Author name: Sayling@@Away

This is the second in some stories about growing up in Plymouth in the 1950s. Growing up, I recognized that my father had a keen sense of proprietorship concerning our house and its land.  Several times a year on a Saturday morning, he would announce from the pulpit of the breakfast table: “Today we’re clearing bushes” or “Today we shovel the driveway” or “Today we burn the lawn.”  Those days he usually made dollar pancakes to soften us up, but these statements struck fear into our hearts, like those of a New England Puritan preacher. The driveway was a quarter mile long, the land was about five acres, and my father had an addiction to kerosene. Our house was three stories, with weathered gray siding, dark green shutters, and three brick chimneys. It had been built in the mid-1800s by a man named Hornblower, and its many windows stared out at the water of Massachusetts Bay. There were five terraces leading up to the house from the main road, wild and full of brambles and wild blackberries, and some had even been other sites for the house. My father told me he had seen pictures of the house, raised up on a huge platform, being dragged down the hill, to be repositioned on the first terrace, next to the road, and the foundations were still visible in some places. There had even been a turret on one side of the house, but it had fallen off in a move. The next terrace up had ancient apple trees that bore fruit sporadically. My brother and I had once tried the apples but decided that the small, tart fruits weren’t worth the briar scratches on our legs and the burrs in our socks. The third terrace was half-full of day lilies, which bloomed spectacularly in summer, painting the terrace in brilliant orange, and they spread a little each year. The fourth and fifth terraces were thick with bushes and brambles, the object of my father’s desire to clear, and he always established a beachhead for burning on that fifth terrace. In retrospect, he could have hired a plow to do the work and he had a friend who owned one. However, undaunted in his belief we could do the job ourselves, and probably to save money, he made the whole family – except maybe Mom – suffer together in true pioneer fashion. Never mind that the job couldn’t be done in one or two weekends. So with much of the brush remaining after our Herculean efforts, only to regrow thick and lush the next year, we waited at the breakfast table for the annual announcement. Clearing was always done in late spring and early fall, when it was warm and humid and the poison ivy in full bloom. Dad would get a burning permit from the town and start bushwhacking early Saturday morning with his machete and a scythe. My mother, brother and I would pull on old gloves, whose insides smelled and frequently contained small bits of yuck, and follow behind Dad, grabbing the cut brush and dragging it to the towering inferno he would create with liberal splashes of kerosene. In the early days, when no one was particularly good at recognizing poison ivy, I usually came down with a good dose of it and would be wearing pink calamine lotion for the next week or so. Burning poison ivy was also unsafe, because the smoke, when mixed with sweat, also required calamine treatment. My loathing of this green weed only grew when Mom told me that years before, some crazy relative had died after eating poison ivy on a dare. Thereafter I carefully inspected every load of brush we dragged to the fire and tried to stay upwind of the smoke. My brother mocked me. Poison ivy didn’t affect him and he was never subject to the humiliation of sitting in a classroom with a pink-coated face, being driven crazy with the itching. I came to regard my mother as the smartest one in the family, beginning with the very first time we bush-whacked the terraces. She would haul brush for about 30 minutes and then engage my Dad in a short discussion. “John, I think we’ve just about cleared this area.” That would be followed by a grunt from Dad, who was dripping sweat into his eyes and trying not to slash himself with the machete. “Would you like something to drink? You must be getting thirsty.” “Sounds good.” “OK, I’m going to head in and I’ll bring you all out some lemonade, after I start lunch.”   Then Mom would retreat to the house and wouldn’t appear until she called us for lunch. The lemonade would be on the table when we slogged inside. I never knew exactly why ham sandwiches took the entire morning to make, but whatever Mom was doing, I would have been only too happy to help her. In the winter, “the family must shovel” pronouncement usually occurred after several feet of snowfall. Inevitably, the snow blocked the back door. In that case, the easiest way out of the house was through the cellar, since Dad hermetically sealed all the other doors of the house to keep out the cold. We would assemble on the stairs leading up from the cellar to its double doors and with might grunts, would heave upward, dislodging a pile of snow which would rain down inside our clothes. While most of the day would be spent clearing the large parking area in the back of the house and making two straight lines the width of the car axle down the driveway, there were also a lot of snowball fights and general mayhem. Dad’s belief that burning a lawn in the spring made it come in rich and green – why didn’t he think the same thing about the brush? led him to get another burning permit from the town. So one Saturday morning, he would set fire

