Sandi Kahn Shelton

This summer is only two days old, but already it has a theme.

It is The Summer of Fluidity. Not nearly as much fun as the summer two few years ago that everyone knew as The Summer of Frozen Drinks, or the one in the year 2000 that became The Year of Camping Trips Every Few Weeks.

Nope, this is fluidity—not just because it has rained every day for weeks on end, and “fluids” are starting to come through the porch skylights and are thundering through the drainpipes—but also because we are living the kind of life where nobody is ever sure what’s happening from day to day.

It’s kind of fun, actually. This is the first summer I can remember when I didn’t have a book due on September first, which in itself is astonishing. There are whole HOURS in the day when I am not typing. And I am not being awakened in the middle of the night by some character in the book who has chosen 3 a.m. as the time to finish telling me a story I MUST include in the final draft.

Also—Stephanie is back at home, at least part-time, between her internship with a casting director in New York and her various babysitting jobs. She comes back and forth so much she’s practically a commuter, which is lovely because she knows something that very few people know about the world, and that is that it is necessary to go to the ocean as often as possible.

I had forgotten this fact of life—surprising since I was raised on the beaches of Florida and then transplanted to the beaches of Southern California, and I spent three-quarters of my early life sitting on some damp towel on one of the coasts, contemplating whether I should make another sand castle or if the last one would suffice.

This is why it’s a good idea to have children: they remind you of things you always knew but may have forgotten while you were busy trying to raise them and make sure they got their homework done and brushed their teeth.

Stephanie returned from college this year just slightly worn out—sick and tired and overworked and oversaturated with city life—and she knew immediately that she needed to go to the beach. “I think the beach is nature’s hospital,” she told me. “And that’s where I need to be.”

And so that’s what we do. We bought a season pass so we don’t have to feel guilty if we can only spend an hour or so there—and we head for nature’s hospital whenever it is not absolutely pouring rain. Cloudy days are even fine. They have their own charm at the hospital, I’ve found—a kind of peace and quiet. I don’t even mind huddling under the blankets in the cold and sipping hot tea.

There’s something else about nature’s hospital that I’ve realized. It has an incredible arts and crafts unit—plenty of shells and rocks and seaweed to work with. Lately I find myself collecting little rocks that look like teeth and creating what could only be called “mouth sculptures” all along my towel.

Soon, I know, one of those mouth sculptures is going to start talking to me, telling me some story that I’ll realize needs to be written down and that perhaps will turn into my next novel.

But for now, it’s enough that it’s just me, the clouds, the little teeth, and the daughter—all of us spending the Summer of Fluidity in nature’s intensive care ward.

I have started giving writing workshops in my house, which is the most wonderful thing.

When I have given writing workshops before, they have been held upstairs in bookstores, or in public museums, or in conference rooms of libraries. All of these are very nice places, and I have had a good time there, surrounded by books or stuffed birds or intercom systems.

But now, with the writing workshop at home, there’s a different kind of magic. We drink tea and lemonade. We take off our shoes and spread out. Some people gravitate to the back porch, which is a very nice place as long as it isn’t raining, since the skylights there tend to leak just a little. Other people like the discipline of the dining room table, while still others curl up on the sectional sofa, surrounded by pillows.

I give them prompts: Write about your name. Tell us about the dinner table when you were a child. 

While they are writing, I take out my notebook, too, because there is something just amazing about being in a space where absolutely everyone is working.

It reminds me of a story Arlo Guthrie told, when I went to see him in concert. He told of a time when he and Pete Seeger would get together each day to write songs. They sat in a cabin together, and every day, Pete Seeger would just write and write and write as fast as his hand would move across the paper, while Arlo sat and fidgeted.

At last he realized what was wrong. Pete was sitting closest to the window, and so he managed to catch all the good ideas that floated in, trap them into songs, and so none of them got past him to reach Arlo. They had to trade places.

But that’s not what is happening here. The way I see it, when these rooms are filled with people writing away—some of them tapping on their laptops while others’ hands are racing across the pages of their notebooks—I think the ideas are coming through the window, getting caught by the ceiling fan, and spinning out to be sprinkled over everybody.

