can’t always be expressed out loud.

Here’s a taste of what I mean, from a poem about the days when Madam C. J. Walker and A’Lelia lived in one room and took in laundry for a living:

**********

“Walking away, A’Lelia asks, Why do you call her Mrs.
while she uses your first name?

It’s just the way it is.

A’Lelia feels the weight of stacked sheets
she no longer holds. There are two sides of town
back and front doors
those who can enter both and
those who’d better knock on just one.”

**********

I could pull other highlights from every page. But I won’t, because this book is one you will definitely want to read for yourself —- and then share with the much-loved mothers and daughters in your own lives.

A very British Fourth

How do I explain the Fourth of July to 3-year-old Sweetpea?

If we still lived in America, I would just let the holiday speak for itself. Parades and flags and watermelon. Fireflies and sparklers and fireworks.

But that’s not possible here in England. And a history lesson is out, too: Three is just too young for the story of the Declaration of Independence. Besides, I want her to know something about the other sides of the Fourth, too, the ones I knew as a kid — that marching-band-cotton-candy excitement, that ice-cream-on-a-picnic-blanket-at-twilight anticipation.

What to do, what to do?

When in doubt, bake a cake.

A birthday cake.

We lit a candle and sang “Happy Birthday America” and listened to this fabulous rendition of “The Stars and Stripes Forever” on pipe organ:

All of which made a joyful impression on Sweetpea.

I think we may have started a new tradition.