Isabel's Daughter

Judith Ryan Hendricks writes of the southwest, particularly New Mexico - of food and cooking, kitchens and corn, and the dusty smell of dried chiles. This story of a foundling's search for her mother is her third, preceded by Bread Alone and The Bakers' Apprentice


“The first time I saw my mother was the night she died. The second time was at a party in Santa Fe.”

Avery James spent the first 13 years of her life in a foundling home in Alamitos Colorado, near the New Mexican border. Her best friend was Esperanza Verdug – a round person with long gray braid, snapping dark eyes, smooth brown arms, and a gold front tooth. The cook at Carson. Not a housemother or a teacher or a nurse. No degree in psychology or social work or early childhood eduction. No counseling credentials. If the truth be told, she couldn’t read or write, and her English sometimes sent me into fits of laughter.

But of all the Carson staff, it was Esperanza who always seemed to be wading through a river of kids. They’d hang on her arms, grab at her skirts, cling to her legs. She was the one who tied shoelaces, wiped runny noses, smuggled bizochitos into the library.

After Esperanza died, Avery ran away to Florales where she finds a rural haven provided by an eccentric old woman called Cassie, a curandera, or healer, who teaches her how to concoct remedies from wild plants. She lived with Cassie for many years, until the old woman died, helping in the garden and with the cooking.

Eventually she finds her way to Santa Fe and the famed art colonies. Working for a trendy caterer, she sees the portrait of a woman who bears a striking resemblance to her in the home of a client. Avery's search for her mother is revealed in flashbacks.

When she was living with Cassie, she was bitten by a rattlesnake. Recovering in hospital- "When they stuck needles in my arm I knew it should hurt, but I couldn’t feel it. I remember Cassies’ face hovering over me in a blue cloud, then her hand on my forehead.

"It was still dark, and I wondered what time it was. I started to call for a nurse, but the sound died in my throat. A woman was standing in the doorway. She was wearing a black dress with white sleeves. The multicolored beads on her dress caught the dim light from the hall and made it sparkle. She had long black hair and her face was shadows. I figures she was an angel, and that seeing her meant I was going to die. Except I didn’t think angels wore black, so maybe she was a bad angel and I was going to Hell for not believing. I stared harder, trying to see her face, but I couldn’t. She just stood there like she was watching me.

"All at once I know, and the knowing made the hair rise up all over my head.

"She was my mother."

There's a (Slight) Chance I Might be Going to Hell

This story takes place in the Pacific Northwest, my home ground. It's very very funny, and I enjoyed it thoroughly ... listened to it as an audiobook. The author describes people and places so well that I thought I could see them and hear them.

When her husband is offered a post at a small university, Maye Roberts is only too happy to pack up and leave the relentless Phoenix heat for the lush green quietude of Spaulding, Washington. She's a freelance writer, and works at home, so making new friends is quite a challenge.

Spaulding is a quintessential college hippie town, laid-back and full of quirky characters. The town is founded on a sewer pipe manufacturing company, though it's been closed for years now. The big annual event is the Sewer Pipe Festival, complete with the crowning of a queen. This is a recycling, no-meat-eating town, and Maye resorts to telling lies to find friends. This, she reflects, is earning her places in the different degrees of hell. There's an intermediate hell where one is forced to live out eternity in Wal-Mart "the day after Thanksgiving as shoppers jostled, pushed and rubbed against her to secure the cheapest things hellishly possible, while their children, also known as demi-demons, cried, screamed, and begged for hell's cuisine, corn dogs and Mountain Dew."

After narrow escapes from a coven of witches, a cult of vegetarians (she loves a good steak) and an alcoholic who humiliates her on a friend-date, she decides to enter the town's Sewer Pipe Queen pageant in hopes this will help her attract friends.

