Day 2 KB Inglee

Henry James and the Long Trip Home

London, December 1891

Emily was tired of the formal manners, the fussy clothing and the conversation about trivial things with people she didn’t know. There must have been 20 of them around the huge table.

There was only one other person in the room that she had met before. Henry James was seated to her left. She was surprised to find he knew who she was. "You are Anna Lothorp’s little sister," he said. She was so astonished she could only nod in answer.

"How did you get invited to this dreadful affair?" he asked. The servant who appeared between them with a carafe, gave him a withering look.

She sighed and told him, "I was to come with friends, but there was an illness in the family."

He was much more of Anna’s age. In fact Anna had dined at their house on Quincy Street, and had hated every minute of it. And now Emily was about to repeat the experience.

"How long have you been here? I seem to remember Willy writing to me that your husband had died and you had taken your grief abroad."

"If you mean in Europe, March 1890, so almost two years. I’ve been in London for about a month.”

"Have you loved every minute of it?" he asked, with a cutting sarcasm. Could he read her thoughts?

"No. It was fun at first, but…"  She was trapped between Mr. James on her left and someone named Bryant on her right. It would be impolite to burst into tears right here.

Mr. James deftly changed the subject. "Have you been to the South Kensington Museum?" he asked.

"No. Should I go? What is there worth looking at?"

"Harvard would do well to look into establishing a museum of its own. For art, I mean, not for those dreadful Natural History exhibits. How can something dead and stuffed be natural?"

She took a deep breath as her tears receded.

"Now be a good girl and talk to the gent on the other side of you. Lord, how I hate these affairs."

It felt like hours before the guests were allowed to leave. Emily was reminded of waiting for the school day at Mrs. Agassiz to end.

As they bustled into their coats ready to step into the cold damp evening, she found Mr. James at her side.

"I would be honored if you allowed me to show you the museum tomorrow. It has some fine examples of Flaxman and Landseer. I can pick you up at the Fields place about two if that is convenient."

Why does Henry James want to take me to a museum? He must want something.

"I must admit, I have an ulterior motive. I hope you will love the museum, of course. I was hoping to find someone like minded to enjoy it with me."

Likeminded? Does living a quarter of a mile apart make two people like minded? Surely he was simply being kind.

#

The day was bright and clear but cold. She would spend the morning in the shops looking for things to send to her nieces and nephews for the holiday. Late as always, it would be well into the New Year before they received them.

She found perfect gifts for each of the children if they had been ten years younger. Nothing that would suit the young men and women they had become. Nothing for their mothers; even less for their fathers.

A small leather-bound note book appealed to her, but she didn't know of anyone well suited for it. She liked it enough to spend more than a few coins on it.

By two she had put away her purchases to wrap and send tomorrow and was ready when Mr. James rang the bell.

Emily asked him what he was working on at the moment. He laughed and replied, "When in doubt in conversation with a Cambridge man, ask him about his book. Every man in Cambridge is writing a book. The old saw should include the many women who are doing the same."

"But you actually are," she protested.

#

It was getting dark when they left the museum. Mr. James slipped a small package into her hand. She could feel the smooth paper and lacy ribbon, but she was unable to distinguish the color in the shadows of the cab. The box was heavier than she had expected.

"Oh, but I have nothing for you."

"This is a gift, not a present. There is no obligation to reciprocate. I think you will understand when you open it."

Under the street lamp in front of the Field's house, Emily untied the silver ribbon with care and tore the red paper off the box."

"This is the fossil of a chambered nautilus. It's very nice but…"

He took her free hand as an elder and wiser brother might. "The golden spiral. There is a bit of history that comes with the object. Remember the Holmes poem? 'Leave thy low vaulted past, let each new temple, nobler than the last'…well, you know it.

"Professor Agassiz gave this to your father sometime before the war. Your father had to make a very difficult decision."

"But he and father didn't like each other. Why would he give him such a gift?"

"I believe you are confusing academic disagreement with personal dislike. You remember the great debate that followed your father's book on education. But didn't the Lothorp girls attend Mrs. Agassiz's school? And didn't your father continue to attend the Professor's morning lectures fairly regularly?"

She would have to think about that for a while.

"How did you get it?" she asked him.

"Your father gave it to my father when he had to make a similar decision, and he passed it on to me when I decided to give up law to write novels."

He shrugged as though the whole story were perfectly clear.

"Now you are making a decision that will change the rest of your life. You must have it."


