But I’ve also been thinking recently about those creepy little moments that stay with you a long, long time. I’ve never forgotten one particular night like that, back when I was about eight or so.

Around this time, I was allowed to watch the PBS show Mystery! with my parents on Thursday nights. This was a sort of mild-mannered crime/detective show. In this memorable episode, Sherlock Holmes was investigating a crime in which dead people would show up with these creepy little stick figures drawn near them.

The killer, of course, had drawn the picture as his sort of signature. All well and good, except that that night, I woke up in my own bed in a cold sweat.
I was absolutely positive that if I turned around and looked at the wall next to my bed, I would see that the dancing men were drawn there. Just what this would mean, I didn’t know, except probably that I was going to die.
So, I laid in my bed, frozen, unable to move and definitely unable to turn and look at the wall, for about two hours. It’s remained in my mind as one of the longest episodes of stark terror I’ve ever had.
Finally, I wrenched myself from this terrified stupor, and in one motion, grabbed a blanket off my bed and ran, without looking at the wall, into my brother’s room, where I spent the rest of the night on his floor. He was about six at the time, so how he was going to protect me from the dancing men, I don’t know, but there was no way I was going back to sleep alone in my room that night.
It’s twenty-four years later, and the dancing men have still not shown up on my wall.
But you never know.

So many things were strange that week—all the food in my parents’ kitchen from strangers, doing laundry at two in the morning, the numbing funeral. And not reading.

On the eighth day, when the marker of the first week had passed, the thought occurred to me that I could still read. It was a relief. I slept in my childhood room that week and when I ran my hand along the row of faded bindings on my bookshelf, I stopped on the water-bloated, torn copy of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Long Winter. I lay on my bed and opened the stained pages and as I read the pages I’d read twenty times before, I realized I’d unwittingly chosen the most painful of Laura’s stories.

The Ingalls family almost starved to death that winter, and almost froze. It’s a horrific story when you think of it in adult terms and Laura later said that she had to lighten it up in order for children to be able to handle it. Reading it after my brother died felt right—familiar, of course. And also it felt like I had an ally in Laura—like someone else had been through hell too, and made it.

Years later, I walked the halls of Good Samaritan Hospital, waiting to give birth to my first son. I read a Penguin Classics edition of Jane Eyre, one I’d ordered especially for the occasion. My old copy from the 1930s was crumbling and the red cover always bled dye onto my fingers.

When I thought of what book to take to the hospital, Jane’s familiar epic immediately felt like the right fit. Her story is that of a long, halting, painful, joyous journey—just like the one I was embarking on. I started the book that night and a week later, read the last lines as I sat in my recliner at home, nursing my new son with the clear, sane autumn light coming through the living room windows.

This is a little different–write a proper caption for this picture:

The best, most creative caption will win a signed copy of STILL WATERS, complete with personal note from me. Or, as an alternate prize,  if you have a manuscript or poem or something you’ve written, and you want a few pages critiqued, you can send them to me and I’ll look at them.

Okay. . .go!

Enjoy, everyone.

Write me and tell me what you think.

Actually, all the eating makes sense because I love to read about eating–I actually love eating, too, obviously, but seriously, how great is reading about it? So can we talk about some of the best food reading ever? Like for instance, basically all of FARMER BOY by Laura Ingalls Wilder? Remember those like page-long descriptions of all the stuff Mother Wilder would put on the table. Three different kinds of pie, ham, baked beans, baked squash, mashed potatoes, like six different kinds of jellies, the list can go on. And when the Wilder parents left town and the kids made a pound cake, and ice cream and taffy and ate watermelon? Basically the whole chapter is about the stuff they ate when their parents left.

The other awesome book about eating that I used to love was JELLY BELLY by Robert Kimmel Smith. This was a middle-grade book from the 80s about a kid trying to lose weight and basically the entire book was about the amazing things the kid couldn’t eat because he was on a diet, and the disgusting things he was supposed to eat. There’s this one scene where the kids are at diet camp and the parents visit and Ned’s bunkmate’s parents bring this huge Italian meal for a picnic, with different sausages and a whole box of pastries. The author describes each different pastry in that box and I still remember some of the descriptions to this day.

So, what food scenes have stuck in your mind? (I think this should extend to movies too and I could go on for quite awhile about all the food scenes I love in movies.) Is there that one book you always go back to just to read about the food?

