Mom's House has been released - almost.

I guess I should have picked a release date for the memoir sooner. Mom's House: A Memoir is now available for pre-order. If you sign up now, it will be delivered to your Kindle bright and early on the morning of Thursday, June 7th.

The cover. Copyright Lynne Cantwell, 2018.

I haven't talked much about the subject matter, other than to say it's a memoir. Basically, the story covers the period from early 1998, when my mother was first diagnosed with cancer, through her death in 2008, and the final resolution of her estate and the family home early this year. The main characters, if you will, are Mom, my brother Larry, and me; and the story is about our relationships, which are as messy as most other families and which include verbal and emotional abuse.

The house is the MacGuffin: the thing that drives the plot. Mom lived there until she died; afterward, I had to take drastic action to get my brother to buy out my interest in the place.

I see Amazon isn't providing a "look inside" during the preorder period, so here's a snippet. This one is about the kitchen, which could be considered the hearth -- however quirky -- of our home.

***
The kitchen work area was in an L-shape. The fridge was along what used to be the back wall of the house, with the sink bang up against it. In the crotch of the L was a rectangular counter that ran alongside the sink and extended to the stove. That eighteen inches of counter space between the stove and the front edge of the sink was the sum total of the workspace in the kitchen, excluding the dinette table, because on the other side of the stove was a squat 30-gallon water heater in a counter-height, sheet-metal cabinet. Mom could have used the top of the water heater cabinet for food preparation, but she didn’t – it was a catch-all space for mail and other stuff.

Mom had two floor cabinets and five wall cabinets in her kitchen; the wall cabinets over the stove and fridge were half-height, and the cabinet next to the sink was half-width. There was a single drawer for silverware between the stove and sink. And that was it.

Mom reduced her puny kitchen workspace even further by stacking a bunch of junk on the one working counter: a breadbox that held junk instead of bread (the breadbox that actually held the bread was on a stand-alone wheeled cart, halfway into the family room), a coffee canister, and a pile of salvaged food containers which she used for leftovers. Mom contended that she wouldn’t have had so much junk out if she had more cabinet space; Dad said if she had more space, she’d just fill it with more junk. And so it went, on and on, year after year.

As I got older, I figured out that no matter how the bickering between my parents started, it always ended up being about the kitchen cabinets. I called them on it once as they were getting warmed up: “Why don’t you just cut to the chase and start arguing about the kitchen cabinets now?” I said. “It would save you a lot of time.” They laughed in guilty acknowledgement. And then they argued about the kitchen cabinets.

Dad eventually relented and bought more storage units, which he sort of scattered about the family room: a metal shelving unit, six shelves high; two sheet-metal cabinets with drawers; a huge double-door cabinet with a Formica countertop and two drawers. He had Uncle John come back and build another wall cabinet above the washer and dryer, and hung a doorless three-shelf cabinet next to it. Mom filled them all with stuff: cake mixes, canned goods, cookie sheets, spare sets of dishes we never used, more salvaged food containers. And still she complained that she didn’t have enough space.

Yes, Mom was a packrat. Dad used to threaten to buy another house for us to live in so that Mom could use ours for storing all of her junk. As I got older, I’d sometimes wonder whether I’d open the newspaper one day and read one of those stories about some little old lady that the county had to get after because her place was stacked floor-to-ceiling with so much trash that it was a fire hazard – only this time, the little old lady would turn out to be Mom.

I’d tell her this, and she’d laugh at herself. Then she’d save more stuff. At one point, she had a dresser drawer full of the red plastic handles that used to come on a gallon of milk, back when gallons of milk still came in waxed-cardboard containers. “I’ll use them for a craft project,” she said. What craft project, Mom? She had no idea. They were just too nice to throw away. “Save it!” she would say, making fun of herself. “It’ll be good someday!”

That’s what growing up in the Depression will do to you, I guess. Dad saved stuff, too, but his collection was out in the garage.

***
If that whetted your appetite for the e-book, click here to pre-order. There will also be a paperback edition, released on or about June 7.

And with that, I'm taking a one-week break. See y'all back here Sunday, June 10th.

***
These moments of homey blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

We may have a book problem.

There's lots more where these came from.

You may have noticed that hearth/myth took a break last week. Frankly, I didn't have the energy to write a blog post; we'd spent several days driving around town, looking for a new apartment, and made the final selection last Sunday.

Go us! Right?

Except now we have to move. Which means packing. Which is not my favorite thing to do ever.