It’s Garfield. ‘Nuff said. 3 0

When I was twelve years old, I dared to launch what I like to call The Great Spinach Rebellion, one of the few times I truly confronted my parents. My mother had a habit of serving boiled spinach. No butter, salt or seasonings, just a great lump of shriveled greens sitting in a bowl bathed in green liquid. She was a great believer in greens, my mom: spinach, beet greens (equally loathed) or dandelion greens picked from the lawn (I won’t even go there and you’re welcome). Usually I just choked the spinach down, because my father was a chair, CEO, and director of the Clean Plate Club. We were all members, required to eat all the food on our plates at every meal. It took years to undo the effect of that rule! One Friday night, Mom served us our usual fish, dictated by the Catholic Church, along with a bowl of spinach. I wasn’t happy with the fish, but ate it out of Catholic guilt. I didn’t eat my spinach, which teamed with the fish, made the meal totally unappetizing. Dad insisted. I demurred. Dad insisted again, louder. I said no. My brother smirked. “If you don’t eat that spinach now, you will have it for breakfast, cold. And NO dessert,” he bellowed. So be it. I could be stubborn, too. “May I be excused, please?” “You may go to your room.”  I got up from the table without waiting for another comment, and I could hear him making ‘wasting perfectly good food comments’ all the way up to my room. At least he didn’t bring up the starving children in Africa. There on the table for breakfast the next morning sat the bowl, now containing ice cold spinach, sitting like a lump of accusation.  I regarded it with loathing while everyone else ate pancakes my father had made. Deliberately. I stayed resolved and the spinach remained untouched. After breakfast, Dad told me, “You will have it for lunch. Go to your room.” Fortunately, I didn’t feel particularly hungry at that point but I did overheard my mother pleading with my father to forget the spinach. Something about my being a growing girl and needing food. My father was intransigent. Cold spinach for lunch. Same reaction. Only this time I smiled, because it occurred to me that I could be as stubborn as my dad. When he asked why I was smiling, which ticked his temper up another notch, I just asked to be excused. By midafternoon, my stomach had started to rumble and Mom was getting frantic. I could hear her begging my Dad to let her give me something to eat. When I came into the kitchen sometime later, Mom said, “I left the spinach out, so it’s not cold. If you only eat one bite, I’ll tell him you ate it … please?” She looked so distressed, I decided I could manage one bite, just for her. I sat down, picked up the smallest amount I could and still have it qualify as a bite, and popped it in my mouth. Mom smiled and took the bowl away. “Would you like a cheese dream?” she asked. That’s a toasted cheese sandwich in our family, in case you’re wondering. I nodded, got up from the table and casually walked to the downstairs bathroom. Where I closed the door, spit the spinach into the toilet, and flushed. I think we’d managed a compromise, but Mom hardly ever served spinach after that, and never on a Friday. 0 0

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Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and all the happiness of the season to the wonderful people and writers who make up my blogging world. You have entertained me all year long with poetry, music, stories, reflections and laughter, for which I am hugely grateful. May your New Year be filled with love and magical things! I’m taking a few days off to celebrate the season with my family and catch up on my reading! Talk to you soon. 0 0

The Harbor Pointe Series is a collection of eight novellas by Story Empire authors. Each story takes place at the Harbor Pointe Inn in a fictional California town. See my reviews for the previous books in the series on this blog. A Fathomless Affair has everything: a family feud, a paranormal encounter, a missing person’s case, and a police investigation. Even a little romance. Lorelei Audley comes to the Harbor Pointe Inn to co-ordinate her father’s latest wedding to a Thai woman young enough to be her sister. Lorelei arrival starts with a bang: she slips on the floor, bangs her head and hurts her back. Worse, both the receptionist and the bartender hit on her. She has paid for the wedding herself and hopes her father will reimburse her, but he proves to be an overbearing, narcissistic, and rude man with an equally rude fiancée. The author does a grand job with him – I wanted to reach into the pages and throttle him. And I wanted Lorelei to grow a backbone. Lorelei’s only help is Elodie, the wedding planner for the Inn and one of the guests, Porter, who is there to track a comet for his thesis. The timing of his visit coincides with the appearance of a ghost ship and the discovery of an old curse, which lends an eerie element to the setting. Both Elodie and Porter are supportive and pitch in to help her handle all the problems she is facing with her father and the wedding. When her father abruptly cancels the wedding (it seems he and his fiancée are already husband and wife), Lorelei needs to recoup some of the money she’s spent, since it seems her father is broke. Then her father disappears. I love the way the author has woven the legend of the ghost ship and the curse into the story and leaves the reader wondering at the end. With its high tension and twists and turns, I loved this novella! About the author (from Amazon): Staci Troilo grew up in Western Pennsylvania writing stories and poetry in her free time, so it was no surprise that she studied writing in college. After receiving creative and professional writing degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, she went on to get her Master’s Degree in Professional Writing, and she worked in corporate communications until she had her children. When they had grown, she went on to become a writing professor, and now she is a freelance writer and editor. Staci is a multi-genre author. Her fiction is character-driven, and despite their protests, she loves to put them in all kinds of compromising or dangerous situations. You can find out more about her On her website: stacitroilo.com Twitter (X): @stacitroilo Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/authorstacitroilo 2 0

