Jodi Picoult quote for The Lemon Orchard

I feel incredibly honored to share this quote from Jodi Picoult: "THE LEMON ORCHARD is a small, lovely miracle:  a story that humanizes the plight of undocumented immigrants; that takes the political and makes it deeply and painfully personal. This is a love story - not just between two characters from different worlds, but about what we humans owe each other in debts of kindness and respect."  - Jodi Picoult, NYT bestselling author of THE STORYTELLER

Jodi writes brilliant novels.  She has such compassion and is always seeking deeper understanding of the world and everyone who lives here.  She's a humanitarian who never shies away from the questions that scare many of us, and she writes about issues that need closer examination, justice, and human kindness.  I can't wait to read her new novel, Leaving Time.  Her praise for The Lemon Orchard means so much to me.

And now it is May

 

And now it is May.

I grew up in Connecticut, and May was the month when everything turned green.  Small leaves appeared on the trees.  When "the leaves on the oak are the size of squirrels' ears" shad would start to run in the rivers.  The first flowering trees were shadblum, also signifiers of shad, a fish that we ate one a year, more to celebrate spring and to have with young asparagus and buttered red potatoes than because we liked the taste.

We had many seasonal foods and traditions in our family, but right now I'm thinking of spring.  My mother didn't like to cook, but she liked to watch Julia Child (she died before the Food Network came to be, but oh how she would have loved all the chefs and cooking shows.)  Mim, our grandmother who lived with us, baked but didn't cook, the difference--as I see it--being that one strictly involved the oven and precise measurements, and the other requires slow burners, drifts of imagination, no certain regimen other than what is fresh, in season, and delicious.

You can probably tell I like to cook more than bake.

From the time I was fifteen I often cooked for my family.  My school had "mini-week" every January, and we could choose from a slew of interesting classes not usually offered.  My sophomore year I took French cooking.  Sister Denise taught it in the convent next door.  We made jambon persillade, coq au vin, blanquette de veau, and asperges au beure blanc.  I'd learn how to prepare the meal at school, then go home and cook it for my family, with a stop at Sussman's market along the way.

Spring was a time to celebrate.  There is so much beauty in every season, but the changes in spring literally feel like rebirth, the earth coming back to life.  Many people speak of unbidden joy, a feeling of hope that wasn't there before.  I feel a shadow.  Maybe it's because my father died in April, or perhaps it's just that I am an Irish existentialist at heart, and I know not to get attached to the beauty because it will not be here forever.  That's the problem, isn't it?  Things won't be here forever.

But for now we have wisteria, tulips, new leaves, migrating warblers traveling the eastern flyway in great numbers, landing in our yards and parks to rest on their way north to the boreal forest.  Just yesterday Anders Peltomaa reported seventeen warbler species in Central Park including a Yellow warblers, a Yellow-throated warbler, Black-and-white warblers, a Palm warbler, a Chestnut warbler and a Canada warbler.  (Large numbers, the migration definitely in full swing, a "fall-out"--literally, many migrants dropping from the sky--because of the storms we have been having.)

In the woods we have elusive wildflowers such as bloodroot, trillium, Jack-in-the-pulpits.  In the streams we have shad.  They are swimming up the Connecticut River in their annual and mysterious migration.  They are plentiful, but hard to find in fish markets because they are the devil to bone.  Those who can properly filet a shad are few and far between; it's a lost art.  The taste of shad is not for everyone: it reminds me of bluefish.  Enough said?  It's an oily fish and, on the plus side, rich in Omega 3 fatty acids.

Some people, including Nero Wolfe, love shad roe.

So if you can find shad and if you like it, or if you dare, I share with you here my menu--cooked once a year, in May, when shad are running, when oak leaves are no bigger than squirrel's ears.  Mim loved it, so I've named it for her.  Happy May!