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Day 1 Alison Ash

Why Christmas Carols Make Me Cry

by Alison Jean Ash

“..and cried when he remembered his mother.”

~ Jean de Brunhof

The Story of Babar

Preface:  My Mother and Me

My mother has been the single most important person in my life.

That sounds unlikely, even to me.  I am sixty-seven years old. I’ve been married three times—happily at last —and survived other tumultuous passions that (mercifully) didn’t go that far.  I have two children, four grandchildren, and several dear friends of various genders who are of great importance to me.

All the same, it’s true.  Mom—or, as she was known in various contexts, Shirley Anne Kellogg, Anne Ash, Anne Cramer, Little Tigger, Grandma Tig—sat squarely in the center of my universe until she died, in January of the year 2000, and for some years afterward.

Our relationship was tender, turbulent, and cruel, wistful with nostalgia, alight with laughter. Each of us felt for the other, I believe, equal parts of love, irritation, bitterness, and genuine admiration.   

For good and ill, I her eldest daughter, revolved around her, planet to her sun.  Now, almost fifteen years after her death, her memory no longer rules my daily life.  Still, whenever I pause to look at  

who I am, and at the forces that have shaped my mind and heart—by precept, by example, by accident, and sometimes by opposition—there she is, still, at the center.

Christmas Day, 2014

Twelve days before Christmas I attended a performance of the Bremerton Symphony Orchestra with my husband.  The program consisted of a Christmas carol sing-along, followed by a Tchaikovsky piano concerto, followed in turn by excerpts from Handel’s Messiah.

My mother, growing up as the daughter of a small town minister, sang alto in her church choir.  When I was a baby, she sang to me, lullabies, old ballads, songs in French and Russian and Welsh, and the darkly humorous Irish songs she’d learned from her grandfather.

When I grew older, we sang together, especially at Christmas-time.  We began a month before the day to play our holiday record albums and to sing carols together.  When we played the Messiah, she always sang along with with the alto part her favorite sections, especially “For Unto Us a Child is Born.”

As a girl I sang mezzo soprano. In some carols, such as “Angels We Have heard on High” with its chorus of “gloria in excelsis deo,” my mother taught me to hold the melody while she sang the alto in counterpoint, each voice singing its phrases in separate, independent but interlocking rhythms.

Of all the games we played together, from Chinese Checkers to Scrabble, from one-upmanship to emotional manipulation (more deliberate on her part, I believe, than on mine, and certainly far more skilled), the interweaving of our voices was the most intricate and the most joyful. For several weeks every winter, for ten or twelve years, we made a kind of magic together.

The night we went to the Symphony, my husband and I, we both became teary-eyed during the  

carol singing, as various songs reminded each of us in turn of our departed mothers.  Afterwards we dried our eyes to enjoy a piece with no associations for us, the Tchaikovsky, performed with fiery passion.

After intermission came the Handel. With the opening chords, familiar as ever though I hadn’t heard them in twenty years, my eyes began to fill with tears. With “For unto us a Child is born,” the tears spilled out and rolled freely down my cheeks. I had all I could do not to sob aloud.

I slept badly that night, and also the next night, Sunday. I woke Monday morning with my feet in agony, especially the right heel, in which I have a bone spur, legacy of the plantar fasciitis I first suffered immediately after her death.  I couldn’t set my heel down all day, in spite of large doses of ibuprofen, but walked on the ball of my right foot, holding onto something or someone.

My Feet, My First Chakra

For two years after my mother died, I’d walked in pain, near-crippled by the fasciitis, until I healed myself, not only by stretches and exercises, yoga and chakra work, but also by meditating, painting, and especially by singing, and at last by weeping for her.

Since I had never fully yielded to my grief after her death, the clogged flow of my emotion had settled into physical manifestation as pain in my feet. Once I understood that, I immersed myself in memories of my mother.

Deliberately, almost forcibly, I opened myself to grief for her, grief which necessarily included rage:  rage at her, at all the cruel and sneaky things she did to me; rage at the loss of her and all she did for me; rage at whatever had happened to her or been done to her, apparently quite early in her life, that made her spirit so full of pain and terror, rage at whatever or whoever it was that had broken her.

Rage at her for being broken.

My class-work that year at The Evergreen State College, a full-time Coordinated Studies program about the wisdom of the body and the connection between emotional pain and physical pain, helped focus the process. Readings ranged from hard science to spirituality, and we did yoga eight hours a week. I learned that the feet belong to the First Chakra, which is connected to home, family, our sense of being rooted in this world. My mother’s death had, in a far more physical sense than I had realized, knocked my feet our from under me.