The Edge of Too Late is the next book in the Harbor Pointe series, which is a collection of eight novellas by Story Empire authors. Each story takes place at the historic Harbor Pointe Inn, overlooked by an iconic lighthouse, in a fictional California town. See my previous posts for reviews of books 1-4. Brandon Miller has it all – a great job, lots of money, and a silver Mercedes Benz convertible. The only thing he doesn’t have is the gorgeous woman in the car with him on the way to a romantic weekend at the Harbor Pointe Inn. Angela Cooper is recovering from an abusive marriage, and while she treasures her relationship with Brandon, who is the opposite of her ex-husband, she shudders at the thought of marrying again.  Brandon has an engagement ring in his pocket and he plans to propose this weekend, even knowing her reluctance. And he’s reserve the honeymoon suite, a small building that used to be the lighthouse keepers cottage. Angela, or Angie Baby, as Brandon prefers to call her, always has her camera with her. When they arrive at the Inn, an emergency vehicle is just leaving at a high rate of speed. Nevertheless they are charmed by the Inn and Angela snaps pictures of everything, until she spots someone on the Widow’s Walk of the lighthouse, which is closed. One of the lights is out in the cottage and while they are relaxing in the hot tub, Jeremiah arrives to fix it but gives Angela a long, lascivious and very uncomfortable stare. While exploring the beach, a homeless man with the scent of rotten body odor passes by them, and his dark spirit scares her. At dinner, a face in the window causes one of the diners to scream, and Angela, who is an empath and sensitive to spirits, is further shaken. Coincidences pile up. The next day things improve as they take a day sail on the schooner, but Brandon is unable to talk to Angela about marriage. When Angela once again see a figure on the lighthouse’s Widow’s Walk, and this time she sees her jump, he is unsure how to handle the situation. Angela is torn – she knows she is being unfair to Brandon by stringing him along, and her anxiety grows, aggravated by her ghost sightings and encounters with the creepy maintenance man. Are all these things explainable coincidences? Jan Sikes paints the Inn and its grounds beautifully in bright colors while embracing the ghosts and spirits of the place. She also does a great job of describing the nuances of Brandon’s and Angela’s relationship, and Angela’s stress at the thought of marrying again. Best of all, like the surf below the Inn, she really whips up the tension surrounding Angela as the story line grows. This novella works well as a standalone in the series and for me, ended too quickly! I wanted more! About the author: Jan Sikes has been an avid reader all her life. There’s nothing she loves more than losing herself in a story. Although she never had an ambition to be a writer, she wound up in mid-life with a story that begged to be told. Not just any story, but a true story that rivaled any fiction creation. The tale came to life through fictitious characters in an intricately woven tale encompassing four books. Not satisfied to stop with the books, she released music CDs of original music to match the time period of each story segment. And to bring the story full circle, she published a book of poetry and art. I was done. Then her story ideas keep coming. She love all things metaphysical and often includes those aspects in her writing. She is a member of the Author’s Marketing Guild, The Writer’s League of Texas, Story Empire, and the Paranormal Writer’s Guild. Also an avid fan of Texas music and grandmother of five beautiful souls. I reside in North Texas. Connect through Jan’s website: http://www.jansikes.com On Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/AuthorJanSikesBooks On Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/JanSikes3 And on her blog: http://www.jansikesblog.com 1 0

One thing about having a grandchild live nearby is that you are often invited (by his parents, and sometimes by him) to various fun activities. One place we’ve gone this month is the North Carolina Zoo. Eli loves animals, the more the better, And our trip to the zoo didn’t disappoint. he NC Zoo is nestled on 2,600 wooded acres centrally located in the heart of North Carolina in Randolph County. With 500 developed acres, it is the world’s largest natural habitat zoo. You can discover more than 1,800 animals in habitats ranging from Africa’s grasslands to North America’s forests, with an Asian habitat under construction. This zoo was featured on the Disney channel not long ago. Having this much space in which to see wild animals means a lot of walking, and since my husband and I have four artificial knees between us, we were kindly treated to a tour by golf cart, with lots of stops. Whew. Here are a few of the zoo’s residents that we got to see, some up close and personal. One of the older male chimps seemed to take a real liking to my husband and came back to the glass partition several times to ‘commune.’ The North Carolina Zoo works closely with wildlife conservation centers and organizations around the globe to protect wildlife, and prevent illegal wildlife trade across the world. Some of the local species we work to protect include Eastern hellbenders, the American red wolf, and the Pine Barrens treefrog. The American Red Wolf, which was reduced in numbers to double digits at one point, is a success story. These wolves have been released into eastern North Carolina while maintaining the colony at the zoo, and occasionally newborns will be introduced to wild mothers to increase genetic diversity. The Red Wolves in the wild each wear a GPS tracker so they can be located at any time. This is worn on a PINK collar so hunters will not kill them. This strategy is working because the only Red Wolf death in recent years was from natural causes. I hope you like the tour of the zoo as much as we did! 1 0