Mim's Baked Shad

1 shad filet per person

1 cup whole wheat bread crumbs, freshly crumbed in a Cuisinart or your favorite food mill-type apparatus.

olive oil

fresh lemon juice and zest

salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 350.  Dry shad filets with paper towel and lay skin-side down in baking dish.  Sprinkle with salt and pepper and a dash of fresh lemon juice.  Mix bread crumbs with olive oil, enough to moisten--do use whole wheat bread because it's more full bodied and will work better with the strong flavor of shad.  Add a little more salt and pepper, and a half teaspoon or so of lemon zest to the bread crumbs, then divide the mixture among the shad filets, spreading it on top, not too thin, you don't have to be artful, this is mainly seasoning.

Bake for 30 minutes or till cooked through and bread crumbs golden brown.  (Check while baking, and if the bread crumbs are getting too dark, you can cover loosely with a piece of tin foil.)

Asparagus

The asperges au beurre blanc recipe from Sister Denise involved hard-boiled eggs, which I don't like.  But if you do, you can just peel and rice a hard-boiled egg and put it on top for garnish.

Bunch of asparagus

beurre blanc  (or olive oil)

Bring pot of water to boil.  Prepare asparagus by holding each stalk between two hands, bending till it breaks.  It will break in its natural spot, just throw away the tough inch-or-two from the bottom.  Add asparagus to boiling water.  (Salt the water if you like, I don't think the asparagus needs it.)  Cook until the asparagus is bright green, easily pierced with the tip of a knife--5-8 minutes.

Now, you can serve the asparagus straight out of the pot if you want.  Or you can drizzle it with a small amount of olive oil.  Or if you are fifteen and want to impress your family and by the way feed them very well, you can serve it with beurre blanc.  Don't forget to add the chopped hard boiled eggs IF and only if you like them.

Beurre blanc

1 shallot, chopped fine

4 ounces white wine

fresh juice of 1/2 lemon, strained

1 tablespoon heavy cream

12 ounces cold unsalted butter, 1/4 inch slices

salt and white pepper

Combine shallots, wine, and lemon juice in non-reactive saucepan and cook over high heat until simmered down to 2 tablespoons.   Add the cream and cook until the sauce  bubbles.  Add butter, 1 slice at a time, whisking over low heat.  Whisk continuously until all butter is added and sauce is emulsified.  Pour over asparagus.  This is where you garnish with hard boiled eggs if desired.

Red Potatoes á la Hubbard's Point

This is my favorite part, a vehicle for the rest of the meal.  It's a very casual and most delicious dish, and requires guests to participate, in that they'll have to peel their own garlic at the end, when served.

A pound or two of the tiniest, reddest new potatoes you can find

olive oil

sea salt and freshly ground pepper

cloves of garlic--don't bother peeling them

sprigs of fresh rosemary

Preheat oven to 400.  You want it hot.

Do not wash or peel potatoes.  If necessary clean them with a dry cloth or paper towel.  Cut in half or quarters, depending on how large.  You want them to be about the size of a walnut.  Spread olive oil on cookie sheet--don't stint.  You'll use a lot, but it won't be absorbed, so you won't be consuming that much--it's for flavor and browning.

Place cut potatoes on cookie sheet, rolling in olive oil until well-covered.  Add unpeeled cloves of garlic.  Season with sea salt and freshly ground pepper.  Add a couple of springs of rosemary--in one piece, not broken up.

Insert sheet into oven.  As soon as you hear the oil starting to sizzle, after 10 minutes or so, remove pan and with a spatula turn the potatoes so they don't stick to the pan and so they brown on all sides.  Do this a few times over about 30 minutes--cooking time depends on size of potatoes.  You want to cook them until they are crispy.

Serve with cloves of garlic straight from the pan, still in their jackets, and tell your guests to peel them themselves.  It will be fun for them, easier for you, and the garlic will taste delicious with the potatoes and shad, or even spread on slices of baguette.

Small Things

I used to write here nearly every day, didn't I?  A few things have pulled me away, and I've been living more inside than usual.  But I've always loved my relationship with my readers, and the online world has been a way for us to connect.  It's immediate and intense.  Write, hit post, and there I am in your inbox.   I want to ask you: what have you been doing during this time?  What have you been reading?  What are the big and small things in your life?  The small things sometimes get overlooked.  We're so focused on the major events and hurdles, we can forget that the smallest, seemingly--at the time--insignificant--moments or choices can add up to major changes, dramatic life directions.  I'm serious: the littlest things.  Just as, on a hike, if you find a tiny stream and follow it far enough, you'll find the ocean.

