Weekend

I had a great one.  Weekend, that is.  It was party sunny on the drive up Door County to Ellison Bay where The Clearing is.  Since my usual potty stop in Baileys Harbor isn't open in the winter I had to stop at the gas station mini-mart to use theirs but the view from the side of the building was kind of beautiful.  Lake Michigan looked cold and fairly calm except for the small wave breaking over the end of the point.





The first thing I did was get the fireplace lit up.  Keeping the fire going is my weekend job.  I picked it because doing that and being the only one who knows how to run the ancient dumbwaiter to haul food up from the kitchen and dirty dishes down absolves me from having to wash or dry dishes much over the weekend.  At least that's the way it works in my devious mind.  Plus I get to play with fire and elemental machines.  


On Friday morning I claimed this seat next to the big window in the Lodge overlooking the Three Pines and the bay.  I plugged my earbuds in, cued up the 5-hours-long nature sounds playlist on my Kindle and got typing.  Over the course of the next three hours I managed to crank out four pages of new chapter.  That's a lot.  I signed up to be the first to read the first part of that chapter (that I printed out at home) at the afternoon roundtable and got lots of valuable feedback.  The most valuable idea that popped into my head was that I spent a lot of time this weekend talking about Durwood, telling stories of what a fun and wonderful guy he was, and it occurred to me that even though Rose's husband died two or three years before this story takes place she doesn't think of him, cry about him, or miss him nearly enough and the relationship with the electrician, Iggy, is just too easily entered into.  That means (gulp) that I go back to "once upon a time" and look for places that I can insert small pieces of grief and longing.  Rewrite #8, here I come.  I'm just relieved that this won't be a total rewrite, only a bit of fluffing up.



The weather really favored us this year.  For the last two years the high temp over our writing weekend has been a whopping -2 degrees.  My fire building was very important those years.  This was my view walking from my cabin (#11) to the Lodge on Saturday morning, sunny and in the mid-30s.


 
We still made a lot of wood into ashes.  When we arrived on Thursday the front row of wood was as high as the back row in the woodshed at the foot of the Lodge steps.  I asked everyone to bring up one piece of wood whenever they came in but it still burned fast enough that I made a couple trips down with the wood bag a day.  I do love making fires.  I think either I had an arsonist ancestor or I was the tribal fire tender in cavewoman days.  Thank you to my Eagle Scout husband and son for teaching me how to make a fire.  (Hint: arrange the logs like a log cabin not a tepee.  Tepee fires collapse as soon as they catch, log cabin fires collapse too but they're more stable for longer.)



There was absolutely no danger that anyone would starve over the weekend.  This is Saturday lunch before the homemade tomato soup rode the dumbwaiter up.  It was a good thing that I took 2 loaves of semolina bread and the remaining loaf of onion bread along; there's about a sandwich worth of the onion left and what looks like escaped crostini of the semolina.  Next year I guess I'll take three loaves of semolina.

I didn't do any prompt writing over the weekend but I was thinking about a series of prompts I wrote a few years ago using a Bonaire week-at-a-glance calendar because DC brought one back from Bonaire for me and we met this afternoon so she could give it to me.  I have thought for a while that there should be a way for me to rearrange these pieces to make a whole story but I kind of like them disjointed.  To that end, I'm going to slap them on here for your reading enjoyment and maybe seeing them will help me decide what the devil to do with the thing.

6 January--Tropical Obsession. 

"Red trails drawn over yellow ocher tell the story of what early men saw in the crystal clear sea where they fished." In the baking hot midday on a desert island I stand, arms akimbo, listening to the tour guide dressed in khaki shorts, a Red Stripe t-shirt, mismatched flip flops, and a Rasta hat. His dreadlocks dangle out and wave in the onshore winds that carry salty spray over us, bringing cool relief. I have been on this tour before, I've heard the story of the Arawaks being overrun by the Caribs, a bloodthirsty tribe, of early Europeans coming ashore to harvest salt, and of the bad old slavery days. My attention wanders from the speech to the speaker. His eyes are red-rimmed and watery, sure evidence to this child of the seventies of a more than passing familiarity with ganja. I've seen those eyes in my mirror. Though it's been decades, I still recognize them.

Okay, kids, I see by the clock that it's nigh onto 11:30 PM.  Again.  Time for this old bag to go to bed.  G'night.
--Barbara