We gather at the end, and the people who wish to share what they’ve written—which is to say, the brave ones among us—read to us in quiet, questioning voices. They are writing first drafts and they are scared of the tumble of words coming through, but they know they are onto something, and so they are powerful.

We tell them, “Keep going,” and “Wow—you wrote all that, just now?” And “I can’t wait to hear what you do with this by next time.”

And then they pack up their notebooks and their laptops and go home, and the ceiling fan, which has dispensed so many words on so many people, still has a few left for me.

I haven’t blogged in so long that I practically had to get out the GPS even to find my way here.

No excuses beyond the usual. I’ve been busy finishing (yet again) my book. Books in manuscript form, as those of you who are writers know, are a lot like boomerangs: they keep showing up, needing just a little tweaking here and some nipping and tucking there, a possible rethinking of Chapter 15, perhaps another comma or two in Chapter 20. I tell you, you could go mad.

And then there’s Comcast. We’ve been having rather a comcastic time of it over here, ever since we fell for their ad about the triple play. (They really should call it the triple threat.) That’s where you can pay next to nothing and get internet, digital cable television, AND phone service all on one bill. Since we already had the cable TV thing and the internet thing going, we decided what the hell. How great would it be to add the telephone to that lineup and save tons o’ bucks!

The phone immediately went crazy. At least ninety percent of the time, we’d find ourselves talking to people on the phone, having a perfectly nice conversation, and then out of nowhere they would start screaming: “WHERE DID YOU GO? I CAN’T HEAR YOU! YOU SOUND LIKE YOU’RE UNDER WATER!” And then they would hang up on us.

So in the last few weeks, Comcast has been here approximately 468 times, which has taken up an unbelievable amount of time in my life. It’s been like a part-time job, scheduling these visits and then living through them. in fact, I visit with Comcast people more than I see my friends these days. They are nice and apologetic individuals, generally of good character but with a certain air of doom and mystification about them.

Because they are generally young, I have to explain to them that once upon a time in America, phones just worked. You picked up the receiver—it was usually black and heavy—and you heard a dial tone. You could make calls by dialing a little wheel with numbers, and those calls always, always went through. You could even hear the person on the other end speaking clearly and loudly in your ear. It was astonishing. True, the phone didn’t go from room to room, and you had to pay for long-distance calls—but it worked every single time.

They look astonished to hear this.

In our time together, these Comcast men have done everything they can think of. They have rewired the house. They have trampled the flower beds. They have jiggled wires and cursed and complained and called on supervisors and higher powers. They have harrumphed and argued—and one hapless guy even tried to talk us into canceling our service. But we have persisted—and since for the last two days nobody has screamed at me for being underwater, I am even willing to go on a little longer.

But—how did I get so off track? This is not a post about books OR Comcast. This is a blog about the secret to life, which happens to be mulch.

While I am following Comcast workers around my yard, I have been pondering yet again my garden.

Unfortunately, I have always been the kind of gardener who would like it so much more if it was an activity you could do from the window. Okay, I am willing, just barely, to go and buy plants at the nursery and then put them into the ground—and I have even been known to water them for a few weeks. But then, alas, I have a personality defect which caused me to lose interest. I think that nature should step in and do the rest.

So my yard always looks like hell by the end of June or so. Flowers are gasping for life, while only the weeds and dandelions run rampant.

This is where black mulch comes in. It was during one of my walks around the yard trailing a white long wire marked Comcast that I suddenly realized I wouldn’t have to weed so much if I bought bags of mulch. DEEP DARK MULCH. I was immediately ecstatic. I would go and buy heaps and heaps of the stuff, and I would place it where the weeds normally grow, and the weeds would not show, and the flowers would hold in their moisture, and life would be grand.

So I spent a whole day weeding, planting and bestowing deliciously black, rich-looking mulch on everything I could find. I have put it everywhere I can think of.

Here is a picture of my mulch. I call this “Mulch with Hostas.”

And this is “Mulch with Petunias”:

I can’t imagine life without it. In fact, the most recent Comcast guy said he’s seeing black mulch everywhere he goes lately.