Have you found the ocean since we last visited?

But see?  Even with that question I'm asking about the big thing, not the tiny stream, and I'm of a mind that it's the small, the overlooked, the near, the easily dismissed that keeps us in the present, where all good things happen.

Today I plan to pet my kitties and look into their eyes.  I plan to take a walk in the Ramble in Central Park to see birds passing through on spring migration.  I plan to pause and look at tree branches, at the buds that will soon, but not yet, be leaves.  I plan to stop into the book store and choose something I want to read.

But for now, this minute, I am here with you.  So hi, you.  I've missed you, old friend.

Love, Luanne

photo: 192 Books, wreathed in pear blossoms.

Springtime in Chelsea

Chelsea's Callery pear trees bloomed overnight--literally, between dusk and dawn.  Every year I look forward to their flowers with such anticipation; the trees fill the parks and streets of New York City and symbolize true springtime to me.  Yesterday they looked like this:

and today they look like this:

the townhouse gardens are full of daffodils and forsythia:

and on West 22nd Street there is a window box full of purple pansies:

The Lemon Orchard: Limited edition free gift

Pre-order The Lemon Orchard in paperback before May 27, 2014 — online or from your favorite local bookseller, send in a proof of purchase — and Luanne will send you a FREE tote bag featuring the cover art from the hardcover of THE LEMON ORCHARD.  You'll also receive a signed bookplate.  Shipping and handling are on Luanne! This offer is for U.S. and Canadian residents only. Please allow 6 to 8 weeks for the delivery of your tote bag. Already pre-ordered? Keep reading!

Send your name, mailing address,and proof of purchase via the form below. You can take a photo of the receipt with your phone, or scan it, and submit the jpeg!

*photo of tote bag by Luanne's reader Michele Collard

[gravityform id="1" name="Free Lemon Orchard tote bag"]

world book night 2014

 

i wrote "why i love libraries" to celebrate world book night & you can download the free ebook on 4/22!   @wbnamerica #WBN2014

facebook giveaway

sometimes we have giveaways on facebook.  here's an example...in fact, it's running now.  you might win a tote bag and lemons from my lemon tree!  meanwhile, please do pre-order THE LEMON ORCHARD.  

Luanne Rice shared a link.

Posted by Luanne Rice · April 1

GIVEAWAY!! To celebrate THE LEMON ORCHARD being available for pre-order, 5 people will win tote bags and lemons from Luanne's own personal lemon tree. Share this post and comment that you have pre-ordered to be entered to win. Good luck! http://amzn.to/QCXKyG

The Lemon Orchard: A Novel

www.amazon.com

A heartrending, timely love story of two people from seemingly different worlds?at once dramatic and romantic Luanne Rice is the beloved author of twenty-two New York Times bestsellers. In The Lemon Orchard, one of her most moving and accomplished...

It Couldn't Happen To Me

Cassat_CupOfTea

  IT COULDN'T HAPPEN TO ME

I met him right after my mother died.  We fell in love right away.  In retrospect there were red flags, but I didn't know how to read them.

He had a hard luck story, an awful childhood.  Hearing about it filled me with compassion and a desire to help him.  Now, looking back, I don't know how much of it was real.  Lying came with the package.

I saw the good at first.  He was friendly, funny, interested in life.  When I talked, he seemed to anticipate my next word, seemed to understand me better than I did myself.  He listened to me talk about my mother's long death, and he'd hold me and tell me she was up in heaven.  He meant it literally: puffy white clouds and angels with harps.  This was new for me, a person who spoke of death in such simple, childlike ways, but I latched on and accepted the comforting image.