Back when I was in radio, I moved approximately once every two years -- and not just to a different house or apartment, typically, but to a different city. I traveled a lot lighter in those days.

Over the past ten or fifteen years, though, I've only moved a couple of times. And then my mother died and I ended up with a bunch of her old stuff (although not nearly as much of her old stuff as I could have taken -- that woman was a packrat from way back). In any case, packing for this move is likely to be no fun at all.

In particular, my daughters and I have gone kind of crazy collecting books. We took nine boxes of books to our favorite used bookstore this afternoon and brought the empty boxes home. Those have now been refilled, and another sixteen have also been filled with books (and some DVDs). And we aren't done.

A lot of the books I'm keeping are mythology-related. I collected a whole bunch of material for the Pipe Woman Chronicles and I'm not quite ready to part with it. I mean, if I follow through on my threat to move into a tiny house when I retire, I'm going to have to cull the herd again, and a whole lot of those mythology tomes will have to go. But not yet.

One thing I may cull shortly is my inventory of paperback editions of my own books. I stocked up some time ago, intending to do a Goodreads giveaway or several, but never got around to it. Now that we're moving, though... Hmm. Watch this space next week.

***
I'm getting pretty close to being done with the memoir. We take possession of the new apartment a week from tomorrow; it sure would be nice to have this project out the door before then, but I do need to pack. So we'll see.

***
These moments of herd-culling blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Defining home.

The concept of home has been on my mind a fair amount lately -- ever since I closed a chapter in my own life by selling my interest in the house in which I grew up. I tell the story in the memoir I'm working on, so you'll get to read it eventually. But now I find myself in an odd position: for the first time in my life, I have the opportunity to define my own home.

For many people, I think, this is a no-brainer. Home is where they grew up -- the place where their parents still live, maybe, and where they return for family holidays. The house I grew up in doesn't have that kind of resonance for me. I moved out nearly forty years ago; for the first twenty of those years, I worked in radio, and scheduling prevented me from forming the habit of returning home for the holidays. Then, too, my father has been dead for more than thirty years; my mother, for ten. If you define home as people more than place, my childhood home has been gone for many, many years.

By my age, a lot of people have bought a house (or two) and settled in for several decades -- and then that structure becomes home. But owing to those years I spent in radio, moving from city to city and from job to job, I was rarely able to settle in one place for long enough to make that kind of planning possible. So for the most part, I've parked my stuff in a succession of rental properties. And while they all met the need at the time, and while I called them home in a colloquial sense ("I got home at..." or "I'll be home tonight" or something like that), they were never places where I put down roots for very long.

Again, if home is people more than place, then of course I'm home when I'm with my daughters. But it's different now that they're adults. We all live in the same apartment for now, but they have their own interests and friends, their own way of doing things -- as they should. It's natural and normal and I'm not sad about it. But home feels different than it did when they were little.

And now that I'm getting close to retirement age, I have an opportunity to define a place that might very well be home for the rest of my life. I'm without touchstones for this task. There's no need to base my decision on the usual factors: proximity to the job or to good schools. I almost need to rewrite my list of must-have and would-be-nice features.

And I have the whole, wide world to choose from, in a way that's never been available to me before. Sure, many places are impractical or impossible for one reason or another -- too hot, too cold, too expensive -- but that still leaves a lot of options.

It's all a little daunting.

I told a friend not long ago that my decision will ultimately come down to way the place feels when I get out of the car and put my feet on the ground. When the earth there reaches up and grabs me and draws those roots out of my soul, that's when I'll know I've come home.

***
These moments of homey blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

A taste of memoir.

I've been slaving away over a hot keyboard all day, finishing the cut-and-paste job on the memoir. It's going to be called Mom's House and it covers the period from January 1998, when my mother was hospitalized with colon cancer, until a couple of weeks ago, when the hassle over her estate and her house was finally resolved.

I mentioned last week that I've been writing this thing in bits and pieces as events unfolded. That's been very useful; as the details were fresh in my mind when I wrote everything down, I'm reasonably sure that my recollection of events is accurate. But I'd also included some stuff that, in retrospect, won't push the narrative along. So it hasn't been a straight cut-and-paste job -- I've had to edit as I go.

And then there were the little stories that I'd forgotten about until I ran across them in the journal entries. Here's one tidbit. It takes place during the summer of 1998, after my mother's second cancer surgery. I'd taken the summer off (thank you, Family and Medical Leave Act) to help her with her recovery and to drive her to radiation appointments. My daughters had spent the first month of the summer with their father, who was living with his new wife in Buffalo, NY.

