Home again, home again

Wendy hornsby

One of my favorite stories among the many that my husband, Paul, tells concerns the time his grandfather hired some local youths to help him drive three wagon-loads of corn to the railroad in Lebanon—pronounced Leb’nun in Missouruh—some thirty-five miles distant from his farm in Hartville.  One of the boys, a lad we’ll call Lem, was possessed of a strong back, did a good day’s work, and had a certain eagerness about seeing something of the world beyond the edges ofWrightCounty, where he was born.

Now, this was before 1930 and those wagons were drawn by teams of horses, so Lebanon was a hard three-day drive from Hartville, a round trip of roughly a week.  After the delivery was made, as Grandad and his hired hands drove back into town, a neighbor asked Lem how his trip had gone.  Lem’s eyes lit up remembering his adventure.  Pointing in the direction away from Lebanon, he said, “If the word’s as big thataway as it was in t’other, it’s a whole big place.”

Over the last few weeks, as Paul and I drove some of the blue highways on our long wander around and through the nation’s agricultural Midlands, I frequently felt the way I imagine Lem might have.  That is, awed.  The world is a great big place, and every time we venture beyond our neighborhood we understand more about how vast it is.  But isn’t that why we travel?

A couple of times a year, we drive from Southern California up through state’s rich agricultural center to visit my kids in the north.   We are always impressed by the richness and variety of California’s crops and the length and number of our growing seasons.  But nothing prepared me for the scope of Midwestern farm production until I saw it for myself.  

What the nation’s prairie lands lack in variety—and our lovely weather—is made up for in volume.  Mile after mile, state after state without break from Amarillo to the Appalachians, we drove through fields of ripening wheat and corn, soybeans, feed grass and rice that stretched to the far horizon in every direction. 

And cows.   Beef cattle and dairy cows, by the bazillions, graze the fenced grasslands where buffalo used to roam.  You want to talk about ripe—phewee!—take Highway 54 across the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles where cattle feed lots stretch for miles, filled with cows getting fat while they wait for their train ride to the butcher.

What you don’t see much of, though, is people because most of this is corporate farming.  Except for the Amish communities where hand cultivation still occurs, the farms are huge, as is the equipment used to cultivate the land.  One man driving a big John Deere with a fifteen-foot wide discbine can do the work of how many Lems?   A lot. 

Amish farmers take their produce tot he weekly auction.

There are many reasons why individuals have left farming and agribusiness has moved in; farming is tough work and no place for the faint of heart or courage.  I’m reminded of the World War I era song that asked, “How ya’ gonna keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?”  Maybe the answer is, you aren’t.   What I do know after driving through one nearly-deserted farm town after another is that Lem didn’t just move to town.  He kept going, and corporate farming moved in.

  It was clear that the era of family farming, with some exceptions, has passed.  Paul has said that in his grandfather’s era, a big family working a big farm might be able to support the college education of one of its kids.  Now it takes three or four college-educated kids to support one farm.  Or, as a friend said, “If I won the lottery I could farm until the money ran out.”

The passing of an era was never more apparent to us than when we visited some old friends who still live on the family farm, a century farm, meaning it has been in the family for at least one hundred years.  Larry and Mary went away to college and worked in the city for a while afterward.  But they came back   While Larry and his two brothers worked the farm, the wives all worked in own; Mary taught high school until a few years ago. 

This summer, as Mary and Larry celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary, they announced that they have retired from the farming business.   And there is no one in the next the next generation to take over.

Lem has moved away.  That’s where the story begins, isn’t it?  Where did everyone go?  What are they doing?  Who and what got lost along the way?

The Grand Adios. Or is it holá?

Wendy Hornsby

The big topic of conversation at our house of late is retirement.  Though Paul is already a pensioner, I am still a couple of years away from finishing at the college and crossing that threshold.  Before I pass over, there are many decisions that need to be made about how, when, where we retire.

The why of it is easy:  I’m not getting any younger and I want more time to write while I still have a few brain cells and we want to travel while we still have good knees.  The folks at the State Teachers Retirement System have answered the how question; let me assure you that “rich teacher pension” is an oxymoron, and if anyone tries to persuade you other wise, send them to me.  Every Monday morning I grow more certain about the when part.  The next question, then, is where?  Do we stay put, or do we move elsewhere?

Recently, Paul and I got together for dinner with three of my former UCLA housemates and their spouses.  We have remained friends through college, boyfriends, marriage, babies, launching careers and now, ending those careers and scattering out of the Elay area.  Among the eight people at the dinner table, five had already retired and the rest of us would soon.  The question of where to retire dominated the conversation.  All of the others had, or were in the process of, selling the homes where they raised their children and were planning to move to less expensive areas.

