The Cantaloupe

In the 1950s, 60s and even into the 70s, we didn't get a lot of fresh state-side fruit that tasted good. By the time it got to the islands it had seen better days. Apples were usually bruised and mushy, same with pears. Watermelons tended to be over-ripe with that slightly sour/sweet flavor they get when they're starting to rot and honeydews tasted like a weak glass of water with a smidgen of sugar stirred in. Grapes were often green and sour. Cherries (a mouth-watering favorite of my sister and I) were often starting to get soft and grow that white mold they grow when they've been in the fridge to long. Forget about peaches and berries.

We had better luck with citrus, but even oranges and tangerines could be dried out and juiceless. And when in came to cantaloupes they were always picked so green that if they became edible they had little or no flavor.

One day while we were living at Caneel Bay, back around 1958 or 59, my father came home and announced he'd made a discovery at the hotel dump. It was a place where mostly plant and vegetable matter (both from the kitchen and the grounds) was tossed.

What could it be? He took Mom, Erva and I and showed us. There amidst the garbage was a cantaloupe vine, and on it, apparently quite happy with its environment, was one small cantaloupe. Obviously seeds from the kitchen had gotten tossed and one seed and managed to sprout and was endeavoring to produce some fruit.

Well, we were all excited and Dad promised to keep an eye on it, to protect it from predators, from having more stuff thrown on it, to occasionally give it some water, but most particularly to keep it hidden from other humans. We wanted that cantaloupe all to ourselves.

Erva and I must have asked him every day if it was ready to pick. But no, it wasn't, we had to wait. Eventually the day came when he brought it home, a large round cantaloupe that smelled.... oh yum, like heaven! Up to this point I had no memory of ever eating a cantaloupe that was any good.

Mom put it in the refrigerator and as the next day was Saturday, promised we would have it with a breakfast of pancakes and waffles.

There was anticipation as she brought it to the table. Anticipation as she cut it in half releasing a wonderful aroma. She carefully scraped out the seeds and cut the halves into quarters. We each got a whole quarter! Spoons in hand, we all dug in, put the fruit into our mouths and moaned...

...in utter delight. Never before had we had such a juicy sweet aromatic cantaloupe. And to this day, no cantaloupe as ever tasted as wonderful as the one grown in secret at the dump at Caneel Bay.

Out of garbage good things can come.

Do you have a fruit story? Ever grown one, or stolen one, that had particularly good flavor?

Finding and Collecting Characters

This is an article that was published way back in 2005 at the Institute for Children's Literature Rx for Writers. There are many wonderful blogs out there doing a fine job of passing on information about writing. I've never felt I had much too offer. But (there's that but...) I did have a few articles published, so I thought I'd share them. Not all at once, of course, so breathe a sigh of relief. This is the first 

Finding and Collecting Characters

So, you have a perfect idea for a story. What next? You need a character or two or three. After all, characters are the story, they are the plot. Wouldn’t you know it would be all about them? Just like regular people, they can selfish and self-centered. They want attention and recognition. They want to be described. They want their story told.

But how do you “create” your perfect protagonist? If you have a hard time “imagining” a character into being, maybe you need some models. Maybe you need to start collecting characters, like stamps or Barbie dolls.

           

“Where,” you ask, “do I find them?”

            

They’re everywhere, like ants at a picnic, like leaves on a tree. Just look around you. They lurk within your home and family. They skulk about your neighborhood and community. They flounce across your TV screen. They stare at you from the pages of magazines.

            

Collecting characters is simple, easy and fun.

            

As you go about your daily routine, start looking at people. Notice what they’re doing, how they are dressed, what they’re talking about. Everyday, or once a week, try to find one person to really study, even if it’s only for a few minutes. Unless you have a good memory, when you get back into your car, whip out your trusty note-pad and scribble down your observations.

            

Maybe you saw a cashier who wasn’t smiling. Maybe she stuck out because she seemed down-right unfriendly. You might come away from the experience feeling angry yourself. But, as a writer, you have to become an observer. And observers have to be dispassionate.