***

Aquilitan | CC0 | Pixabay

In the midst of the radiation treatments, I had to pick up the kids.  I drove from Michigan City to Buffalo in a single day, stopping in Cleveland for a couple of hours to visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  I stayed overnight in Buffalo and planned to pick up the kids the next morning and drive back to Mom’s.  Somewhere along the way, I concocted a plan to make the trip fun for the girls: I decided we could go wading in each of the Great Lakes.

Bruce and his wife were civil to me; they were giving up on Bruce finding a job in Buffalo and were moving back to the D.C. area as soon as his previous employer hired him back. The girls said goodbye and piled in the car, and we were off.

We drove all over downtown Buffalo, looking for a spot to put our feet in Lake Erie (something I wouldn’t have tried a decade or so before, for fear that pollution would have left me with no feet). Finally, we found one. We got our feet wet and I took a picture. Then we drove to Niagara Falls and stopped for a look. The girls had visited the Canadian side earlier in the summer with their dad, his wife, and her kids; they described going up to the top of the CN Tower to see the view.

We crossed into Canada and headed for our next target, Lake Ontario. This one was easy – we drove right past a little neighborhood beach and parked long enough to stick our feet in and get a picture.

Driving across Ontario, the girls fell asleep. I hit a blinding rainstorm and a road construction detour at almost exactly the same time; I spent a nerve-wracking hour or so following the tail lights of an eighteen-wheeler and hoping he wasn’t leading me off the road.

Eventually, the sky cleared and I could relax. We made it to Sarnia and Lake Huron at dinnertime. The beach was closed because the storm had created an undertow, but the lifeguards let us put our feet in and get our picture. We stopped for dinner at McDonald’s, marveling at the Happy Meal bags in two languages. Then we got back in the car and kept driving, getting back to Mom’s safely, if late.

Nailing Lake Michigan was no problem. We walked down to the beach and got that picture sometime before the end of the summer.

Unfortunately, I had never put film in the camera. So the pictures of our wet feet live only in our memories.

***

It's going to be a while before the book comes out. It's still in pretty rough shape, and I'm not talking just about story continuity. I didn't know as much about formatting then as I do now. The early entries have a ton of tab stops and extra spaces after periods, and they are all going to have to come out. But at least the heavy lifting is done. Now, maybe, I can relax.

Relax? Oh haha. I kill myself sometimes.

Hey, it's a knitting post.

I know y'all are all about the big sportsball match this evening, so here's a post that has nothing at all to do with it.

It looks like the last time I did a knitting post was in September. I've been busy since then with several projects -- including the Main Street shawl, which was partly done then. Here's what it looks like, all finished.

I moved on then to the Architexture shawl. This pattern caught my eye months ago, but I'd put off knitting it until I found the right yarn. Then it occurred to me that I'd picked up a suitable yarn at Maryland Sheep and Wool last spring and hadn't even realized it would work for this pattern. Here's a shot of the finished project.

Please excuse my sour expression. I really do like the way the shawl turned out. I was concentrating on a new photography technique -- grabbing a frame from a video to use as a still photo -- and forgot to smile.

The Architexture worked up pretty fast, but I had to put it on hiatus for a few weeks in December to work on another project -- that Craftvent Calendar shawl I mentioned here at the end of November.

The back story for the Craftvent shawl is this: My daughter Amy found the product online and decided to buy one for herself. It didn't take much urging for me to get one, too. She ordered the "jewel tone" colorway and I got the "wintergreen" one.

Mine turned out fine. I liked most of the colors but -- as usual -- I ran out of yarn in the first lace section. I finally figured out that I'm too generous with yarn when I do a yarnover; once I tamed my tendency to make those extra stitches REALLY BIG, I did okay. Amy, however, disliked her colors -- she was expecting a range of saturated colors and, well, did not get them. Plus she ran out of yarn, too. In fact, a lot of people ran out of yarn. The place we ordered the kits from had to ship packets of extra yarn to a lot of folks.

When I got to my last ball of yarn, it turned out to be the precise shade of neon green that I actively avoid. So Amy, bless her heart, went spelunking in her stash and found a bright blue-green that worked just fine. Here's mine. If Amy ever finishes hers, I'll post a photo of it, too.

To be honest, I'm impressed that I got so many projects done, considering I spent a huge chunk of the fall working on a shawl called the Find Your Fade. I'd picked up the kit at Maryland Sheep and Wool in the spring, and did not fully understand how big a shawl 1,500 yards of fingering weight yarn would make. To give you an idea of how massive this thing is, the piece of furniture with the drawers in the photo below is 44 inches wide.