“You’re out tromping around people’s gardens a lot, are you?” I said.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Lots of people can’t get their phones to work. People tell me their friends yell at them that they sound like they’re under water.”

“Hmmm,” I said.

“But black mulch—” he said. “That’s the wave of the future.”

Wave of the future? It’s the secret of life! At least in the spring.  

Lately I’ve been editing the final version of my new novel, which is going to be called The Stuff That Never Happened, and I’ve kind of lost touch with Kissing Games of the World.

It’s a little like tending to a new baby while your toddler plays in the sandbox and doesn’t need so much attention.

So how sweet, then, to get invited to come to Newtonville Books in Newton, Massachusetts (another state, even!) to read from the toddler-aged book and get reminded once again of how much I once loved those characters and all the trouble they got themselves into.

Even better, I get to see one of my new dearest friends, Holly Robinson Cookson, whose new book, The Gerbil Farmer’s Daughter, is coming out in just a few weeks. I wrote a blurb for her book, which is such a delightful memoir about growing up amid quirky, unpredictable adults and…well, their gerbils. And then she came through town the other day on her way to visit her editors in New York, and we ate lunch and talked about a million things…and now she’s going to come to my reading since she doesn’t live so very far from there.

It’s very good, as you might imagine, to have Actual People at readings. A writer’s worst fear is that not one member of the public will show up to be read to, and you will have to slink away in embarrassment for the trouble the bookstore people went to even just to write the sign with your name on it. You will vow never to trouble the public again with the illusion that you wrote a book. WAIT!  No, no! I just remembered. That’s NOT the worst fear. The VERY WORST fear is that there will be ONE PERSON there to hear you read–one singular, baffled human being who is probably somehow related to the bookstore owner and who was BEGGED to come–and so with one audience member in the sea of chairs, you will actually have to DO the reading, and will not be permitted to crawl away and start trying to put the whole thing out of your mind, if you can.

So, anyway, all this is by way of saying that if you happen to be within striking distance of Newton, Massachusetts, on this Thursday (April 30), at oh, say, about 7 o’clock, and you would like to come to the VERY delightful bookstore there–well, I would be there, and I would jump up and down with joy.

AND, as an added bonus, you would get to meet my wonderful son Ben and his delightful wife Amy, who happen to live in the neighborhood and have agreed to saunter on by and clap very loudly. (You’ll know who they are because they will be the people in the back, whispering, “NO! No! PLEASE don’t read the sex parts!”)

Newtonville Books is located at 296 Walnut Street in Newtonville. The phone number is (617) 244-6619. Tell Jaime I said hello!

Believe me, I’ve tried not to talk about this.

But for the past month or so, I’ve been drinking a green smoothie every day…and I have become somewhat addicted, I’m afraid. I hate talking about it because–well, I’m all too aware that people (and by people, I mean family members) are rolling their eyes at me. I know what they’re thinking: this is just the latest of my little obsessions.

Okay, I admit that I do have obsessions. A few years ago, for five straight months I woke up every morning and ate half a can of pineapple. I can’t remember why this was a good idea, but it had something to do with getting enough chromium, so the pineapple had to come out of a can. Fresh pineapple, delicious though it might be, wasn’t an option. We had stacks and stacks of cans in our pantry. One day I decided I didn’t want anymore.

I’ve also had some hair issues (read: obsessions) from time to time. I’m the only person in our family with blond hair, and as anyone with blond hair can tell you, the color is NEVER precisely right. It’s always either too gray-looking (hairdressers call that “ashy”) or else it’s too gold (”brassy” to the professionals), and sometimes, defying all logic, it can be both at the same time. You can have ashy hair when you catch a glimpse of it in the rear view mirror of your car, and then the most horrifyingly GOLD hair in the bathroom mirror. When that happens to you, you NEED family members to assess and report on what THEY see. It’s difficult to keep them from backing away from you, though, when you attempt to explain what’s going on and impress upon them the importance of their evaluations. At times, they will run out of the room to escape your questioning.