He also said, from our first night together, that we were Made in Heaven.  "Heaven" came up frequently.  I was a once madly devout child but had fallen away, and he was a serious Catholic, and I felt spellbound by the thought of my old faith, embodied by this man who said he loved me.  We'd walk through the city and many walks included a stop in church.  He'd light a candle and kneel, head bowed in deep prayer, and somehow that made my heart open a little more.

The beach; he did love the ocean, and so did I.  We could spend hours walking the tideline in any weather, swimming when we could, lying on the beach and staring at the sky.  He told me he loved surfing.

The courtship happened fast--a whirlwind romance--and lasted until we were married six weeks after meeting.  (Not my first marriage.)  Right after I said "I do" everything changed.  He quit his job so I would support him, disappearing whenever he felt like it.  He didn't speak to me so much as growl.

I was strong, "myself," at the beginning.  But he wore me down.  I was one way the day we married, and quite a different way by the time I finally left.  My bones aren't broken, he never gave me a black eye.  Yet his need for control depleted me terribly--to this day I'm shocked to think it happened at all.

When he yelled, his voice boomed so loud it reverberated through my bones.  His eyes scared me.  He raged at me.  Or he'd go silent for days, not saying one word but giving off hateful energy, brushing past me hard enough to knock me aside.  His physical changes were extreme and violent, frequently instantaneous; I felt I was watching Dr. Jekyll turning into Mr. Hyde.

After a while we'd make up and he'd beg me to understand HIS pain, and not to leave.  He could be so charming, seeming to love me.  People on the outside saw a handsome, friendly man.  Sometimes I saw him that way, too.

I had close women friends.  I would confide in them.  Some got sick of seeing me drain away; they must have felt frustrated to watch me be stuck in such a bad, destructive relationship.  They would say something real to me, and I would agree, say that I had to leave.  Then he'd be nice again, and I'd remember the harsh words my friend had spoken about him.  Eventually my friends drifted away.  Or I did.

Seeing the relationship was like looking through a prism: now it looks this way, now it's completely different.  What is real?  

His first wife is a great woman.  We respected each other from the beginning and became good friends as we went along.  She was one of the few people I could really open up to--because she got it.  While pregnant with their child, she'd been hammered on the head by him, one night when he'd come home late from the grocery store where he worked.  She still has skull pain and hearing loss from that beating.

He had gotten arrested for beating other women--after his first wife there were girlfriends, and incidents, and nights in jail.  He learned not to use his fists.  If you don't leave marks, you won't get arrested.  He told me that he had once broken a woman's jaw in three places, the message being that he could do that to me.

Why did I stay with him?

Check out the Cycle of Violence diagram.  That part when you decide to believe his explanations, is called the fantasy or honeymoon, and it happens over and over, and it's unbelievably destructive.  Each time I decided to stay, it chipped away a little more of myself.

Cycleviolence

I used to drive past a domestic violence center in a nearby town, but I never entered--wasn't that for women who were bruised and bleeding?

Holidays became a time to brood and suffer.  He'd brood, I'd suffer.  Eventually we shut everyone out.  He liked to sit in a big armchair, right in front of the fire, staring at the flames.  If I interrupted his fire-watching, he'd glare as if he wanted to roast me.  I spent many many hours feeling dread and fear.  Paradoxically, he was big on sending out Christmas cards--it was all about the show, giving the appearance of a marriage.  He kept a detailed list of people who would receive our cards each year.  He wrote them out and addressed the envelopes.  He'd sign them, "May your New Year be blessed!"  He spoke about God and religion frequently, had prayer cards and rosary beads and miraculous medals and spiritual books.  Meantime he wouldn't be speaking to me.

Driving ragefully: it got worse toward the end.  Once we were heading to Woods Hole, and I said or did the "wrong" thing, and he told me he was going to kill us both, drive us into a tree.  He sped up, onto the shoulder--I felt and heard that buzzing friction of pavement designed to let drivers know they're going off the road.  I was terrified.  

Sometimes there is an actual incident that tells you you've had enough.  There is also a cumulation of everything that has happened all along.  That day of road rage was the end for me--I told him I wanted a divorce, and this time I meant it. When his ex-wife's father heard, he called me and said, "He's left a lot of wreckage in his wake."

