Catch Up

I, too, have been bad. I haven't written in the last 3 days either, at least not prompt writing. So this morning I'm playing catch up.

I'll give the full report on Thursday night at writer's but I will say that going to the conference was money well spent, even if I felt crummy and the weather was sucky on Saturday. It was good. And I think I might have seen the Jenny A. Memorial Noodles & Company. There wasn't a plaque or anything but I didn't go in; I felt like I was at hallowed ground.

March 28 & 29--Pieter Claesz, Still Life with Musical Instruments. It looked like my family had just dematerialized when I got home that day. Lunch lay half-eaten on the table, wine filled glasses, and their instruments sat abandoned in mid-use. Some comedian had put my tortoise, Elgar, on the table. He tottered there at the edge looking confused. "How'd he like it if I put his precious flute in the wineglass?" I said to Elgar as I picked him up and tucked him under my arm. I heard footsteps on the stairs from the front entrance and didn't want to meet my family just yet so I grabbed a few slices of bread and ran to my room to start my homework and let Elgar wedge himself into the corner where he had a nice rotting apple to snack on.

March 30--Walter Crane,Tile Design of Heron and Fish. Celia lay in the bath, her red-painted toenails peeking out of the mounds of fragrant white foam. She leaned her head back on a rolled towel and sipped her chilled wine., It had been a while since her last bath in this tub. Gran had always let her play until the water turned cold and gray with soap. Gran understood about fairy tales being real to little girls and she let Celia live in that world whenever she stayed here in the old house with her. Celia's parents were reporters who flew off to chase stories in what Celia and Gran had called the "no-star cities" on their map. Mama and Dad never went to the big-story places, they chased the common-man-making-a-difference stories that only took place in the small-dot cities in the atlas. And that's where they disappeared the year Celia turned thirteen. Now Gran was gone too. Celia was twenty-two but felt like an abandoned six year old. She moved her foot to turn on the hot tap to reheat her bath. She planned to stay there in the semblance of safety the old tiled room gave her as long as possible.

These aren't bad. I'll do today's later after I've started rewriting Horizon. Again. What are you writing? Are you writing? Is anybody writing but me?
--Barbara