And I’m not even scratching the surface of my health interests. For instance, I was once told by my yoga teacher that I am totally misaligned in ways that were going to lead to pain, bad knees and sloping shoulders–and so he recommended that I perform an exercise which involved lying motionless on the floor for forty-five minutes a day with my legs at right angles on a chair, and my head perfectly forward and my arms at my sides. Forty-five minutes of motionless lying about! I wasn’t even permitted to fall asleep, which would at least be a good use of the time, because then I would collapse myself into my old misalignments and grow even more crooked! And I couldn’t use the time to make phone calls or even watch educational things on television, because all you can really do when lying motionless on your back is stare at the stains on the ceiling.

But I did this–for a while, at least. My family members were quite amused. But no one joined me in this attempt to become a better aligned person. And now that I have quit doing it, they are polite enough not to bring it up again. It’s been filed away in the catalog of my oddities, I’m sure.

But this brings us to green smoothies. Despite what you might be thinking, green smoothies aren’t green TEA smoothies. They are green because that’s the color of the smoothie itself, since it it is chocked full of green vegetables. Like handfuls of baby spinach, to be exact.

What you do is take some frozen strawberries–a lot of them, but this is not exact science, so just put as many as you like–and two bananas and the handfuls of fresh baby spinach and you put all that in a blender along with some water, and then you turn on the blender to its best ICE-CRUSHING setting, and then watch as the whole thing turns a slightly horrible-looking green color.

A warning: You will not look at it and think, “Wow! I have GOT to drink that thing, because it looks so good!” But when you taste it…wow. It tastes mostly like strawberries, with some creaminess due to the bananas, and a kind of fresh, crisp taste from the spinach. It definitely does not taste like spinach, so you don’t have to worry about that. But when you drink it down–I have two large glasses of it every day–well, you can’t believe, frankly, that anything that bad looking tastes so WONDERFUL.

The best part of it is that just this blenderful of goodness contains, like, a bazillion servings of vegetables. You know how recently they decided that it wasn’t enough for us to get five servings each day, like they’d always been recommending, but that now we needed, oh, at least NINE? And I remember thinking, “Well, THAT’S never gonna happen!” But now I think I get nine servings just thinking about the green smoothie each day.

No, no. Here’s the really, really best part–and now you’re going to think I’m just bragging. The other day I went to the doctor, and of course they always insist on weighing you at the doctor’s office, no matter why you’re really there. Usually I try to ignore this aspect of doctorhood, because it’s just a quirk that they can’t help. But–holy smokes! I had lost FIVE POUNDS without even trying. Honestly. I still eat all the food I normally do, whenever I’m hungry. I’ve just added this green smoothie to the mix–and five pounds has somehow melted off without me noticing. (I feel that five pounds that leaves in April is worth about ten pounds any other time of the year, because this is the time of the year when a person is starting to think about the bathing suit problem coming up.) AND! I can take my jeans off without unbuttoning and unzipping them. In fact, I have trouble getting them to stay up! I’m actually going to have to buy a belt. I found out I lost two full inches in my abdomen, just from drinking green smoothies for five weeks. My stomach is flatter than it’s ever been.

So you can see why I can no longer keep quiet. Thank you, bloglily, for telling me about green smoothies being practically the National Beverage out there in California. And, by the way, does my hair seem ashy to you?

That video of 200 people in Belgium suddenly breaking out in a dance to “Do-Re-Mi” is popping up everywhere–and with it, the question of what it all means and why anybody should care.

If you haven’t seen it, it’s really an astonishing four minutes in the Antwerp train station when Julie Andrews’s clear, high voice starts singing over the public address system, and seemingly from out of nowhere, people start performing a choreographed dance–the crowd of dancers growing larger and larger, much to the amazement of the regular folks in the train station.

The dancers are all ordinary looking people of all ages, some wearing business suits and carrying briefcases, others hoisting backpacks. They look like ordinary passengers–only they all know the same steps, and THEY ARE DANCING TOGETHER, performing wordlessly in straight, precise lines. The crowd of onlookers can’t stop themselves from looking stunned and delighted as the folks next to them suddenly join in.

When I watched it, it made me smile–and then without warning, my eyes were filling with tears.