It's wonderful to wrap up in, but it's impractical to wear to work. I've been leaving it next to my desk at home to wear while I write.

Right now I'm working on some little stuff. I used up some of the leftover yarn from the Architexture and Main Street shawls by making a pair of fingerless gloves. I also knitted myself a new hat and am working on a gaiter-style cowl to go with it. The pattern has a bunch of yarnovers in it. We'll see if I have enough yarn to finish the cowl. Fingers crossed...

***
I'm also working on a memoir. I can't remember whether I've mentioned this project before, but it's something I've been working on for probably 15 years, off and on, as the story unfolded. Events have recently reached a denouement, so I feel like it's time to wrap up the book. This weekend, I started the process of cutting, pasting, and rewriting the original material. It's gonna be a ton of work, but it will be rewarding in the end -- to me, anyway.

Have a great week, everyone, and may the best sportsball team win.

Second youth, vehicle edition.

I seem to be posting a lot of memoir-ish stuff lately. I hope it doesn't mean I'm entering my second childhood. Although maybe I am.

This photo shows one of my Christmas acquisitions: a toy car. More specifically, a blue 1964-and-a-half Mustang coupe. It's about five inches long -- much bigger than a Hot Wheels car -- and it has a friction gizmo hooked to the back axle, so that if you roll it backward and let go, it will run forward under its own power.

I'd been eyeing this car at the grocery store for several weeks -- because, you see, I used to drive a vintage Mustang, back when they weren't quite so vintage.

I think I might have mentioned previously that my father was an auto mechanic by trade. He worked for a dealership, but he also tinkered with our family vehicles. He'd pick up a car with some kind of problem, then spend his own time fixing it. We always had two cars in the garage and another one or two parked in the driveway.

At some point in the late '60s, he procured a 1967 Mustang coupe, green (although I guess Ford called it "lime gold" -- the things you learn on teh intarwebz!), with a bashed-in door on the passenger side. Pre-wreck, I expect it looked like this:

Due to his work, Dad knew the guy who owned the local junkyard. The guy found him a passenger door from another lime-gold Mustang, but there was a superficial problem. Ford made the car with two interiors: black and lime-gold. Our Mustang had the lime-gold interior; the replacement door had the black. But it fit. And it's not like anyone would notice it when you'd pass them on the street.

Dad gave the Mustang to Mom. I was relegated to driving the '62 Ford Falcon, which had a manual choke. Peppy it was not; it went from zero to 60 in about an hour and a half. Anyway, eventually we got rid of the Falcon and sometimes I'd get to drive the Mustang.

It was a lot of fun to drive. It sat pretty low to the ground, and it had a shift lever on the floor despite the automatic transmission. But by the time I got to drive it, it was already almost ten years old, so it had the usual issues -- as well as some unusual ones. One day, I noticed the passenger-side carpet was soaking wet. I duly reported it to my father, who let loose his usual string of obscenities and accused me of driving too fast through a puddle and forcing water up into the passenger compartment. Then he pulled up the carpet and discovered the floor had rusted through. Luckily, he had some spare sheet metal from our old shower stall; he riveted it in place and caulked it up, and the car was ready to roll again.

I left the Mustang behind when I went to college, but I always thought of it as my car. So imagine my dismay, around 1980 or so, when Dad told me he'd sold it for $2,500. "You wouldn't have wanted it, anyway," he said when I complained. "It was all rusted out, and it would have cost too much money to keep it running."

Well, maybe. But it would have been nice if he'd given me the option.

Fast-forward to the grocery store on Christmas Eve. We were on a mission for a few things we'd forgotten, as well as a stuffed Darth Vader toy that my daughter Kat had seen on the previous trip. As she hunted for her toy, I ran across the car. So I got it. 

They didn't have any green ones, so I settled for blue. The trunk doesn't open, but the doors do, and there are suitcases in the back seat. Where should we go?

***

These moments of vehicular blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Remembering Mom.

Today is Mother's Day, in case it had escaped your notice.

My own mother has been gone for six years now; she died just a few weeks after her 93rd birthday. For perhaps ten years before her death, she had been sliding into dementia -- not Alzheimer's, just your garden-variety can't-remember-stuff. Still, until her death, she lived in the same house in Northern Indiana where I grew up. She even kept driving until she turned 90 (mainly because there's no bus service in our neighborhood). My brother, Lawrence, who lives in Chicago, took on the bulk of the responsibility for keeping Mom and the house going -- and kudos to Lar for that, as I am a 13-hour drive away.