In December of 2001, I spent a week at a retreat center.  I painted—not something I do well or often, but this was therapy, not art. First, as warm-up, I made a mad bloody picture of the goddess Kali, and then an equally mad and bloody-looking picture of my mother that I call Sea Monster Mother.

A naked woman with her face stands at the bottom of the sea, the mouth exaggeratedly wide and hungry. Her limbs are impossibly long and all her digits stretch away into tentacles, coiling, reaching for something to grip in a half-strangling hold, as she gripped me in her need for so much of my life.

Through these paintings I was able to express some of my rage, so widely and unclearly directed, and some of my resentment of the way she had clung to me, manipulated me, used me to feed her voracious needs. I expressed my rage and pain in both senses: I gave it utterance, and I pushed it out of myself, leaving me cleaner and kinder, more open to grieving for her.

Near the end of the week I sat alone in a yurt singing, first the Gayatri Mantra, which I’d learned in yoga.  Crudely translated from ancient Sanskrit, it means, “Praise the glorious light of the creative principle.”  I sang it 108 times, the traditionally prescribed number, and then I went on singing.

I sang everything I could think of: the lullabies she sang me; the funny, often macabre Irish songs handed down from her flame-haired grandfather; all the songs, the madrigals and hymns and Christmas carols we’d sung together.  I sang until at last the vibrations pried open the locked-up fountains of my tears, and then I continued to sing as I wept for her.

That afternoon I laced on my boots and walked along the highway to the ocean beach, a round trip of about twelve miles. At supper time I plodded back uphill to the lodge exhausted, with a fierce ache in my lower back, but no pain in my feet. I was healed. From that time the pain in my feet departed and I could walk normally again.

My Book

A year after that, at the end of 2002, I began to write a book about my mother, about her life and about our life together. I’ve worked at it, off and on, ever since, sometimes a few hours a day every day for a month, occasionally six to eight hours a day during a week-long writing retreat. Between those periods of intensity, I’ve returned to it in sporadic, desultory fashion, altering a few words here and there like a painter adding little touches and then stepping away to let them dry.

In 2013 I entered another period of working on it every day:  looking at it again, revising and re-organizing, writing new sections, even reading bits of it aloud at a literary open mic. I presented some excerpts to my writing critique group (though one member balked at it, finding it too “confessional”). But at the time of that Christmas concert in 2014, I’d barely touched it for months. I’d been writing romantic fiction, with some success. An independent e-book firm had put out my novella that fall, and I’d written and published a Christmas story and was at work on my Valentine story.

Aftermath of the Concert

Tuesday morning after the concert, after I’d hobbled around in pain all the previous day, I woke from a dream.  It began in a theater where a play was in rehearsal, a large amateur production.  (I should mention here that my mother did quite a bit of amateur acting, to great acclaim, in her thirties and forties, and was at all times theatrical in daily life.)

The play, apparently, was about a shipwreck. A crowd of “survivors,” sailors and rescuers milled around onstage, and more actors waited backstage for their entrance.  My mother was surely there somewhere.

Suddenly, in the way that dreams change scene without warning, we were all outdoors, by the sea, some of us in the sea. Now it was not a stage play but a film being produced.  Survivors flailed in the water or clung to rafts; sailors manned lifeboats. The cameras and all—sound, lights, etc.—were also on boats.  The scene was even more chaotic than in the theater, and the waters of the sea were real, salt and wet and constantly moving.

The director’s voice rose above all the noise.  “Okay, short break now. I thought we could do this in one take, but I was wrong.”  He dismissed everyone to dry off and dress, eat, rest, etc., and I awoke.

At breakfast I recounted the dream, which I recalled very clearly, to my husband, and suddenly I understood. Yeah, Mom I get it, I thought. I’d imagined I could grieve for her in one take, but I’d been wrong.

So I got back to work on my book—and my feet immediately stopped hurting.

Christmas-tide 2015

Again, the Symphony, the Christmas carols, the tears. It’s the opening chords of “Joy to the World” that feed the fountains this time—an instrumental performance, but I sing the words in my head, harmonizing with my mother’s ghost. And even though the orchestra is now playing another carol, we go on singing, my mother and I. We finish the first verse and move on to the second. “Fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains/Repeat the sounding joy/Repeat the sounding joy/Repeat, repeat the sounding joy.”