But why? I had no idea. I watched it five more times the first day, and since then I’ve seen it perhaps ten more times, and each time I feel this tugging at my heart.

I figured I was just losing it. But tonight, on salon.com, a commenter on Table Talk put into words just what I’d been feeling. Here’s an excerpt from it:

The dancers are presenting the purest form of art imaginable: art simply and truly for the sake of art.

What they are presenting to the people in that station (and the rest of us, of course) is the ideal of human co-operation. They’re showing us the possibility that a bunch of unrelated, unconnected people could spontaneously burst into a song and dance routine in a train station because that’s what they all wanted to do and that’s what we could do too, if we set our minds to it.

They have shown me a little bit of what it is to be human again.

And if we can be human again, maybe there’s hope for us as a species. And that, I think, is why I love to watch it. It just feel so good to think of ourselves as part of something bigger, something joyful and lovely and filled with hope. It’s the best of our humanity.

As my conductor friend Bobby said in his wonderful blog, Bobby Derailed, how long before this breaks out in Grand Central? We could use a little of this close to home.

Well, we’re STILL awaiting spring here in the Northeast, still being teased by the fact that it’s April and yet ridiculously colder than it has any right to be.

Today, driving to the library, I saw little ICE crystals bouncing out of the sky onto my windshield. I wanted to close my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see such a miscarriage of meteorological justice, but then I would have probably driven off the road.

And now that I have gotten to the library, where it is warm enough that a person can drink iced tea without shivering, I have perceived yet ANOTHER problem. There is a little bit of a bad vibe here today, which I now realize is happening because nearly all the people here have TAX FORMS in front of them. Some are even whispering furiously with official accounting types and shuffling through briefcases filled with receipts and such. What can be worse than having ice crystals AND tax form pressure all in one day?

Life is so unfair sometimes.

But here is an offering, in case you also are shaking your fist at some sky somewhere, or else scowling at tax forms: a video that has a chance of making you smile. As my friend Beth Levine said when she sent it to me, “I already knew that musical theater could cure the world of all its troubles!”

Go–watch and smile.

The sun is out, the grass is greening up, and little bright spots of purple and yellow crocuses dot the landscape.

It’s enough to make one believe once again in things like reliably warm breezes and tulips. Roses, even.

But here’s the thing: the peepers are still silent. And that means that at any moment the sun could go behind the clouds, and by morning there could be an entire foot of snow on the ground. Believe me: I’ve seen this happen.

Winter can’t be fully gone until the peepers declare it so. Peepers are little New England-y frogs who hang out in the little swamps and ditches at the sides of roads, and they sound like a combination of car alarm and horror movie soundtrack. If you were watching a movie with peepers making noises in it, you would just know that the murderer was IN THE HOUSE and about to jump out from behind the curtains and stab the woman who is innocently making a cup of tea, and you would get tense about it.

But for some reason, some great cosmic joke perhaps, these prehistoric-sounding things seem to be in charge of announcing that there is no longer any danger of ice and snow. Apparently it is the peepers who get the first memo from the earth that all that winter stuff is gone. People around here believe that once you have heard the peepers, you can safely put away the snow shovel and get out the garden hoe.

This brings to mind SO many questions.

WHY is it the peepers who are given this info, and not, say, the bobcats or the squirrels–or, hey, here’s an idea–how about the HUMAN BEINGS? Especially those who work at the National Weather Service. THEY might like to know when all danger of freezing is past.

And: do the peepers ever get it wrong? Has it ever happened that this ALL CLEAR memo is given to them by mistake? Or that the lead peeper misreads it and announces that it’s time to get out there and start peeping and three days later an unexpected nor’easter comes barreling through?

And if that ever were to happen, would that spell the end of peepers until next year…or maybe even forever? Would their soft amphibian little bodies turn to ice and then they wouldn’t be able to make new peepers? Is this something that we need to worry about?

I would miss their crazy soundtrack of spring, the way it feels to walk out onto the screened porch on an early spring night and hear them barking and croaking and calling out in what I imagine must be pure, unadulterated joy, SPRING IS HERE! THE WORLD HAS COME BACK TO LIFE!