            

All you need at this initial stage is a rough sketch. It might read something like this: “Big haired, over-rouged cashier. Mid to late 50’s. Black hair. Dark eyes. Frown lines between eyebrows, at corners of mouth. Clipped, abrupt speech. Seemed angry. Never smiled. “

            

When you have more time, you can put flesh on her skeleton. Hopefully your rough sketch will trigger memories of your experience with the cashier. Start asking yourself questions.

            

“Why was she so sour? Has she always been this way? And if so, what’s made her such a Scrooge? Did she get some bad news? Didn’t she get enough sleep, or was she just having a bad-hair day?” Give her a story, give her an excuse. Write it down. Describe her physical appearance in a more detailed way. What was she wearing? Did she have a wedding band? Maybe she is recently divorced. Were her nails manicured and painted? Give her a mannerism. Maybe she has the nervous habit of chewing on her lower lip.

            

If you can’t remember specific details, make them up! As a writer, that’s one of the fun things you get to do. In any case, give the old girl a least of page of your time. Lastly, give your character sketch a title or name. How about, “The Sour Cashier” or “Mabel’s Bad-Hair Day?”

            

            

Now, what do you do with the characters you’ve collected? If you’re anything like me, there are scraps of paper all over the place. An idea here, a thought over there, a description of a bug under the sofa….I’m not the most organized person in the world, but I do gather up my scraps of paper from time to time, go through them, and file them in their appropriate places.

            

One of these places is my “character file.” I’ve had one for over 30 years. I use a regular old three-ring binder. I have it broken down into a few basic categories, with dividers of course: men, women, girls, boys. You can break these down further if you need to: old men, extraterrestrials, teen girls, toddlers, you get the picture.

            

Once you’ve written up your character sketch, file it away in the appropriate category. As you can see, if you collected one person a day, at the end of a year you’d have 365 characters sketches! You can take one day off at leap year.

            

Okay, so you have a bunch of people down on paper. What next? Didn’t you have a perfect idea tickling your gray matter, but there were no characters to be found? Get out your file, it’s a giant mall. You can browse through it like a shopper. You can mix and match bits and pieces to develop a whole new persona, or, you can use that cashier just as you sketched her.

            

But wait! Maybe what you need is an idea. This is where the titles or names you’ve given your characters may be the match that lights the creative fire.

            

Over time you will no doubt have to thin out your rogues’ gallery, discarding people you’ve used up or ones that will never work for you. But what the heck, there are six billion more where they came from, each and every one as unique as a finger print.

            

Another way to collect characters is to look for pictures of interesting people and faces. You might even need a separate binder for them. I cut pictures from magazines and newspapers and paste them onto lined loose-leaf paper. The lines help me write straight when I work up a character sketch.

            

There is one other thing I keep in my character file. Names. Interesting names I read or hear about, or names I make up, all go together. Any kind of name can find its way onto the list; place names, magical names, foreign names, people names, animal names. I keep them all roughly alphabetized by first letter.

            

Now you can find the perfect name for your perfect character to act out your perfect story. Go forth and write.

Grammy's Cookbook

I have mentioned in several past posts that my grandmother, Erva Boulon, wrote a cookbook. It is filled with recipes and anecdotes from her life.

Grammy was born in 1895 in Ada, Ohio. The opening pages of her book tell the story of how, in 1904 while living in Lincoln, Nebraska, her father announced to the family that they were moving to Cuba.

Her father, Eugene Hartwell, was a weatherman who worked for the Federal Weather Bureau (now known as NOAA or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admistration) and was being transferred.

They traveled by train from Lincoln to St. Louis. From St. Louis they floated down the Mississippi on an old fashioned river boat to New Orleans. At New Orleans they got on a small freighter to Havana. The ultimate destination was the town of Cienfuegos, on the southern coast, 160 miles away. It took a day to reach by train.

As one might imagine it was a totally alien environment for Grammy's mother, Bertha. "When the question of milk arose, we discovered that the delivery was very simple: the cows were driven from door to door and milked at your door step."