I went to that domestic violence center I'd passed so many times, and found loving support.  The women there really helped me realize emotional battering is as bad as any other kind.  I wish the courts and our society would recognize that emotional and psychological abuse leaves scars which, although you can't see them, are just as terrible and deep.

At one point I began writing a novel (writing has always saved me) about a woman who was married to a man with secrets.  The husband was a white collar criminal, a banker who had committed fraud.  Researching the character, I spoke to an FBI agent in the Oklahoma City field office.  I told him the scenario, then told him about my own marriage.  He told me I should try to talk to women he was involved in with before me, to see if he had treated him the same way. 

I remembered one woman's name.  I tracked S down and called.

"I've been waiting for your call," she said, when I identified myself.

She knew he wouldn't change.  That is a pattern with abusers--the behavior continues on and on.  She described his patterns--so familiar to me, his abuse, the way he had made her feel it was all her fault even while taking every single thing she had, sucking the life out of her.  I loved her then, and I love her to this day, and am forever grateful to her for sharing with me.  She came to court, to support me in the divorce.  He went after everything I had, hired a lawyer who made sure the divorce would go on a long time--trying to wear me down--an abusive divorce to follow an abusive marriage.  I will never forget the look on his face when he saw his old girlfriend, my new friend, walk into the courtroom.  

Here's what I know: I'm strong and independent.  I have wonderful friends and family, including his ex, and a life and career I love.  Domestic violence can happen to anyone.  To learn more about that, and to get help, I recommend reading Patricia Evans's powerful book The Verbally Abusive Relationship, and to visit websites such as The National Coalition for Domestic Violence and the National Domestic Violence Hotline.

My own linked novels, Summer's Child and Summer of Roses, as well as Stone Heart, The Perfect Summer, and Little Night deal with domestic abuse.  I am proud to be involved with the Domestic Violence Clinic at Georgetown University Law Center, headed up by Deborah Epstein.  Law professors and students advocate for victims of abuse in Washington, DC.  They take their cases to court and fight for them.  Their work is extraordinary.

Good luck to anyone reading this--with love and support to you.  

(The painting at the top of the page is Tea by Mary Cassatt.)

My novel LITTLE NIGHT deals with domestic violence and its devastation on the women in one family... Thank you to all the readers who've written me with their own stories. I am honored and grateful.

EVERY MOTHER COUNTS Book Club Pick

Here is a note from Elizabeth Benedict: "I'm thrilled that Christy Turlington's fabulous organization EVERY MOTHER COUNTS chose WHAT MY MOTHER GAVE ME as its book club pick this week. Turlington writes about her favorite gift from her mother: 'While I am just grateful to still have my mother in my life, the gifts she gave me that mattered most were the ones she gave herself: Mothering my sisters and me, traveling the world and continuing her education. The fact that she was born in El Salvador provided me with an early connection to a larger world than the one I would have known otherwise...'  Shout out to Judith Hillman Paterson, Luanne Rice, Elinor Lipman, Caroline Leavitt, Karen Karbo, and all the other wonderful contributors to the anthology."

Liz edited and wrote for WHAT MY MOTHER GAVE ME.  My essay is Midnight Typing, about how my mother gave me the gift of...perhaps you'll read it.

I am touched by Christy Turlington's words about her favorite gifts from her mother, and about the important work she is doing. According to a story in The New York Times, the goal of her organization is to help "people understand that pregnancy and childbirth, even though it’s a joyous experience for so many women, really is a risky endeavor for millions of other women,” according to Erin Thornton, executive director, who happens to be expecting right now herself. “To this day, hundreds of thousands of women will die in pregnancy and childbirth, but 90 percent of those could be prevented just with basic, simple access to health care.”

PW Review of The Lemon Orchard

Buy the Book

Amazon • Apple • Barnes & Noble • IndieBound

Publishers Weekly review of The Lemon Orchard:

Still devastated by grief five years after the death of her husband and teenage daughter in a car accident, Julia hopes to find solitude and solace while house-sitting at her aunt and uncle’s California estate. Amid the lush landscapes and lemon groves of Malibu, Julia does find these things—in addition to an unexpected relationship with Roberto, who oversees the estate. Roberto, an undocumented immigrant, connects with Julia over her loss: he became separated from his young daughter during their crossing from Mexico and believes her to be dead. Julia, an anthropologist specializing in movements and migrations, thinks that the little girl is still alive and sets out to find her—even if doing so means potentially losing Roberto. The plot alternates from an initially tepid pace to moments of intensity—as when the estate is threatened—that seem largely irrelevant to the developing narrative. Nevertheless, Rice’s fans will appreciate the evocative setting and unconventional romance, as well as the harrowing, if familiar, depictions of border crossing and the fascinating parallels drawn between Julia’s research interests (she studies the Irish who arrived in America over a century ago) and modern-day Mexican immigrants. Agent: Andrea Cirillo, Jane Rotrosen Agency. (July)

Reviewed on: 06/03/2013

Liz Smith

Love being mentioned in Liz Smith's great New York Social Diary column today. I'm right up there with Cher!  #TheLemonOrchard 

An American Dream I Couldn't Share

 

My essay, An American Dream I Couldn't Share, appeared in the New York Times Modern Love column on July 5, 2013.  It tells some of the story behind my novel The Lemon Orchard.

Booklist Review of THE LEMON ORCHARD

Amazon • Apple • Barnes & Noble • IndieBound

The Lemon Orchard.

Advanced Review – Uncorrected Proof

Rice, Luanne (Author) Jul 2013. 304 p. Viking/Pamela Dorman, hardcover, $27.95. (9780670025275).

Trust Rice (Little Night, 2012), known for fiction that explores the power of family, to find the humanity in illegal immigration, a topic too often relegated to rhetoric and statistics. The story centers on Julia and Roberto, both of whom have suffered the loss of a daughter. Julia’s was killed in a car accident. Roberto’s little girl went missing as the pair crossed into the U.S. from Mexico—a trek through punishing desert that Rice depicts with visceral, heartbreaking brutality. The pair meet at the Malibu home of Julia’s aunt and uncle, where Julia is housesitting and Roberto oversees the titular orchard. An unlikely friendship forms between the two, a bond born out of shared grief, which eventually grows into a tender romance. Though Rice acknowledges the cultural chasm between her lovers, she also imbues her characters with uncommon kindness and understanding. Initially weighed down with exposition, Rice’s novel picks up steam as Julia takes up the search for Roberto’s daughter. An unexpected plot turn will leave readers begging for a sequel.

— Patty Wetli

Maya, we love you...

For so long we were four.  As someone who knows us well has said, I was the fourth cat.  I think that is true.  When you spend so much time with beings, and  you are together most of the time, your species merge.  I do know that I learned to speak their language. Cats are kindreds in the sense you never have to be your "best" (whatever that is) with them, and they meet  you where you are on any given day, in any given mood.  That has been true of my girls.  They have sat on my desk through book after book, giving me love, being the best friends and companions.

Maya died on April 5.  I called her Mae Mae for a long time, but when we moved to California she wanted to be called Maya and so that's what we called her.  She was the sweetest, most loving kitty.  I think back to when she was a kitten, those white whiskers and her bright green eyes, and the way she wanted to play and play.

Sickness never took the play out of her.  She loved to take walks--back home in New York we would walk down the hallway of our apartment building, nothing much to see, but just being together as we strolled from one end of the hall to the other.  She had the cutest habit of stopping, looking up to make sure I was following, taking a few more steps, glancing up again, continuing on.  

In California I'd sometimes take her outside.  I'm a believer in indoor kitties--too many dangers out in the world, and I am the biggest worrier around.  I'd be afraid of coyotes, cars, hawks...but by the time we reached Malibu she had a diagnosis of lymphoma--the same disease that took Maggie and, decades ago, each of my parents--and I knew she didn't have long.

So one day when she stood at the screen door smelling the jasmine and salt scented air, I opened it up and let her out.  I followed close by, never let her more than a few feet away.  I had done the same for Maggie when, a year ago, she began to die.

Maya, like Maggie, loved those hours in the garden.  We would sit together on the blue thing, and I can only imagine how good the warm sun felt on her black fur.  Her hair had started falling out in patches--she wasn't having chemo so it couldn't have been from that, but she seemed to love the breeze and the fresh air.  Heading back into the house she would stop on the stone path, glance back just the way she did in our Chelsea hallway walks, make sure I was right there, and keep going toward the house. 

She died in my arms just past noon on April 5.

Each cat has her own story.  Maggie was born on a sprawling farm of red barns and mountain laurel-covered hillsides in Old Lyme CT.  Her mother was killed by foxes when Maggie was just days old, and this tiny kitten was taken into a stone wall and fed by a squirrel mother for just a few days--enough to keep her alive.  A friend with super powers captured tiny Maggie--she was swift as a bird--and I fed her on a bottle, and she thought I was her mother, and we became each other's family.

Maggie was a wild kitty and I was a wild woman.  This is true.  My mother's life was ending, her long illness concluding, and my way of raging against the dying of the light was to behave as recklessly as possible.

Maggie was tiny and fast as a shooting star.  She would hide in the most unlikely places.  Once she disappeared so totally I thought she was gone forever, but then she jumped down the stone chimney into the fireplace and shook the soot off her fur--she had been hiding on the smoke shelf.  Often I would climb into bed and find her under the covers--flattened and invisible to everyone but me.

Maya--"Mae Mae"--came into our lives when Maggie was one.  She was also a rescue cat.  I got her from Dr. Kathy Clarke, a vet in Old Lyme.  Maya was the daughter of a brave cat named Cruella for her black and white streaks.  One night when someone left the d00rs open, Cruella patrolled the kennels to keep the dogs at bay, away from her kittens.  One of her kittens was Maya, and she inherited her mother's ferocity.

Maisie joined us a few years later.  Also a rescue cat, the only survivor of a family who died of diptheria, Maisie is skittish and fears losing everyone and everything.  She needs special attention.  Traveling upsets her--to put it so mildly.  All three were born in Old Lyme CT, raised in New York City, and traveled with me to California when, after lifetimes on the east coast and with little warning to anyone including myself, we just picked up and moved west.

I haven't written about Maya's death--or Maggie's--until now because what is there to say except that they were the dearest girls and I loved them and to say I miss them is the understatement of my lifetime?  They are together in the garden now.  Maisie and I are alone, and we are trying.  It is not easy.  For so long we were four, and now we were two.  We feel the loss.  Yes, we do.

Right now Maisie and I are forming a new relationship.  Because she was the third, the baby, she has never been the only kitty--the favorite kitty.  And for the first time in her life she is both.

This Week's Drawing

Welcome friends!! Please comment on this thread the chance to win an ARC of The Lemon Orchard as well as a special tote bag. We will notify the winner on Monday April 22. Good luck! Love, Luanne

[UPDATE 4/22: Congratulations to Belinda Daniels Guy our latest giveaway winner! We hope she enjoys her advance copy THE LEMON ORCHARD as well as a tote bag featuring the novel's cover.]

I'm visiting CAROLINELEAVITTVILLE!

I'm so grateful to the lovely and talented Caroline Leavitt for featuring The Lemon Orchard (and me) on her blog. The Lemon Orchard comes out July 2, but is available for pre-order now. Here's what I can't wait to read: Caroline's new novel, Is This Tomorrow, a May Indie Next Pick. And here's Caroline in a baseball cap:

To write

To write you have to like being alone. Ideas have to flow in and out like air through cracks in the cabin wall. Physical space isn't important; the flow can happen in a tiny room. What counts is internal space. The voices you hear belong to your characters. I clear my life, days and weeks and months at a time, and I lie about it. It embarrasses me to need so much solitude. So I write this today with a sense of coming clean. I'm a terrible one for canceling. I make plans because I love the people I make them with. But sometimes even a single appointment can worry me, or shift my focus to that day, that moment on the calendar, and I wind up saying I'm sorry, I won't be able to. This might be extreme. Some writers might need groups or gatherings or just plain old daily contact more than I do. I need solitude. When I wake up in the morning I get to my writing without speaking a word. Talking before work shifts my focus away. It's not that what I'm writing is important, or beautiful, or noteworthy--it's just what I do. The words are important to me, maybe no one else. I tell stories because if I didn't I would stop breathing.

One can never be alone enough to write -- Susan Sontag

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day -- Ernest Hemingway, 1954 Nobel Prize acceptance speech

The computer makes writing both easier and harder. It makes revision easier but it's a portal to the Internet which is a distraction. The internet has pluses and minuses. When I first discovered it I was distracted by it all the time. Email, constant contact--both wonderful and destructive, like the best addictions. Facebook provides the sense of a social life; Pinterest seems to me to be intuitive and wordless communication, a way to say who you are, or at least who you are at the moment of pinning a picture or poem; Twitter is immediate like speed or sugar; a comic artist introduced me to Tumblr, and I think I like the feeling of it. But let's face it, the Internet is hell on writing. My father, who sold and repaired Olympia typewriters, gave me an Olympia SM 9 when I was in school. I'm glad they still make ribbons for it. I've stocked up in case they stop. I think the sound of the keys comforts me; I know the cats like it. They sit close, as if the typewriter is a hearth. Most of the time I still write on my computer and sometimes on those nights I dream I am typing. Either way the stories get told. Life is writing and writing is life.

Road Odyssey

 

Here's a fascinating essay by Vanessa Veselka:   The Lack of Female Road Narratives and Why it Matters.

I thank my writing pal Joe Monninger for sharing it with me and therefore sending me on a remembrance-of-road-odysseys-past.    I went through a hitchhiking phase in my teens, and I sometimes have nightmares of a couple specific close calls.  One happened somewhere between Old Lyme CT and Hightstown NJ; it was early October, after a summer at the beach, and I missed one of my beach friends so much I decided to hitch down to visit him in boarding school.

In this space I normally write about the nature of summer friendships, the depth of love for my beach friends, but Vanessa's essay takes me to a different place, to the reality of what happened on the road.  There I was--17, maybe?--standing thumb-out on an I-95 entrance ramp, so convinced of my own invincibility that I climbed into the cab of an 18-wheeler.  I can't picture the driver, but I can see that truck--red cab littered with fast food wrappers and a dark curtain behind the seats.  "Check it out back there," he said.  "It's where I sleep."  That was the first moment my stomach flipped.

I felt brave, resourceful.  That made me reckless, but I only know that now, from the distance of many years.  If I think of my nieces doing what I did, I'd lose it.  Yet even after that ride in the big rig--and the driver's innuendo and invitation into the back and my opening the door and jumping out at a toll booth--I kept hitchhiking.  I got to Hightstown and later made my way back home.  When my younger sisters were visiting one of their boyfriends in Warren VT, I hitched north through thickly falling snow to meet them.

Right after our father died my sisters started hitching with me--great older sister, wasn't I?   The the three of us were heading back to Old Lyme from Newport RI and got picked up on Route 138 by some creep in a rattletrap who told us he had beagle puppies at home and would we like to see them?  We scrambled out at the next exit, climbed the ledge that bounded the ramp, and walked for miles along the crest until we got tired and called our mother to pick us up.

Nothing disastrous happened, except perhaps to our psyches.  Stepping so close to the edge, courting danger, has a serious half-life.  You might not be conscious of it, but the what-ifs visit your dreams.  When I was young I was searching for something--I'd push myself to do things that must have scared me at some level--when I think of them now I marvel that I survived, thrived, and wrote about them in short stories and novels.  I feel guilty for taking my sisters on that part of my own strange journey, but back then we were so inseparable it would have been unthinkable to leave them out.

Come to think of it, my new novel, The Lemon Orchard, is about journeys.  Traveling far from what is comfortable to find something you're not even sure you need...  Maybe that's just life; it's certainly been my life.

[Image: The Highwayman by Linden Frederick]