It is, after all, their one job, and they can’t help it that they were given the voice of a police siren to accomplish it. They do what they can.

I have to admit that I’ve been in something of a gray funk lately, a mood which I always think can be fixed somehow if only I would Try Harder. You know, apply myself. Join my fellow citizens at the gym. Take up line dancing. Start meditating or eating right. Sign up for a marathon.

That actually may be the very worst part of gray funks, you know–the sinking feeling that if you only had a little bit more ooomph to you, you could manage to pull yourself out of it. So you go about lecturing yourself.

Take it from me: this does not help.

So instead, I have decided to stop trying to make things better and simply give in to complaining. Here’s a list of the things that are currently bugging me.

1/ It’s March. And it’s Connecticut.

Need I say more? As I overheard a guy say today, “March is the month that can break your heart.” I suppose it is possible that I have had my heart broken by March. The weather–at least here in New England–is abominable in March, and not merely because it’s cold and gray. We’re accustomed to cold and gray; hell, we’re four months into cold and gray at this point. For a true full-blown depression, you have to look at January. That’s when it’s not only colder and grayer, but you know you have months and months left of it. But now that it’s March, it knows and you know that things could be so much better. An example: last weekend the sun shone and the temperature struggled into the low 60’s, and people rejoiced in the streets. On Monday, it snowed.

I knew why. Just because it is March and it can.

2/ I have a low-grade cold.

Sore throat, loud coughing fits, sneezes, sinus headaches, sleeplessness. You name it. The house is filled up with crumpled up tissues.

3/ Also: to deal with the low-grade cold, I’ve had to take Nyquil at night before bed. Nyquil tastes sooo bad (and don’t try telling me to take the capsules because we all know the capsules are just a hoax, they have never helped anyone!). So to get myself through the bad-tasting Nyquil, I’ve had to eat a piece of chocolate cake each night after I take the medicine. Trust me: it is the only thing that can kill the taste. And how unfair is it that now I have gained approximately 35 pounds from eating a piece of chocolate cake for five nights in a row!

4/ Therefore, none of my jeans fit without hurting.

5/ We’ve had, in the last few weeks, the following domestic horribilities: a foot of snow, frozen pipes, a broken washer on the water pipes over the furnace which caused water to leak into the motor of the furnace, a blown-out tire, two cars with CHECK ENGINE LIGHTS that will not go off, illnesses, infections, clogged drains, a toilet that wouldn’t stop running water, and a flooded porch.

6/ There are about 6,000 little tiny things I have to do that involve calling up insurance companies, computer anti-virus services, human resource directors, cell phone people, bursars, credit card companies who have charged things automatically to our account, things that we do not want and did not authorize–or didn’t KNOW we were authorizing, and which now will take up four hours on the phone pushing buttons and listening to bad music.

7/ I thought I wanted my hair to grow long, but now I realize my hair is stringy and shapeless. This, even though I just went to have my hair cut two weeks ago. When I was there, I was apparently in a jaunty, I-can-have-long-hair mood and so I only let the hairdresser take 0.00006 of an inch off, but I now need to go back and pay $44 more to have a REAL haircut performed.

8/ I cannot figure out how to get songs I no longer like OFF my iPod and put songs that I really love ON the iPod. Because the iPod is filled up. With many unlistenable songs (what was I thinking??) This makes me feel stupid and inadequate. It’s my iPod. Why can’t I make it work?

9/ Okay, and while I’m grouchy about technology, let me then make this confession: I cannot for the life of me figure out how to watch a simple DVD in my own house if there is not another person present to operate the two remotes. These remotes make no sense to me whatsoever. Okay? I can’t even waste time watching movies!

10/ A new book is whispering to me, yet the part of my brain that feels so overloaded by having just finished the old book is saying, “WHAT?!?! Are you crazy? You can’t start a new book now! You haven’t even cleared the million little scraps of paper off your desk that have to do with the OLD book. You haven’t even returned the phone calls you didn’t return while you were working on the old book. And vacuuming: have you vacuumed since you finished your book? No, you haven’t. SO NO NEW BOOK UNTIL YOU HAVE FULLY CAUGHT UP FROM WRITING THE OLD BOOK!”