Our hosts had recently purchased a brand new home on a fairway in a brand new over-fifty-five development out on the far edge of civilization, i.e. the desert.  All over the Mojave and the Sonora deserts, like mirages shimmering in the distance as you zip by on the Interstate, you will find random gated communities for seniors, instant towns built around golf courses and Costcos.   The developments aren’t there because someone thought the desert was good for oldsters, but because the land comes cheap.

For about the price of a one-bedroom condo in our beach-front neighborhood, our hosts bought a lovely big house with a fairway as a back yard.  The trade-off for us living so far out would be convenient access to certain amenities we think are essential:  an airport and good medical facilities, tolerable weather and some cultural offerings, such as an accessible symphony or some theater, good restaurants, an interesting community outside the gates.

Another couple at the dinner—for her wedding she dressed me in harvest gold silk moiré, I put her in hot pink chiffon for mine—was selling a big house overlooking thirty acres of avocadoes and moving into a 450 square-foot RV.  For a while, anyway.  They will head off on the land version of a cruise around the world while they decide where to end up.  Sounds interesting, and challenging.  I’d be more inclined to load up the trunk of the Honda and invoke my AARP discount rate at hotels than live in an RV, even a very big one, but wandering for a year or so could be a grand and fun adventure; something to think about.

Last week, spring break for me, we took a trip that began with what we call The Kid Loop.  We went up the San Joaquin Valley to visit my son and his wife in Fresno, and then crossed the state to see my daughter and her husband in Menlo Park. Menlo Park put us next door to Palo Alto, so we were able to meet Meredith for a lovely lunch before we headed up to Sonoma County to go house hunting.

Everywhere Paul and I visit, we try on the area.  We tour neighborhoods, look into the real estate, talk to the locals.  This is what we have learned:  no matter where we end up, there will be trade-offs; college towns, even if they are small towns, offer most if not all of the requisite amenities on our list and are far less expensive than big cities are; we are spoiled by Southern California’s weather.

That last one, the weather, keeps coming up when we consider the Midwest where Paul’s family is, and the Pacific Northwest where much of my family is, as well as the Southwest and the Atlantic shore.  Parts of Europe are gorgeous, cheap and clement, but too far from family; I am still hopeful of a grandchild one day.

The dream retirement house will have space for a real garden again, a guest room that doesn’t double as an office, a beautiful view that doesn’t include either stucco or asphalt, good walks, a nearby village.  And, of course, will cost less than our beach house sells for.  Is that too much to ask for?

We have some time to make the big decisions.  And once made, those decisions won’t necessarily be final.

The Grand Elopement

Wendy Hornsby

I just don’t get Facebook.  Twice now I’ve hit the wrong button and sent messages that either weren’t what I intended or targeted someone I did not intend.

I admit that I haven’t put much time or effort into learning to love Facebook, or to becoming at all familiar or proficient with a tool that can help the writer “get oneself out there.”  For the same reason, I now have a webpage, http://www.wendyhornsby.com.  Knowing my limitations, I handed design and management of the webpage to a professional.  But Facebook – whatever happens there is all my fault.

I was simply adding stuff to my profile one day when I pushed a button that apparently sent the following message to everyone in theWestern Hemisphere:  “Wendy Hornsby has changed her marital status.”   I hadn’t changed anything except the Facebook profile; we’d been married for a while.

Congratulations started flowing in.  Among the well wishers was Harry, my editor at the Grunion Gazette, our local newspaper where my column, “No Mystery Here” runs every second Thursday (www.Gazettes.com).  When I told Harry that I wasn’t new to marriage but only new to Facebook commands, he suggested that there was a column in there.  Somewhere.

My husband, Paul, thinks there’s a book in there.  Not about Facebook, but about the circumstances that led us to, finally, change our marital status, i.e., get married.

I’ll skip the part about the night Paul got down on one knee.  Let’s just say that it was long ago enough that getting down on his knee wasn’t as big an issue at it might be today. 

We chose a date in fall and reserved the Church of St. Mary of  Aldermanbury on the campus of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri.  The church has significance for our family – both his and mine – and that’s where we met.  Because the wedding was to be inMissouri, the event had to be in the fall – after the bugs and before the ice.

Before we announced our plans to anyone, Paul’s nephew Travis and his Dawn announced that they were getting married that fall, at St. Mary’s.  Travis, at that time an army captain, was deploying to Iraq at  Christmas.  Nothing should distract from their special event, we decided.  Certainly not a couple of oldsters toddling down the aisle.  We called the church and postponed for a year.

The next fall, my son Christopher married his lovely Cherylyn in a beautiful garden ceremony inFresno, where they live.   The following fall we went to Williamsburg, Virginiafor the wedding of another nephew.   By that point, we had given up on traipsing all the way toMissourifor our own nuptials and were looking for somewhere closer to home.  Before we made a decision about where and when that might happen, we got a save the date card from my cousin Douglas and his fiancée Rachel; in the fall we went toPlacerville.

