Time

Busy busy, so much to do. Once again I'm the Mad Hatter, running around trying to get things ready for the tea party.

I came across this poem today, written about seven years ago. Seems I was just as busy then as I am now.

And this is still an appropriate way to describe Time.

TIME

Flying

doesn't begin to describe

what happens to it

More like

 disintegrate, evaporate, eviscerate

 My lack of it

cuts me

like the sharpest of knives

in my drawer

The one I use for carrots

or steak

Little pieces of it

get swept into the dust bin

tossed away

before I know they're gone

Panicked

I rummage through the trash

hoping to find a morsel

I can still put to good use

Elated

I grab scraps -

ten minutes here

fifteen there

Could it be I've found

one hour

soggy and tattered

amidst the rubble?

Clutching this treasure

this time of my own,

I weep

Then throw wide the door

and

fly

TLC Book Tours: The Virgin Cure

Being a huge fan of historical novels, I was eager to read The Virgin Cure, by Ami McKay, a new-to-me Canadian author whose first novel (The Birth House) was a number one best seller in that country. I'm not surprised, because McKay's writing and story telling skills are epic. The Virgin Cure is set in Lower Manhattan circa 1871. It's the story of Moth, a young girl growing up alone on some very mean streets filled with orphaned children and desperate women trying to eke out some kind of living. Moth's father is long gone, and her mother is a Gypsy fortune teller who sells her 12 year old daughter into servitude with a cruel, abusive society matron. Moth eventually escapes and spends some months on the streets before she is taken in by the charming Miss Everett, a Madam who runs something called an Infant School, which is really a brothel catering to gentlemen willing to pay a premium for desirable young virgins like Moth. In fact, some of them are seeking the fabled "Virgin Cure" - the belief that having intercourse with a virgin will cure them of syphilis. Moth's friendship with Dr. Sadie, a female physician who works among the indigent population, gives her the courage she needs to see a better life for herself.

Moth is a totally engaging character, and I longed to reach back in time and scoop her up for myself, bring her home with me and give her a good life. McKay creates such breathtaking word pictures that reading the novel is almost frightening at times, the reader feels so involved in the time and place.

And what a time and place! We talk a lot today about the poor situations children find themselves in - gangs and single parent families, hunger and lack of education. We tend to forget the history of maltreatment of children in this country. In an author's note, McKay writes that over 30,000 children lived on the streets of New York city in 1870. Even more of them wandered in and out of tenements as their families struggled to find food and shelter. Most of these children were illiterate and would end up as thieves and prostitutes, dead before they ever reached adulthood. McKay's interest in this time period was sparked when she learned about her own great-great grandmother, the original Dr. Sadie, who worked the streets of New York along with Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female physician, caring for the women and children of the city.

The Virgin Cure is a fascinating look at this time and place in our history. But it's also a story of perseverance and hope. Because Moth does find good people among the bad, people who care about her and are willing to help her, people who step up to make a difference, one child at a time.

Sometimes, for a moment, everything is just as you need it to be. The memories of such moments live in the heart, waiting for the time you need to think on them, if only to remind yourself that for a short while, everything had been fine, and might be so again. I didn't have many memories like that...No matter what might happen or what fate Miss Everett had in store for me, I now had the image of Miss Suzie Lowe to place alongside them. She would remind me that I was a girl who longed for things, a girl who wanted to become something more than she was seen to be.

If you enjoy historical novels, I highly recommend this book.

Connect with Ami McKay here:

Website, Facebook page, Twitter account,  Pinterest board.

Singing and Swinging

One of my favorite childhood past times was swinging on the swing set in our backyard. And while I was swinging, I was singing, the volume of my voice increasing as my short legs pumped the air, propelling me higher and higher toward the blue sky. I sang "This Old Man," and "Row Row Row Your Boat." I made up a song using the words from Robert Louis Stevenson's children's poem (How do you like to go up in a swing...up in the air so blue? Oh I do think it's the pleasantest thing that ever a child can do!) It was exhilarating and satisfying and comforting all at once.