Update: I was just rummaging through the piles of paper on the desk, when I came across this quote from Lee Smith, a wonderful Southern writer whose books I adore. It was just written on a piece of paper, waiting for me to discover and re-remember it. It says:

“When stuff in life gets really rough, I would just die if I was not writing a novel. Once you think it up, it’s like a whole other city with a little door, and every time you sit down to write you just open the door and there you are–a wonderful vacation for two hours.” 

That’s what I have been missing: my wonderful two-hour vacations away from March and paperwork and my iPod and my yucky hair.

I just realized I’ve spent practically an entire month away from this blog that I truly do love writing…and I can’t for the life of me remember why I haven’t even stopped by to dust the place off, sweep away some of the cobwebs, and open the windows and let the air in.

Oh, wait. I know. I’ve been in recovery from writing a novel. Rehabbing, as it were. I cleaned the house, started washing dishes again, threw out a bunch of things I was sick of having around me, and did practical things like the taxes and the FAFSA (the student aid application…trust me, you don’t want to know)…and then I went to Florida to visit with my stepmother.

She and I have no right to love each other as much as we do. She was my father’s childhood sweetheart, and he probably would have married her except that one day when he was 21 and she was 20, they had a lovers’ spat. In the only impulsive act he ever did in his life, he packed his suitcase and took off for another city, where he got a job as a civil engineer and waited to see what life was going to serve up to him before he went back to Helen.

But–and in the movie of his life, the ominous music would play here–life had other plans for him. When he rang the doorbell at a boarding house where he hoped to rent a room, the front door was opened by my mother. He later told me that he’d never known anyone who painted her toenails before. She later told me she’d never met anybody so handsome and so lacking in confidence.

They got married five months later, and I was born ten months after THAT.

Thirteen years and three children later, they had a bitter divorce…and after a time, my father found his way back to Helen and spent a very happy twenty years with her, before he died of kidney cancer in 1989.

My mother considered Helen her sworn enemy, and for the rest of her life, I had to hide the fact that Helen and I had long, meandering, wonderful conversations about love, writing, creativity, God, children, politics; that sometimes we would get on the phone and three hours would pass in the blink of a minute. Sometimes, for days after one of these long talks, I walk around speaking to Helen in my head, arguing, showing, explaining.

And so last week I went to see her. She is frail now and has trouble walking. She has Crohn’s disease and there are very few foods she can eat without her stomach (she calls it “The Boss”) giving her fits, so we don’t eat much. We sit on her screened porch, surrounded by azaleas and impatiens and roses, and we talk and talk and talk. We need a flow chart to keep track of all the conversations we are having simultaneously.

We have lost many, many people between us, so many that we think of ourselves as survivors. She tells me about her childhood, I tell her about mine. We talk about love and writing and friendships and the reasons that we stayed friends even though we might never have discovered what was good about each other.

She asked me what it feels like, writing a novel and trying to hold these ideas in my head, and how do I know when it’s right, and what keeps me from going crazy with the sheer uncertainty of it all? And I, having just finished writing my novel–and having just gotten the reassuring news that my editor LOVES it–was so full of myself, saying how FUN it is, and how the words just COME OUT, that they can’t be stopped. I heard myself saying all these things, saw myself forgetting that a video of the last few months would instead show me walking hunched over, brow furrowed, eyes staring blankly in space, spending my days pacing in Starbucks with not a plan in my head, and then jumping out of bed in the middle of the night and feverishly writing until the sun came up.

Isn’t it funny, how one mood doesn’t remember the other? How we go through such times and then say of them, “Oh, it was GREAT. I LOVE writing a novel!”

I didn’t email much while I was in Florida, but a friend sent me this link to a talk given by Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love…and in it, Gilbert says everything I wish I could have said about that state we go through when we create something: the panic, the fear, and the moments of feeling as though we have been touched by something divine, something that we secretly know has nothing whatsoever to do with us.

Take 20 minutes and stretch out and watch it. You’ll be so glad you did. Not only is the message so reassuring, but the quality of her voice alone is enough to calm your nerves.