"Mother was very anxious to try all of the strange new fruits and vegetables which she saw on the push carts about town, so one day she arrived from a shopping expedition with a green avocado, our first. The vendor had been reluctant to sell her the fruit as he knew it was green, but Mother had insisted. All that she had understood of his directions for using the fruit was the Spanish verb "to cook." We had green avocado cooked in syrup for dinner that evening. It tasted strangely like sweetened laundry soap and was promptly dropped from our menus."

Here's a recipe that's come a long way from green avocados cooked in syrup! Sometimes her instructions are not always clear, so I've done a little editing.  My additions are in blue.

Avocado Mold

2 envelopes of Knox's gelatin
4 cups mashed avocado
1/4 cup lime or lemon juice
3 bird peppers (a small very hot pepper) or Tabasco sauce to taste
1 cup of cold water
2 cups of boiling water
1 tsp salt (to taste)
Cooked shrimp, lobster or chicken pieces marinated in a small amount of gelatin

Soak the gelatin in cold water. Melt with boiling water. Pour a little of the clear gelatin into the bottom of a ring mold. Arrange shrimp, lobster or chicken which has been marinating in this small amount of gelatin.. Set the mold into the refrigerator to harden quickly. Combine mashed avocado, lime or lemon juice, hot sauce and salt and add to the rest of the gelatin mixture and allow to cool. When the clear gelatin has set in the mold add avocado mixture, set mold back in the refrigerator until the gelatin has hardened. Unmold on a bed of crisp lettuce leaves, fill the center of the mold with chunks of peeled tomatoes, serve with tart mayonnaise.

Check out this video of Cienfuegos, Cuba. Many of the buildings pictured were there when my grandmother was little girl of nine.

Random Thought Thursday

I haven't done one of these in a while. Today I thought I'd share two quotes by two different people that relate to their friendship and speaks volumes.




George Harrison said of Bob Dylan:
Can you imagine what a world it would be if we didn't have a Bob Dylan? It would be awful.




Bob Dylan said of George Harrison:

He inspired love... the world is a profoundly emptier place without him.

The two collaborated many times.

Let's hear it for collaboration.

Do you have a favorite someone you'd like to collaborate with? 

Ethlyn Hall

Last Monday I wrote about Agnes Sewer who introduced my mother to Ethlyn Hall because she was concerned about Mom running wild and not having enough feminine influences. To correct the situation, Miss Agnes introduced Mom to Miss Ethlyn, who lived at Peter Bay, just over the hill from Trunk Bay. That introduction which happened when Mom was around twelve, lead to life-long friendship.

Ethlyn was born on St. John in 1916 while the Virgin Islands were still under Danish rule. At the age of 23 she went to New York where she learned haberdashery, met and married her husband and had three of four children. Eventually she and her family returned to St. John where she proved to be a successful business woman, running a guest house and serving as President of the Business and Professional Women of St. John. She was also active in the Historical Society and the Elaine Sprauve Library Association.

This is my mother and Ethlyn, taken in 1999. 

I call this picture The Age of Wisdom.

Ethlyn was the mother of my friend Victor Hall, who died last year and whom I wrote about here. 












Here comes the synchronistic part, the part that lets us know the Universe is involved. And I hope, dear gentle readers you won't think this morbid. Ethlyn Hall died while I was in the islands in May. She was just shy of 96 years old. She died the week before my sister Erva and I put our mother's ashes out to sea. The following week Erva and I had the pleasure of being able to attend Ethlyn's funeral.

It was really quite special because after the lovely service at the Lutheran Church in Cruz Bay, she was interred at Cinnamon Bay on National Park land at an old family plot. The tombs are above ground because the ground in mostly solid rock and nearly impossible to dig through. There are now, with Ethlyn, three generations of her family buried there. Her tomb is obviously the white one to the left. It is a shaded, cool, and peaceful place to be laid to rest. Those smooth-barked trees at the upper right are bay tree, from which the body splash, bay rum is made. The leaves of the trees litter the ground and as you walk, their delightful aroma fills the air. Erva and I laid small branches of bay leaves on her casket.

My cousin, Rafe Boulon, who is Chief of Resource for the St. John National Park, was a pall barer. He's in the middle on the right. You can see how shaded the area is.