Around 1930, in Bedford, Pennsylvania, Jake made friends with a wild crow. (Jake’s real name was Katherine, but she was such a tomboy that everyone called her Jake.)

Jake had a particular talent with animals and spent a lot of time outside with her brother and sisters in their small town . When she was about ten, Jake noticed a certain crow hanging around the house a lot. Gradually, by being very quiet and patient and offering corn and peanuts, she got to know the crow. She tamed him so much, that he would sit on her shoulder and eat from her hand.

She called him Will and even though Jake’ s mother wouldn’t allow him in the house, he would still wait for Jake every morning when she came outside. He usually had a piece of something shiny with him that he had found–tinfoil, gum wrappers, bits of metal. He would stuff all these items up the drainspout outside the house, his special hiding place. When a big rainstorm came, Will’s collection would wash out of the drainspout all over the dirt driveway. He was undeterred, though, and would immediately get to work stuffing it all back in again.

One day, a funeral was taking place in the cemetery just on the outskirts of Bedford. By this time, Will had gotten to like people and would hang around other houses and shops in town, just visiting, being sociable. But the people attending this funeral didn’t know Will and they didn’t like the way the big black crow was circling the gravesite low in the air, flying slowly around and around. It was a bad omen, they thought.

Someone at that funeral shot Will and killed him.

When I wrote this, I was thinking of the attic in my childhood home, where I lived from the age of six until I left for college. This house is a large gray Victorian with a front staircase, a servants’ staircase, a basement with hundred and forty year-old whitewash, and old iron candleholders still bolted to the walls in the attic.

The basement is pretty creepy but the attic in that house really just defines creepy. It’s huge, creaky, and used to be crammed with old furniture. There are several oddly shaped rooms and only minimal light from a  few bare light bulbs.

One room in that attic really used to freak  me out–it was actually painted black and we used to refer to it as The Black Room. To top it off, in that room is a little half-size closet with an old-fashioned door. It sits under the eaves so it has a slanty door.

Here’s a picture of the closet. My parents recently made the sad choice to paint The Black Room yellow, so it’s distinctly less creepy now, but you can get the general idea:

Here’s the inside, a great hiding place for elves:

This attic, and room, and closet were just one of many scary places I encountered as a child. The brambly space behind the garage where we kept our trash cans was another. I spent most of my childhood convinced that someone was crouching back there, waiting to grab me as I dumped the trash bag into the cans after dinner on winter nights.

This is all to say that I completely agree with Maurice Sendak who said that (I’m paraphrasing here) childhood is a seriously scary place–way scarier in someways than the adult world.

I think this is leftover anxiety from junior high. I never wanted to talk to anyone but I would force myself to so I wouldn’t become any weirder than I already was.

So. Hello. This is me:

This is my desk, where I write in between important breaks to stare aimlessly out the window, check email compulsively, or wander down to the kitchen to eat that one last stale apple-spice doughnut that has been calling my name since 8:30 am:

The story of the desk is that it is actually an old picnic table that was getting rained on in a front yard when I was in grad school. I drove by this dilapidated student house, and saw this sad table sitting in the grass and I really needed a desk at the time. So I knocked on the guy’s door and offered him $20 for it.

Since then, it’s had a big piece gouged out of the top and had the cross-piece broken in two moves. Probably the writerly thing to say would be that I love this desk and am committed to it, but actually, it’s too small and wobbly and I’d be more than happy to put it out by the curb if I had something better.

This is a picture of my copy of The Long Winter, one of my favorite books (more on that later). As you can see, after twenty years of committed reading, it now has to live in a ziploc bag:

My favorite lunch is smoked oysters and cream cheese on Triscuits.

I hate parsnips. And zucchini.

On the other hand, I really like creamed spinach.  (I also like to talk about food, as well as eat it. So anytime anyone wants to have a food conversation, let me know.) My grandmother used to make these hardboiled eggs pickled in beet juice, so they were pink. Has anyone ever seen those?

(AndmybookSTILLWATERSiscomingoutonDecember20th.Endoftheselfpromotion.)

Just kidding. Sort of. Seriously, I am actually incredibly, insanely excited about STILL WATERS being released, but equally nervous and absurdly embarrassed. If there was ever an equivalent to taking your clothes off in public, this has got to be it.

So, can we talk? Any other strange-grandmother-food memories out there?