Finally, five years after Paul got down on his knee, it was our turn.  Plans were made for family and a few close friends to join us on Thanksgiving weekend at a favorite resort on the Central Coast for a simple service on a bluff overlooking the Pacific. 

But, in September of that year, the day before my birthday, an old acquaintance dropped by and changed our plans, once again. 

I had gone to see the doctor a couple of weeks earlier about an infection.  Lymphedema, he thought, a less than lovely legacy of breast cancer treatment thirteen years before.  But, out of caution, he ordered some tests.  Each test led to another until finally I was sent for a biopsy.

I thought I had done my time with the Big C.  But there it was, caught on video, a brand new invasive tumor.  Good prognosis the surgeon told us.  Big surgery.

First thing the morning after we heard that bomb shell, after he wished me a happy birthday, Paul said, “Let’s get married today.”  And that’s what we did.

We got a license at the LAX courthouse, bought rings, and called my children with both pieces of news.  We all agreed to meet at my son’s house inFresno.  With my son officiating, we were married in his living room.  As fine an elopement as there could be.

Other than my kids and their spouses, the only witnesses were my grandogs, Fritz and Pelée, and various cats whose names I don’t keep straight.   After the ceremony, we went to lunch.  And there was cake, because I believe no big event is official until there’s cake. 

We went ahead with the Thanksgiving event as planned.  Before friends and family, on a bluff overlooking the ocean at sunset, we repeated our vows, and said thanks for bountiful blessings, including, again, good health. 

And then we had turkey.  And cake.  

The Problem of Mrs. Southcott.

Wendy Hornsby

 The following was  adapted from my semi-weekly column, “No Mystery Here,” that runs in the Long Beach Grunion Gazette.

            The topic of conversation at our house one morning last week was the fractious state of public higher education.   California State University faculty were on strike for the first time ever over non-delivery of a negotiated pay raise, students were tear-gassed at the Chancellor’s Office while protesting yet another fee hike.   Students at Long Beach CityCollege, where I teach history, were noticeably edgy:   spring registration opened last week and already there are waiting lists for many essential transfer classes.   My husband and I were comparing what is happening now with the demonstrations during our own college years, a turbulent time on campus.  Paul chimed in with Dickens’ opening line from The Tale of Two Cities, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness….”

            And then, as he is wont to do, he sent the conversation off on a new path by saying, “In the opening, Dickens mentions Mrs. Southcott.  But she never shows up again in the book.  Did he forget about her?”

            I suggested that it’s a big book with a dense plot, and maybe he did forget.  When Howard Hawks was directing the screen version of Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” in 1946 one of the screen writers, none other than William Faulkner, noticed that at the end one of the murders remained unresolved.   Hawks and Faulkner called Chandler, and asked, “Who killed Arthur Geiger?”  Chandler reread his book and called back to say that he had no clue; he neglected to tie up that story thread.

         How often do characters and plot lines disappear, never to be resolved?  It was an interesting question, but  I had plenty to do that morning  other than pursue an obscure reference.   The edited manuscript of  The Hanging, the Maggie MacGowen Mystery that Perseverance will publish in the fall, is again in Meredith’s hands, so I am once again at work on the historical novel  that had been put aside for the duration.    But try not thinking about something.    I went to the bookshelves and pulled down the Dickens classic – hadn’t read it for decades – to see what he had said about Mrs. Southcott:  In 1775 Mrs. Southcott turned twenty-five.   That’s all he said.    I Googled her to see what I could find about this anomalous character, and ran right into the endless conundrum I wrestle with as I write my first historical novel:     How does the writer portray people and events from the past in a way that is at once accurate, interesting, and accessible to the contemporary reader?  

           Mrs. Joanna Southcott, it turns out, was an actual person who claimed to be able see the future and who portended doom forLondon, among other prophecies.  If she was twenty-five in 1775, she would have been dead and buried when Dickens dropped her name into his book in 1859, but she was still someone who was well known to his readers.   Dickens used the reference to her age to move his readers back in time about eighty-five years, something like saying to readers, “When Abe Lincoln was a boy,” to give a story a time context.

           The problem for readers now, of course, is that Mrs. Southcott’s fame has faded over time and the reference to her has become so obscure that it is meaningless to most of us who read Dickens.  As a teacher, I figured out a long time ago that I constantly need to update my frames of reference to help students relate to various topics.    Demographically, current undergraduates were in elementary school when 9/11 happened and weren’t yet born when the Cold War ended.  Vietnam?  Their grandfathers tell them about fighting in the jungles.  I can’t drop the Free Speech Movement into a discussion of recent student and faculty protests and expect this generation to know what that was.  If I asked what they knew about D. B. Cooper most of them would only shrug, as they did when I mentioned the Sharks and the Jets, unfamiliar to them even when I sang a little of the “Jet Song:” 

              When you’re a Jet you’re a Jet all the way
              From your first cigarette
              To your last dying day.