Eudora

Nan at Letters from a Hill Farm said she would devote the month of April to reading Eudora Welty. I have a treasured copy of "The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty" that I bring out from time to time to re-read some favorites. Her vision is sweet by nature, and she writes with a fine, pure, and gentle voice about the American South. This year will be her 100th birthday

I posted an entry in My Reading Diary a few years ago, and mentioned her connection to the email system that bears her name




The Birth of Eudora

Originally developed as a freeware product by Internet pioneer Steve Dorner in 1988, Eudora broke new ground by combining the best attributes of various emerging email technologies. The program did not spring from a traditional center of high-tech innovation such as the Silicon Valley, but rather, from a college campus in the nation's heartland.

Eudora was developed by Steve Dorner at the University of Illinois, where Mosaic was also eventually developed. Dorner was a computer programmer working on TCP/IP (transmission control protocol/Internet protocol) applications and servers for the computer science department on the Urbana-Champaign campus. This was his first exposure to Internet protocols, chiefly file transfer protocol (ftp) and telnet, before he moved on to developing "ph" for Net directories.

After growing bored with building directories, Dorner turned his attention to email. Although electronic messaging was still in its infancy, Dorner realized that an elegant email system could greatly enhance and facilitate communications among students and faculty on campus.

The Name

After working on the new email program for a year, Dorner was ready to release it for free to the Internet community at large. The working name was UIUCMail, which Dorner realized was a tongue twister. Then he remembered a short story written by Eudora Welty (1909-2001) titled "Why I Live at the P.O." It's a story about a woman who decides to live at the post office where she works rather than put up with her family at home any longer. Dorner was processing so much email at the time that he felt like he lived at the post office, and his program used a "post office" protocol to fetch mail, so he saw a metaphorical connection. Since the programming and naming took place a decade ahead of the phenomenal growth of the Internet, Dorner hadn't anticipated Eudora would eventually be used by more than 20 million people.

Naming the program after a living author could have become awkward for Dorner and any future licensees. Fortunately, Ms. Welty was flattered and amused by the allusion to her and her work.


I love this anecdote about Eudora Welty and the email system ... it's the same one I've been using for many years now

A short story writer and novelist, Eudora Welty wrote poignantly about the men and women of her native American South, the traditions and changes that influenced their lives, the intricacies of their relationships and their difficulties and failures in understanding themselves and communicating with each other, passed away on July 23, 2001.

Miss Welty and other Southern writers of her generation such as William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Allen Tate, Tennessee Williams and Robert Penn Warren, were key figures in the movement that created a Southern literary renaissance during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s and made Southern writing a dominant force in 20th century American literature.

The Red Leather Diary

Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal



Lily Koppel
Harper Collins 2008








In 2003, Lily Koppel discovered Florence Wolfson’s diary in a Manhattan dumpster. She located Florence in Florida and surprised her with this artifact from her past. Lily said, “I have some old things belonging to you that I picked up at 98 Riverside Drive, and I thought you might want them.”

As a teenager, Florence had kept the diary from 1929 to 1934. Lily wrote a piece for The New York Times based on this 72-year-old relic, provoking enough interest to be turned into a book. Florence writes in a forward to the book, “It has added zest to my life and brought back some of the passion of my youth and made me feel more alive than I have in years.”

Because this was written in a novelistic way, I found it hard to decide if it was fact or fiction. Either way, it is a fascinating re-creation of the romance and glitter, sophistication and promise, of 1930s New York. She was obsessed with the state of her soul and her appearance, and I probably wouldn’t have liked Florence at all.



In June 2008, one reviewer said that she had seen them on the Today show. Maybe it’s true, maybe not, nevertheless, a good read and the black-and-white photos add lots of interest.

Florence as a sixteen-year-old college sophomore in May 1931

No I don't want to join a book club

- Virginia Ironside 2006, Penguin Books

This diary is what happens when grumpy old women meet Bridget Jones. Too young to get whisked away by a Stannah Stairlift or to enjoy the luxury of a walk-in bath (but not so much that she doesn’t enjoy comfortable shoes), Marie is, all the same, getting on in years – and she’s thrilled about it! She’s a bit preoccupied about whether to give up sex – “ouch! Ouch! Ouch!’ – but there are compensations, like falling in love all over again – but this time with her baby grandson, Gene.