The Harbor Pointe Series is a collection of eight novellas by Story Empire authors. Each story takes place at the Harbor Pointe Inn in a fictional California town. See my reviews on this site for The Price of Atonement, The Gift, and The Destination (Books One, Two, and Three). I am an unabashed fan of the author’s work and this novella did not disappoint. I could not stop reading! The story opens in 1859 with a shipwreck off the California coast, where the Harbor Pointe lighthouse will be built in the future. Chained in its hold is a former slave, who beseeches a dark magic god to save him from death. He survives along with his Bible, crawling into an old hut that will become the lighthouse keeper’s home. Forward the story to 1972, when Tali, a young African American woman who drops out of college to pursue her passion for back activism and desire to make a difference in the world, comes to the Harbor Pointe Inn. Her parents send her there to take care of the Inn while her aunt and uncle, the owners of the Inn, take a trip. And to contemplate her future. The Inn is under construction, and she has to meet head on the narrow-minded opinions of the contractor, Greg McBride, who is overseeing the renovation of the Inn. She settles into the lighthouse caretaker’s cottage and discovers an old, hidden Bible. When she deciphers some of the writing in the margins of the Bible, a dark portal opens and an ageless winged gargoyle named Zam emerges. Once she figures out how to communicate with him, Zam becomes a nuisance but an endearing character, and Tali must figure out how to return him to where he came from – the shipwreck. She enlists the reluctant assistance of Greg but faces risking her life and his, ultimately changing her future. This story grabbed me from the first page. The backstory of the slave, Sam, is entirely believable, as is the time in which Tali’s story is told – the 70s, when much of the country was in turmoil because of black activism. The author handles these two sensitive story lines with understanding and grace. The time travel is seamlessly woven into the story, and the details of the Inn, the black magic, and the shipwreck, drew this reader right into the scenes. The characters are emotionally compelling and you can feel the tension and the danger, which rarely slows. I highly recommend this novella along with the previous ones I’ve read in this series. You are in for a treat! About the author: D. Wallace Peach started writing later in life after the kids were grown and a move left her with hours to fill. Years of working in business surrendered to a full-time indulgence in the imaginative world of books, and when she started writing, she was instantly hooked. Diana lives in a log cabin amongst the tall evergreens and emerald moss of Oregon’s rain forest with her husband, two dogs, two owls, a horde of bats, and the occasional family of coyotes. The author can be found On twitter: @Dwallacepeach On her blog: http://mythsofthemirror.com On her website: dwallacepeachbooks.com 0 0

Today marks the 75th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. We have long since made peace with the nation responsible, but Pearl Harbor day will be a part of our history as long as there are people to remember. I wonder how many of our children even know about this? Five of eight battleships, three destroyers, and seven other ships were sunk or severely damaged, and more than 200 aircraft were destroyed. A total of 2,400 Americans were killed and 1,200 were wounded. Many people haven’t seen the footage of President Franklin D. Roosevelt walking with his cane (he had had polio as a young adult and was in a wheelchair except for public appearances) to the podium of Congress. You Tube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VqQAf74fsE His speech that day was brief and began with these stark words, “Yesterday, December 7th, 1941 – a date which will live in infamy – the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” He closed the speech with a declaration of war, but before that he famously said, “Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph. So help us God.” Three days later, Germany and Italy declared war against the United States, and the U.S. government responded in kind. The American contribution to the successful Allied war effort spanned four long years and cost more than 400,000 American lives, fought by men and women who have been called our ‘greatest generation’. What also happened that day was the beginning of the transformation of the United States from an isolationist country with the 14th largest military in the world to a global superpower. God bless the men and women who died that day and the generations of military who followed them to keep us free and safe. Memorial for the Pearl Harbor Dead on the USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor. The USS Arizona Memorial is built over the sunken wreckage of the USS Arizona, the final resting place for many of the 1,177 crewmen killed on December 7, 1941. Who could have imagined how this attack would change history? 0 1