As soon as I was able, I joined the elementary school Glee Club, and eventually graduated into the Madrigal singers. There were only six of us, and we were all good friends. We got to wear nifty blue sashes and we felt very self-important singing a cappella. I cannot tell you how much I loved it. But maybe that's evident because it's such a strong memory 45 years later.

The notion of singing being fun isn't new to me.

The science behind the experience of it, however - well, that's something I'm enjoying learning about.

Read more about it in my post today on Medium.

Write On Wednesday: For the Longest Time

Last night I realized I hadn't written anything on my blog in the longest time, and I stared feeling nostalgic for the olden days of blogging. Many years ago (seven!) when I began writing in this online space, I wrote nearly every day - partly because of the excitement that comes with a new venture, but also because of the connections forming between myself and other writers. We visited each other's writing spaces daily, like children checking their secret hidey-hole in a hollow tree to see if any new messages had arrived. We joined and created groups that provided prompts for our writing, that gave us a little spark to incite ideas to flow.

We wrote and wrote, telling our stories, honing our skills, learning from each other about writing and life. We emboldened one another to try new things - poetry, haiku, flash fiction, even novels. We encouraged and cheered from whatever part of the world we lived.

Over time most of those connections have faded into the ether. People who bared their souls in words on the screen suddenly disappear from orbit. Having no other way to contact them, one is forced to ponder - were they real? did they exist? have they been abducted by aliens?

I miss them. Miss their unique voices, miss their life stories, miss the inspiration and impetus to write they often provided me. Like the cafe society that Fitzgerald and Hemingway enjoyed so much, the online society of writers we formed in those days was a way to connect with others, to share ideas, to support each others efforts, to discuss books and art and life in general. In this decade, it seems  that personal blogging has been usurped by the faster, quicker connections of Facebook and Twitter.

Writing is a solitary occupation. And writers tend to savor the solitary, so much so that we forget how much there is to be gained by sharing ourselves with others.

I'd like to enjoy that again.

How about you?

The Sunday Salon: Permission to Read, Please

On this hot summer Sunday, I've been seriously contemplating climbing the stairs to my bedroom, stretching out on the king sized bed underneath a gently whirling fan, and reading napping. It's a revolutionary concept for me - the napping part, not the reading part. I never nap. But I haven't been sleeping very well, and last night was another in what has become something of an ugly habit - wake up at 1:30, stay awake  until 3 or 3:30, and then drift off into restless sleep until the alarm sounds Summer afternoons seem made for reading, and I'd love to allow myself the luxury of lolling around with The Burgess Boys, which I picked up at the library yesterday. But most of my reading is done at the extremes of the day. I'm used to reading first thing in the morning, often before anyone else is awake, and last thing at night, just before falling asleep. And these recent middle-of-the-night periods of wakefulness have proven a boon to my reading life, if not my physical one.

I wonder why it seems such a decadent pleasure to read in the middle of the day, one almost akin to eating dessert before (or instead of) the meal. In my youth and early adulthood, I often spent time in the afternoon reading, and recall many summer afternoons spent on the back porch of our house or under the shade tree, book in hand, while baby napped inside. It was so rejuvenating, that hour or so spent with a book, that it seems churlish not to engage in it more often.

It is without a doubt my Puritan work ethic that nudges me off the couch and on to more "productive" tasks. I tell myself that reading is sustenance for a writer, that it's is necessary for the betterment of my craft. I remind myself that many of the books piled on my TBR shelf are review books and require my dedicated attention. But even as I settle comfortably on the sofa, I can feel nagging tugs at my shirtsleeve...how about that laundry? did you remember to get the chicken out of the freezer? have those bills been paid yet?

What I really crave is permission to let that other stuff go and read in the middle of the day just for the pure love of it. Isn't that silly?

So without further ado, I will attempt to spend at least part of this summer Sunday engaged in the practice of reading.

How about you? When does most of your reading get done? Is reading during the day a guilty pleasure for you?