When friends suggest she join a book club as she turns sixty, she says, “Book club people always seem to have to wade through Captain Corelli’s Mandolin or, groan, The God of Small Things. They feel they’ve forever got to poke their brain with a pointed stick to keep it working. But either you’ve got a lively brain or you haven’t. And anyway, I don’t want to be young and stimulated any more. I want to start doing old things, not young things.”

Pouncer is her close companion. He’s a cat. After her bunion operation, she’s wearing two great blue flip-flops and her feet are covered in bandages. "Pouncer took one look and arched his back and spat at them. I think he thought I’d brought home two new strange pets. To Sainsbury’s to buy some fish, and some special food they do that Pouncer likes. At least he liked it last week. It’s funny with cats."

At her birthday party, Lucy asks, “do you feel any different?” Marie says, “yes, I do. I feel absolutely marvelous. It’s clear now that I was born to be sixty. And to be honest, I can’t wait to be seventy.”

Maciej, her Polish cleaning man, is falling in love with her French boarder, Michelle, who doesn’t or won’t speak much English. Her friend Penny, the hypochondriac, thinks she has VD now, and soon to have AIDS. Long discussions about condoms continue. Archie, an old boyfriend, is still attractive …. Hmmmm.

Her best and longest friends are a gay couple. Hughie is dying with AIDS. He’s quite philosophical and in good humour about death. “Getting rather past my sell-by date, I’m afraid.” James is quite falling apart and can’t comprehend what life would be like without him.

Too Young to Fight

Memories of our Youth during World War II


Stoddart Publishing 1999
compiled by Priscilla Galloway

A collection from some of Canada's best-loved writers of children's literature. The contributors were children and teenagers during World War II.

Joy Kogawa, author of Obasan writes of experiences with her family at the detention camp in Slocan, British Columbia. Taken from their home in Vancouver to "relocation" camps in the interior of the province. Rounded up as "enemies", Japanese Canadians from up and down B.C. were housed temporarily inside the horticultural barns at Hastings Park in Vancouver before being sent to the camps.

"When we first arrived, we didn't have enough food. All that first morning, Mama, Tim, and I waddled through the forest on our haunches, like three ducks, picking dandelion leaves. Then back home at our newspaper-lined hut, Mama burnt sticks, making ashes, then ash water, in which she soaked the leaves overnight to get the bitterness out of them."

Roch Carrier describes rationing. "To control the consumption of gasoline, sugar, butter, meat, and flour, the government issued coupons to present to the merchants. Without coupons it was impossible to buy those goods."

I remember a bit of this ... collecting stuff to take to school ... drippings from cooking fatty meats were collected in tin cans. We joked about bringing our "fat cans" to school. My mum canned summer fruits without sugar. I think she tried saccharine. It was horrid, and we didn't eat it.

There are stories from eleven writers here. At this time each year in mid November, we read them again and remember.

Resistance

The Maquis, the Nazi resistance network, moves Jews, Allied Soldiers and fleeing Belgian soldiers to France and freedom. In November 1993 a “special ceremony inaugurates a monument in remembrance of an aeroplane fallen down on 1943 December 30th at the Heights near our village.”

The story begins in December 1943, when an American B-17 bomber is downed, and Claire becomes the caretaker of its pilot, Ted Brice. They fall in love … haunted by war, their love seems impossible, making it all the more precious.

This is not just fiction, but based on realities of many villages across Europe and the horror of it all is almost unbearable. There is love in the hole of hell itself

A movie made in 2003 stars the lovely Julia Ormond (of Sabrina and Legends of the Fall) as Claire and Bill Paxton (of Big Love) as Ted

Tara at Books and Cooks is giving away three copies of Testimony, Anita Shreve’s latest novel, just released. You can enter the draw to be made on October 28 by leaving a comment on her post. She asks that you mention your favorite of Shreve’s books. This is mine.