And this is Rafe, carrying a wreathe.

Ethlyn was well loved and will be long remembered. And I'm glad I was there with Erva, to represent my mother, her childhood friend.

Alternatives for Always

Alternatives is a recurring post in which I give synonyms for an over used word. Click on the tab above for a "complete" list of over used words. Depending on how you use the word, this list may come in handy for finding another way to say the same thing.

Today's word is:  Always

Always, a word we love to hate. We always over-use it.

Early in our marriage my husband and I made a point to eliminate certain words that can trigger unwanted reactions.

Never and Always were at the top of the list. I'm sure you've had those "You always," and "You never," kind of statements thrown at you in the course of your life. And of course when used in that context they just aren't true.


Although we can't eliminate it entirely (even the irritating always has its place) we can certainly try to cut back on its use.

So here are some alternatives. If nothing else these suggestions may spur you on to think of you own way to replace the dreaded word.

at every turn, at no time,

consistently, constantly,

deathless,

endless/endlessly, endure, eternal/eternally, ever, everlastingly, ever-living, evermore,

for all ages, for keeps, forever, forever and a day, forever and ever, forevermore,

go on and on,

have no end,

immortal, imperishable, in perpetuity, invariably,

last forever,

never, never-dying,  never-ending, never-fading, night and day,

perpetually,

regularly, repeatedly,

till blue in the face, till doomsday, till hell freezes over, till the cows come home, to the crack of doom, to the end of time, to the last “syllable of recorded time” (from Macbeth)

unceasingly, undying, unfading, unfailingly,

without end, without exception

So, are you guilty of having accused someone of ALWAYS or NEVER doing something? Be honest. 

Miss Agnes

When my grandparents, Erva and Paul Boulon, began building a summer home at Trunk Bay on St. John in 1929-30 they required help.

This first building constructed at Trunk Bay, was on the beach. It's where the family lived while the main house was  being built just up the hill.

This picture shows the almost completed main house. The "roof" of the front building, with the two windows and door, had a roof added and it became the Upper Porch. I have no idea who the people are on the beach, a woman and a little girl. The woman could well be Agnes....

One of the people they hired was Agnes Sewer. It was probably Miss Agnes who taught Grammy about acquiring local food and cooking what was available. She became a member of the family, an invaluable person who not only helped Grammy take care of four rowdy children, but who also cooked delicious meals. For if there is one thing Miss Agnes knew how to do, it was cook.

My mother, having three younger brothers, was quite a tomboy. Miss Agnes was concerned about Mom running wild and felt there was need for some feminine influences.

As luck, or the Universe would have it, just over hill at Peter Bay was the perfect candidate. A year older than Mom, Ethlyn Hall had grace and intelligence. Miss Agnes made sure the two girls met and the friendship they form lasted a life time. I'll share a bit about Ethlyn next Monday.

By the time my sister Erva and I came along, Miss Agnes was an elderly lady living in a small house right on the road just outside Cruz Bay near The Pond. She had high check bones, as if there might have been a trace of Native American blood. She seemed ancient to me. More astonishing was that her mother, Miss Missy, lived across the street!

This picture, taken in 1999, is of my mother and Miss Agnes's younger brother , Roy Sewer.  You can see the same cheek bones in him.

Miss Agnes spent her days sitting in a chair in the doorway watching for people as they passed by. If she was there, you had to stop and pay your respects. Greetings and the latest news were exchanged, then, no matter how much you might insist it wasn't necessary, Miss Agnes would shuffle into her kitchen and return with a small brown paper bag containing something to eat. It might be a hard boiled egg, a johnny cake, some cheese and crackers, or a piece of coconut candy. It might be a sandwich. You never knew what you had until you opened the bag. With a hug and kiss, she sent you on your way.

If you were lucky, her mother Miss Missy would NOT be sitting on her porch because if she was you had to go see her too, which wasn't bad, except that she always insisted on "kissing you up," which wasn't bad except that she was quite toothless and her kisses were quite wet.

Some years back as Mom and I sat together reminiscing she said, "I miss Agnes as much as I miss my mother."

