Sunny this afternoon after a foggy start. The temperature stays pretty much in mid to upper fifties. Every once in a while a cloud will roll over and sprinkle a little rain on us just to remind everyone where we live. The dandelions are making another strong appearance on the lawn after a slight hiatus for what reason I don’t know. It could be this is the third generation of the weeds that started out the summer with us and they are just showing up as a kind of encore for their grandparents earlier performance. They are still my favorite flowers, how they follow the sun and seem so resilient.
Dot is still down in the dumps today and we are keeping her from running around so hopefully her face will heal and not swell up again. I walked her around the yard on a rope for a bit and when we came into the office I bent down to pick up the end of her rope and turn toward her and I tweaked my lower back as I am want to do sometimes. Yikes it hurt! I was able to make it over to my coffin and lay down flat. Dot had her silly looking cone on but she bumped around the office for a bit and even managed a couple of slobbery kisses on my cheek then noisily squeezed herself and her cone inside her crate and lay down. I couldn’t movs. Lucky Jan had her phone out side where she was looking for a drill bit under the stairs to her writing shack where she was installing a safety hand rail on the wall. She brought me some Advil and some ice and left the gimps to suffer alone while she went back and worked on her handicapped accessibility projects. She has always been the troughest in our family.
I lay flat on my backhand recorded todays selection on my phone, because my recorder’s batteries were drained. Today I read a piece by Heather Lende. I had the date wrong on our Zoom event yesterday. We will appear together on August 27, at 6:00 Alaska time. I don’t think there will be a moderator or anyone to introduce us. I believe we will just gab and talk about our newest books. Mine will be Pig and hers will be “Of Bears and Ballots.”
I have known Heather a long time. I’m sure we will talk about that. She wrote obituaries for the Chilkat Valley News and then she read some of her pieces on the FM radio then had success when her pieces were picked up nationally on NPR. She published a column in a nationally distributed women’s magazine and an editor cold called her asking for a book. All I’m saying is Heather made her own luck as a writer. She was a good writer, found her “voice” or “groove” or “style” or whatever you want to call it and didn’t mess with it. The world came to her. This drives some other people who want to be writers crazy. Bat Shit Crazy. Wanting to blame her success on her good looks or her “east coast style,” that is she doesn’t wipe her mouth with her sleeve, unless she is out at moose camp.
It doesn’t help that Heather has always been stylish and beautiful. She came from back east and has an air of “Coming from money,” as my parents would say about people with certain kind of good manners, taste, and looks. Heather has that quality. She is smart and stylish, she is unfailingly polite and kind. Now she is often asked how people in Haines treat her in light of her notoriety.
I think her book about her term on the Borough Assembly will explain a lot about that. Though Heather has never said an unkind thing in public about any of her neighbors. I’ve only heard a few little snide remarks about her. But Haines Alaska, while it is beautiful is one of the most rancorous towns I’ve ever been to in Alaska. Back in the… what…early eighties? The saw mill closed down and young people with little income started moving in to build cabins and make their own community, with an FM station and a bakery that served espresso and “soup” for lunch. For God’s Sake! These people were known… known to this day as “The Hippies” or in some cases “The Mud Bay People,” for the section of town where cheap land was available for cabins. It was a cultural divide between loggers and hippies as deep as anything you might see in the former Yugoslavia. I once did a case from Haines and I found a witness who would give good and important testimony for my client. It could save him years in prison. My client said, “That guy is a HIPPY. I’m not going to have a hippy testify at MY trial.” Yep. Tough crowd.
Anyway… I have always admired Heather even though she and I see Alaska differently… but not as differently as you might think. She is very well read and I learn a lot from our conversations. Too we share some of the same experiences upon having success when living in a small town. My good friends are proud of me and so too are Heathers. Bur there are others. Several people think I ruined their lives by publishing my books because they wanted to write mysteries based in Alaska. No matter how I tell them there is no problem, they should do it, Dana Stabenow’s success only made it better and easier for me to publish. They are not having it. And once when they thought I was eccentric and funny now they think I’m snotty because I’m “sooo famous” I’m sure it’s the same for Heather but she is probably too kind to take notice of the snarky comments that come her way.
There is the old saw about how if you have a bucket of Dungeness Crab and one crab manages to craw up the side just before the one manages to escape another crap will grab on and pull it back down. Some claim to have lifted the whole lot of crabs out ofd a bucket one hanging on to another, trying to pull them all back in. This is an old analogy for village life.
I suppose life is easier now with social media. More supportive or at least easier to slip off the pesky crabs and find space for like minded ones all in the same or different bucket just designed for them.
Bright yellow flowers
by the damp summer garden
where a black dog digs.
jhs
Here is the recording I made of one of Heather Lende’s essays:
