Storybelly Digest: Peach Season

Notes from the Garden, the Kitchen, and the Page

Here I am. Happy June, everybody. I’m posting the Storybelly Digest on Wed. this week, as we glide into summer. This week, I’m sharing a post from my Blogger archives — a legacy post from 2009 when I was deep in the making of Countdown, the first book of the Sixties Trilogy. That early writing life still shapes how I work today, as I write through Charlottesville and the long — and often dark — shadows of history. The rest of the Digest is below this legacy post… notes from the kitchen, the garden, and the page, moments that are sustaining me in the thick of this story. Here we go!

Here is a post from Monday, January 19, 2009. Countdown was published in 2010.

13 Days

On February 1, I will send off whatever I have of this new novel to my editor, David Levithan, at Scholastic. Please God, may I have an entire book, Book One of The Sixties Trilogy. (Working title: THE END OF THE ROPE. This will change.)

Remember my first line? "I am eleven years old and I am invisible."

Franny Chapman wants to survive nuclear attack, if it comes, and she's pretty certain it will, in October 1962, outside of Washington, D.C. She's writing a letter to JFK and Chairman Khrushchev. She's spying on her older sister, Jo Ellen. She's fighting with her best friend, Margie.

Halloween is just around the corner. So is a gravel pit, a brother who wants to be an astronaut, a fighter-pilot dad, a perfect-hostess mom, and crazy Uncle Otts, World War I vet, who is the self-proclaimed neighborhood air-raid warden. Can you say embarrassment?

Then there is the boy across the street. Don't get me started on the boy across the street, or on those 13 days in October when the world came as close as it has ever come to nuclear annihilation.

That's what I'm writing about, in the larger sense. But it's Franny's story.

I have 13 days to finish it. Same time frame as the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I have so much left to do.

I am going to post here every day, and I will tweet multiple times per day (you can see these at twitter, or by going to this blog's online presence -- where some of you are now). I will also separately update my fan page (haha! FIFTY FANS! We're going to have to rent a stadium! Or a stake-bed truck) from under the blankets draped across the furniture. Oh, the perks of being in the all-inclusive club.

So there are several ways to keep up if you are 1) interested and 2) willing to cheer me on. I am seriously behind, but I am determined. You can opt out at any time, of course, you can ignore me the next 13 days, etc., but I could use your energy and good wishes, which is why I'm going to pepper you with posts. I may not be able to reply to comments, but I'll be living on every word.

I tend to write in white heats. I sink down, down, down, and the world goes away while I concentrate for many hours, days, weeks at a time. This next 12 days, I will be in that place, but I will also have three school visits to do, locally, and a non-functioning bathroom. All of this was scheduled when I was going to be done by November 1, of course.

I spent the weekend in my pajamas, in the pink chair, by the fire, laptop and coffee and concentration. I got dressed to go to dinner with Jim last night, as I had eaten nothing but half a chocolate bar all day. Today I ate some Triscuits and mozzarella. I polished it off with a diet Barq's and called it dinner.

This afternoon I researched until I had to take a nap. I read about the Meuse-Argonne Offensive of World War I. I read all about Harry Truman (Harry Truman -- who knew! And I found a wonderful primary source -- his letters to Bess).

I collected recipes from Peg Bracken's I HATE TO COOK BOOK. I gathered the top 100 tunes from 1960 through 1962. I listened to Sam Cooke ("Don't know much about history..." bliss), and studied up on the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul, and Mary. I took notes on the 1960 Olympics in Rome (Wilma Rudolph, Cassius Clay, Rafer Johnson) and on the 1962 integration of Ole Miss, when federal marshalls escorted James Meredith to register and Governor Ross Barnett refused him at the door. What a time.

I read the following comment on a blog about sixties appetizers, laughed out loud, immediately wanted to create this character, and settled instead for stealing her style and using it to tell you about my dinner:

My mother used to take a slice of salami and put a slice of provolone on top. Then she'd put a plop of prepared tuna salad in the middle, lay an anchovy across it, roll it up and put a toothpick in the whole thing. Then she'd throw back a Grasshopper or a Pink Flamingo, tug on her Doris Day wig, and call it a party.

Yeah! These are the people I'm writing about! I hope they make you laugh. So back to it, armed with today's research to answer the questions I bumped against today. I'm also going to take a bath, because tomorrow, as I said, the bathroom... goes. This is just the sort of distraction I need in the next 13 days.

I was supposed to be done a long time ago, you'll remember. My goal had been Nov. 1. Then I lost an editor in October, lost momentum, began fall travels, slid into the holidays, and... well, now I'm finishing, and the bathroom is beginning, and I will not be delayed again! So. Bath. Then bed. Then -- 12 days.

***

You can read all the Countdown “13 Days” posts here.

I made Smitten’s “Crispy Peach Cobbler” today:

This week’s smoothie game is strong. They include cherries, peaches, blueberries, pineapple, mango, spinach, cocoa, yogurt, etc etc etc:

A garden walkabout, taking stock with “the edible yard & garden project” — that’s lemon balm and elecampane leaves I’m harvesting in the first square:

Two new-to-me Jefferson books, from historians who are featured in Ken Burns’ “Jefferson” documentary:

Bobo sleeping in my writing spot:

Most of my words this week are going into Charlottesville. On my breaks I do a little of what you see here, and I wonder how you are doing, in this first week of June-already, and what is occupying most of your time? I am living in 2017 and 1776 and 1865 these days, coming up for air often, and for perspective.

The garden, the kitchen, the companionable slowness and silence and rhythm of days this past two weeks have been touchstones that keep me grounded in the present, so I can go back to the past again.

I hope you’re feeling grounded and centered these days, or at least can work toward that. What is it that grounds you? I’d love to hear.

The world feels haphazard and untethered. I don’t watch or read the news. I participate in the projects at hand; they include taking good care of myself and protecting my heart; getting enough sleep; moving slowly; creating healthy boundaries; having good work to do; checking in with my people; and using my hands in every way I can, making whatever I can, including this story I’m currently writing, a book that I hope reaches readers in a way that helps the world feel a little less untethered, that serves “to make more gentle the life of this world” (to quote Robert Kennedy in 1968).

We have vast influence in our own orbits. I believe each choice, from watering a plant, sharing a meal, engaging in quiet (or lively!) conversation, to listening closely, creates a slender lifeline that invites hope and connection, that quietly and steadily weaves a larger web of care and belonging, if that makes sense. And I am here for it.

Happy June, everybody.