At some point during the final years of Mom's life, I began keeping a journal. It may never see the light of day in its entirety, for various reasons. But here's one snippet for you on this Mother's Day.

The setup is this: Mom had gone to the DMV to get her driver's license renewed. She failed the eye exam, though, and then she couldn't find her old license, claiming the DMV took it. My brother convinced me to drive out to Indiana for Easter, help her get her license renewed, and get her eyes checked. I couldn't get her an eye appointment on Good Friday, so Lar insisted that I take her back to DC with me. Once she got her eyes checked, I was to put her on a plane back to Chicago. Lar would then pick her up at O'Hare and drive her the two hours back to her house.

Sounds like a setup for a slapstick routine, right? It gets worse.

***

The last day of Mom's visit was on a weekend. We got up early and had breakfast, then got in the car and drove to Baltimore-Washington International Airport. I parked the car in the short-term garage, grabbed her suitcase, and began walking toward the terminal. Mom asked me to slow down.  I was mildly frustrated by her lack of progress by the time we got across the bridge to the terminal, and was beginning to worry that we’d miss the boarding call; spotting a wheelchair, I said, “Sit down, Ma.  I’ll give you a ride.”  We made fine progress after that, although Mom kept saying, “I never thought I’d get to the point….”

That wheelchair was a stroke of inspiration. Because of it, the security guards allowed me to go to the gate with Mom.  They did confiscate my penknife, which I’d forgotten to take off my keychain and leave in the car. I sweet-talked them into holding onto it for me until after Mom’s plane left.

It was at about this point that one of the screeners called out, “Does anyone have any weights in his bag?”  Nobody said anything.  He tried again.  “How about a bottle of Listerine?  Does anyone have a bottle of Listerine in his bag?”

“Oh, that’s mine,” Mom said.

“You brought a whole bottle of Listerine with you?” I asked her.  “You couldn’t bring just a sample size?”

“Ma’am, we’ll have to open your suitcase and take a look inside,” the screener told her.

“Okay, sure,” Mom said.

“Listerine bottles sometimes look like dumbbells on the x-ray,” he explained.  Sure enough, they found nothing in Mom’s suitcase that would be fatal to anything but oral bacteria.  We headed through the doorway and were immediately at the gate.

“Okay, Mom,” I told her as we waited for the boarding call, “the gate attendant is going to ask you a series of questions about whether your luggage has been under your control at all times, whether anyone has given you anything to take on board the plane – stuff like that.  Tell them no.  I mean, you have to answer them honestly, but tell them no.”

“Okay,” she said.

“I can’t answer for you,” I said.

“Okay,” she repeated.

“And for God's sake, don’t joke about having a bomb,” I said, laughing a little.  “After 9/11, they really don’t think that sort of thing is funny anymore.”

“Okay,” she said, laughing, “I won’t say anything about a bomb.”

Finally, the gate attendant announced that the plane was boarding.  I wheeled Mom up to the gate.

The attendant rattled off the usual questions, very fast.  I looked at Mom, silently urging her to answer.  Mom looked at me, expecting me to answer for her.  Oh, shit, I thought.  I rolled my eyes in exasperation at the gate attendant, who said to me quietly, “She’ll have to be searched.”

“I know,” I said with a sigh.  So I rolled Mom over to the table where the secondary searches were taking place.  

For the second time in less than half an hour, the security guards went through Mom’s suitcase.  “There’s no bomb in there,” Mom said, then clapped her hand over her mouth.

“Mom!” I hissed, thinking, Jesus Christ!  Fortunately, the guard had his back to us and didn’t hear her – otherwise we might still to this day be in a padded room at the airport, explaining ourselves to the FBI.   

Finished with her suitcase, the guard got Mom out of the wheelchair and ran the wand over her; she checked out fine, of course. One of the flight attendants escorted her onto the plane as I waved goodbye.  Relieved to be out of there, I collected my penknife from the security guard outside the gate and headed home.

Later that day, I called Mom to see whether everything had gone smoothly on the O’Hare end.

“Hi, Mom, it’s me,” I said when she answered her phone.  “How was your flight?”

"What flight?" she asked. "Lawrence drove me home."

***

Happy Mother's Day to everyone who has ever been a mom or who has ever had a mom. And here's hoping that your day has been one to remember.

***

These moments of memorable blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.