I got some giggles from them, but no recognition. 

            In the classroom I can explain and illustrate and repeat – and sing if necessary, dance if I could - until I detect some glimmer of understanding in student responses or on their faces.  In a novel there is no such luxury; quick, deft strokes are we get.   

             My historical tale begins with the beheading of King Charles I in London in 1649.    Big drama, lots of action.   I can’t stop the action to deliver a lecture about the English Civil Wars and why the king is losing his head, but I do need to offer enough explanation so that the time frame is clear, the events are understood sufficiently to support the story, and the characters are believable.   To do this, I use my own versions of Mrs. Southcott by weaving well-known historical figures among my fictional ones:  diarist Samuel Pepys as an obnoxious teenager; poet and teacher John Milton in middle age, going blind; Puritans a plenty; and Oliver Cromwell, of course, riding along the edges.    

           Next issue, making Shakespeare’s contemporaries not sound Shakespearean.   Juggling all the elements is fun, but it is challenging. 

          Let me tell you about Jolly Olde England in 1649.  I could say it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, but any editor would hit that with a red pencil so fast ….

        Today we are reminded that no matter how difficult present circumstances may seem, we still have much to be grateful for.   I wish you a very Happy Thanksgiving.

A Sweet Yet Sad Farewell

by Wendy Hornsby

The deadline approached, and the book wasn’t quite finished.   I had made steady progress through the summer and was in sight of typing The End, until the new college semester began – long days, big classes, papers to grade, office hours to keep, lectures to prepare.  I miscalculated my stores of both time and energy.   When I knew I wouldn’t make D-Day, my editor at Perseverance Press, Meredith Phillips, gave me a two-week extension.    

Writing the last chapters of a book always feels to me something like riding rapids toward a great cascading waterfall and then, by grasping together all the threads of the story, landing safely instead of going over in a freefall.   It would be lovely to make that trip in one long uninterrupted run, but the reality is that life hits the pause button at regular intervals, interrupting the flow, as it were.  

Every writer who has a day job juggles work, family, writing.  We can’t drop any of those balls, but we can from time to time elevate the priority of one or the other.   With finishing the book now my top priority, my husband Paul, my head cheerleader, took on all of the household chores, freeing me when I was at home to focus on the book.

By five every morning I was ensconced in front of my computer, polishing and fixing what had been written the day before and then moving forward with new pages, getting in a few hours of work before my first class of the day.  After school, changed into favorite sweats, fueled by Diet Coke, it was back to the computer to work until Paul rang the dinner gong, maybe four hours later. 

After a glass of wine – okay, two – a lovely meal, some Rick Steves and John Stewart on DVR, followed by a discussion of Paul’s notes on the day’s pages – he is always my first and best reader – we usually called the day finished, though sometimes I spent another hour or two in front of the computer to work through a problem.

Soon that daily drill became a routine.  Even a weekend trip toSt. Louis for Bouchercon didn’t interrupt the flow.  Indeed, what better way to spend time waiting at a departure gate or buckled into an airplane seat than working on the adventures of a gaggle of fictional characters?   And how lovely it was to see the sun rise over the Mississippi every morning.

The book, at last, was mailed.  I was still upright and in my office working by five every morning.   Not to write, but to finish marking a set of essays that my students were eager for.  

By midweek, the essays had been returned.  So, why was I still up before dawn and in my office in front of the computer?   I had nothing so pressing that I couldn’t sleep for another hour then linger over the paper, maybe do the Sudoku.  Eat breakfast facing Paul instead of a monitor.  But I couldn’t.  I felt that there was something urgent to be done.  Why was I still feeling pressure?

Letdown.  Post-book letdown.  

It happens every time.  The elation of finishing the book is coupled with the despair of leaving an adventure and its fictional people behind.  Writing is a pleasure for me.  By the time the book is finished, I have spent months with a cast of made-up characters, hearing them talk – not actually, but actually literally – sending them into action, feeling their pain, racing them toward a conclusion and a deadline, and then…?  They are in the mail.  Gone.  I miss them.  I miss telling their story.

Nineteenth century satirist and cartoonist Honoré Daumier referred to the “feu de composition”, the fire of composition.  Trust me, it takes a while to put out the fire once stoked.

So, while I could sleep in, what had been a routine became a habit.  This historical novel that I’ve had to put aside to finish the mystery won’t write itself.   There is another set of fictional characters waiting for a voice.  And an invitation to submit a short story. 

And the dawn through my office window is so lovely.