Old Pictures

The reason my word count has been fluctuating wildly is that I've got so much material already written, and I'm organizing it so that I can start fitting it together.

One interesting thing I've noticed: Every time I sit down, I plan to knit some pieces together and find a hole that needs to be filled so I have a nice list of scenes to work on. What actually happens is that I fail dismally (because I should be doing that after the writing session, not before -- which just makes me feel overwhelmed) and eat a bunch of chocolate, and then charge on off on some other scene that I just realized I need to write.

So the plan works, but never the way I intend it to.

The other thing that has been occupying my time is that we're having a memorial gathering up north this summer for my father, who died in November. I am trying to sort through the mass of family photos we have and scan as many as possible before we go up north. Then we can give photos which really belong to others in the family to them, and we can also make duplicates for people who want them.

And here are a couple of pictures for your pleasure viewing.

The first one is me and my dad in 1964. That little critter I'm carrying is a stuffed horse, which my grandmother made for me. He is not the first one, who was a brown corduroy horse with saphire button eyes, named Housie, but I can't identify this one. The next picture is me about to get on my VERY FIRST PLANE! To fly all the way to Quebec! That was two years later in 1966, and in my arms is a little sack with quite possibly the same horse sticking out of it.

And the third picture is me and my mother with my first actual horse -- Tony -- the day after our first horse show in 1970. You can't tell but I'm bracing myself, because Tony believed first and foremost that humans existed to be head scratchers, and he could throw you across the pasture with an enthusiastic rub. Tony, btw, was a buckskin, which was the same color as Housie. (But Tony didn't have blue eyes.)


Tony had free range of the farm when we were home, and he often followed my dad when he went out to work in the fields. And that other picture illustrates why I grew up to be a writer. Okay, it was Halloween. But my dad would have enjoyed it if he could dress like a pirate all the time.

My sister and her husband are putting together a book for my dad's memorial event this summer. I scanned a bunch of pictures and sent them to her, and she called me back.

"There are no pictures of US with Daddy," she said.
"There's the one with him stabbing you," I replied, seriously.

That, apparently was not what she had in mind. Luckily I'd found another stash of pictures.

Here we are below in winter in 1962 with our trusty yellow and white "Metropolitan" which I always thought of as a kind of saddle-shoe car. And then five years later when we were living in Quebec. (My dad claims that that little Metropolitan got he and my sister there on like two bucks of gas.)



That second picture was taken at the Plains of Abraham. My sister was obsessed with The Sound of Music that year. I was utterly obsessed with that canteen you see on my lap, but I honestly don't remember why. (Probably some story my dad told me about crawling through the desert with only a drop of water left. Or maybe dying of thirst when the Nazis shot a hole in your canteen. One thing I can tell you, I made sure that darned thing was full, even if the water did taste terrible.)

I still have some word count to do yet tonight, but I should have the sidebar updated by the time this posts in the morning: See you in the funny papers.