Well, if the Universe will have it, I'd like to think that Grammy, Mom, Ethlyn and Miss Agnes are all together in some fabulous kitchen cooking up a feast for the angels.

Origins - Spunk

Origins is a recurring past in which I delve into the history of a word or phrase.



Today's word is: Spunk

My research says it comes from the Scottist Gaelic word spong, meaning tinder which in turn comes from the Latin spongia, meaning sponge. Touchwood, a common kindling, looked like sponge and so the Scots called it spong. Another word for this kind of tinder is punk (which has evolved into a different meaning as well.) In Irish the word was sponc.

So how do we get from spong to spunk? It goes something like this. A Scot is trying to light his fire using spong (touchwood) sparks fly and the spong (or punk) is ignited.

By the 1530's spong had taken on the meaning of "a spark." But it wasn't until the mid 1770s it came to mean mettle, courage, or pluck.

At some point spong and punk became spunk meaning a person who has passion, spirit, or fire which relates right back to spark.

I like the word spunk. It's short and quick, leaping out of the mouth just like a spark.

Writers need spunk. We need to have fire and passion to keep doing something where the odds are stacked so much against us.

So put on your spunk and keep on truckin'.

Do you have a piece of clothing or an object that epitomizes spunk?

Do you think you have spunk?

Do you know a spunky person?

Happy Fourth of July!

I hope each and everyone of you has a wonderful Fourth of July on this, the 236th Anniversary of our Nation's Birth.



Today is also special because I am a GUEST of Nutschell's over at The Writing Nut. This is the first time I've been a guest on someone else's blog. So... if you want to learn a little bit MORE about me (and who doesn't, after all how many Bishes do YOU know) then hop on over and give us a shout.

I look forward to seeing you there!

Cicada Lullaby

 I don't mean to complain, but it's still hot and dry here in Texas and we still need rain.

That said, the invisible tree singers are out. I have never seen a cicada in a tree or seen one singing, they are so well camouflaged, and yet they loudly proclaim their presence. Sometimes we find the abandoned exoskeleton of a nymph clinging to the side of a tree or a building, but I've never seen one emerge.

However a few days ago we were giving this present.

This beautiful creature has been living underground as nymph anywhere from eleven to seventeen years and we just happened to be at the right place at the right time to see it still clinging to its exoskeleton. What are the odds?

I learned while trying to find a nice video of their song that they come in a variety of sizes and sing a variety of different songs. This clip was taken in Texas and the sound is just like what we're hearing in our yard.

Though I know their noise bothers some, I love the song of the cicada. In fact I wrote a song about their music many years ago. Too bad you can't hear the melody.

Here are the words to:

Cicada Lullaby

Simmering summer, shimmering heat waves
Grass turning brown in the sun.
Crystalline waters sparkle with diamonds
Amid the trees there's a song being sung.
    ChiRoo, ChiRah, ChiRye
    ChiRoo, ChiRah, ChiRye
    ChiRoo, ChiRah, ChiRye
    It's the cicada lullaby.

Laughter of children playing in rivers
Butterflies float on the breeze
The rustle of oak leaves, cheeping of sparrows
High overhead there's a song in the trees.
    ChiRoo, ChiRah, ChiRye
    ChiRoo, ChiRah, ChiRye
    ChiRoo, ChiRah, ChiRye
    It's the cicada lullaby.

Warm breezes blowing to cool the brow
The sweat of hard labor is done
Deep blue the bright sky with dancing fairies
While in the leaves there's a song being sung.
    ChiRoo, ChiRah, ChiRye
    ChiRoo, ChiRah, ChiRye
    ChiRoo, ChiRah, ChiRye
    It's the cicada lullaby.


Sunlight that's fading with colors blazing
Shadows that fade with the sun
My love beside me, my old dog here too
We hear the song in the trees being sung.
    ChiChiRoo, ChiChiRah, ChiChiRye
    ChiChiRoo, ChiChiRah, ChiChiRye
    ChiChiRoo, ChiChiRah, ChiChiRye
    It's the cicada lullaby.
    It's the cicada lullaby!

Have you ever heard cicadas? Do they sing for you, or are they just noisy bugs?