Shouldn’t I know by now?  Well, yes, I do know. And my feet don’t hurt. I don’t need the reminder this time. Beginning today, December 26, I am leaving for another week-long writing retreat, which I will devote to the book, her book.  The Valentine romance will have to wait.

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Day Zero- Christmas

Welcome to Christmas! It is 4:30 and I just looked out the window at my thermometer. It is still registering 70, it is also raining.

Last night the bakery across the street burned down and my neighborhood still smells of burnt bread. On the upside the whole town was out on the road last night cheering on the fire departments.

Today has been food presents and then the family tradition of watching the Finnish movie Rare Exports!

Tomorrow we kick off the 12 days and nights with Alison Ash I hope you all had a good day and look forward to the stories we have lined up for you!

Liz

The 12 nights (and days) of Christmas

There was a time when Christmas started on Saint Nicholas Day, December 6th or 19th, and ended On Epiphany, Jan 6th. The time between Christmas and Epiphany are the twelve days of Christmas.

I can hear you through the screen “but the song takes place before Christmas”. Well, most likely it doesn't.

Over the years we’ve stopped celebrating those days after Christmas. Yes, the UK and the Commonwealth celebrates Boxing day, and there is New Years Eve. I live near Philadelphia and here on New Year we have mummers.

The rest of the days have fallen by the wayside.

The twelfth night used to have many celebrations its own, now we don’t even think of it.

In this blog series we will be celebrating the twelve days and nights of Christmas, from five golden rings to the yule log, you may even see the Lord of Misrule!

Wassail!

Day 0
Day 1
Day 2

Spellbound Cinderella

Fabulous Spring Giveaway

Spring is here and it's time for a big giveaway from Laughing Vixen Lounge. 11 shops have come together to create one amazing Prize Pack ($280+) full of Jewelry, Perfume, Clothing, Vintage and much more! Many of the shops offer items perfect for any book lover along with lots of other unique, handcrafted and custom designs.

The Fabulous Spring Giveaway is open worldwide. 1 winner will win the Prize Pack. You can enter via the Rafflecopter below. Please visit the Laughing Vixen Lounge Blog and the Main Giveaway Post HERE to see the full prize list, participating shops and daily features during the giveaway.

Since Summer is right around the corner the giveaway theme is Vacation Memories. Each of our participating shops, and many of our blog sponsors, will be sharing some of their favorite vacation photos with you.

Giveaway runs May 4th - 18th. Laughing Vixen Lounge is responsible for all giveaway details. See full details HERE.



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Review: Society for the Preservation of CJ Henderson

Let me start by saying two things: it has been a long time since I reviewed a book and this is a hard one to re-start with.

Everyone I know in the Creative world of the Tristate area was effected by CJ, by his life and by his death. Even if that sounds pretentious it is the truth.

The Society For The Preservation Of CJ Henderson brings together many of the best of the Tristate and Mid-Atlantic authors - not all, our area includes NYC, Philadelphia, Baltimore and DC including all would be crazy.

The stories in this anthology includes stories of high fantasy, sci-fi, urban fantasy and, of course, stories set in the world of HP Lovecraft’s Mythos.

I enjoyed every story, but at the same time even the happiest of the stories left me a little sad. Above all I got the feeling he would have loved the work.

If you knew CJ, even tangentially, you will see him in this anthology. If you didn't know CJ, you will by the end of the book.

I would love to see this anthology have a sequel – and isn't that the highest praise you can give?

Blurb:

On July 4th, 2014 the world lost CJ Henderson, an iconic author and all-around great guy. He lost his battle with cancer, but he did not go quietly and he will not be forgotten. His work is immortalized in over 70 novels and works of non-fiction, and at least as many collections, anthologies, and magazines.

In fact, new works by CJ Henderson will publish for years to come thanks to his heroic efforts to finish and find homes for those projects as-yet unpublished at the time of his illness, two of which are printed here.

CJ always did what he could to give other authors a boost. Encouraging them, mentoring them, sending opportunities their way. With that in mind those of us who called him friend feel there is no better tribute we can raise in his memory than an anthology filled with people he has helped over the years, writing stories inspired by CJ or his work.
We hope you enjoy these tales of fantasy, science fiction and horror, and that they might inspire you as well. Featuring stories by: John L. French, Jean Rabe, Patrick Thomas, David Boop, Danielle Ackley-McPhail, Jeff Young, Leona Wisoker Robert M. Price, Leona Wisoker, James Chambers, and, as always, CJ Henderson.

amazon link

the You Careing Link