Minimalism

“The Wives of Sunset” Chapter 2: Urban Chickens

A rooster crow blared through the sound of early morning traffic. Marissa smiled and stretched underneath her organic cotton duvet. Beside her, Dane’s muscular, tattooed arm draped over their son. Oliver had crawled into their bed last night with his peach blankie and stuffed sloth, a victim of another nightmare. Dane was so good with him. And he was a model father. As a session musician, he was able to stay home most days with Oliver, writing his own music in his basement studio. It made her proud.

The rooster crowed again, insisting that Marissa put her feet to the floor. She loved this house. They bought ten years ago for an amazing deal. The sellers, poor folks, had gotten in way over their heads financially and sunk further when the Recession hit. They were saved from bankruptcy when Marissa and Dane bought the house. Over the years, Marissa had finished it Earth-conscious materials. Sustainable wood flooring, solar panels on the roof. Even the paint was non-toxic. Last summer, they had gotten the chickens. Dane had built the hen house himself.

You can’t control women.

Read On

The Wives of Sunset – The Pie

The Pie

Her bare foot made contact with the yellow plastic blade. Grasping for the railing, she watched the toy bulldozer escape the crush of her toes and tumble down the stairs. The cherry pie wobbled in her palm. She executed a clumsy jump over the last few steps in an attempt to keep herself upright, but her head slammed into the drop ceiling. A screeching pain brought her to her knees.

The pie flew through the air. Jessie watched it land upside down on the tile floor of the basement, ruby-colored juice flowing over scattered bits of dog hair and dust.

“Damnit.”

Jessie rubbed her head, feeling the gunk of three-days worth of dry shampoo in her red hair.

“Mama!!!” Two little voices floated down the stairs. Why were they awake this early? She sighed as she heaved herself up off the floor. Four black paws came scrambling down the stairs, canine eyes popping at the sight of a free dessert. Jessie rolled her eyes to stop the tears as she watched the dog lap up the twenty-dollar pie. Serves me right for buying it, she thought. If I were better at this, I would’ve made one.

The calls from the living room were becoming more insistent. Shoulders slumped, Jessie made her way up from the basement to get the paper towels and the dish soap. God, she was sick of cleaning.

The children were curled up in the corner of the couch, faces shining the early morning sunrise. Despite the pie, she smiled. The kids were so cute. They had sat like this since they were toddlers, never touching, but right beside each other.

“Mama! Mom!” It was always a demand.

Jessie forced her voice to be soft. “What’s up, loves?”

“Can you hand me the remote? Please.”

“It’s my turn!” Benny’s little voice piped in indignation. “She’s been watching Mermaid Millie forever and I woke up first!” Jessie lifted the remote from the coffee table she had refinished last summer. The trendy ebony paint was chipping along the sides and there was a line of Sharpie across the carefully refinished top. She covered the Sharpie mark with a coaster.

“Avonlea, how many have you watched?” she asked, longing for this negotiation to end so she could pour a cup of coffee.

“What??” her daughter protested. “He just got here and I was watching it!”

“That wasn’t my question,” Jessie said, holding the remote close to her chest.

“She’s watched one million of them and the whale guy is scary!” Benny whined.

“Avonlea.” Warning lay in Jessie’s tone.

“It’s not fair.” Nine-year-old Avonlea glared at her brother with the venom of a teenager.

“Life isn’t fair,” Jessie said through clenched teeth. “Here Benny.” Jessie proffered the remote. “Avonlea, he can watch a show, and then you can watch another Mermaid show. But I need your help after that.”

“But MOM!!” The little frenemies united in protest.
“Enough! I can’t take it!” Her tone startled them both and the look in their eyes piled onto her guilt. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just dropped that pie we bought and I need to go clean it up. And I guess figure out something for dessert…”

“It’s okay,” Benny said soothingly. “We don’t like pie.”

“Sorry Mama,” said Avonlea. “Maybe we can have Oreos.”

“We can’t bring Oreos to the block party,” Jessie muttered. She heard the neighbor’s rooster crow and sighed. She could strangle that stupid bird. It wasn’t even eight a.m. and she had already failed.

The Wives of Sunset

The Blurb…

Life looks good in the storybook town of Oakville. People bike, walk their dogs, and enjoy beautifully-manicured lives with their families. A perfect balance between urban and country living, people flock to this neighborhood where every house has treed backyard and walkability to the picturesque downtown.

Jessie, Marissa, Tig and Anna find themselves living on Sunset Street with their families in tow. On the outside, they lead similar lives: trying to balance work, home, family, and keeping up appearances. But when an accident during the annual summer block party causes a minor tragedy, the veneer begins to crack. Friendships are threatened as masks come off, and the polite peace that reigns over the neighborhood is disrupted when the truths that lie behind closed doors are revealed.

Witty and authentic, “The Wives of Sunset” reveals a slice of the American experience in 2019. As the four women struggle to meet the astronomical expectations of a “perfect American life,” they expose the deep fault lines just beneath the surface. “The Wives of Sunset” is a story of friendship and cultures, of confronting the truth and letting it bind, rather divide us.

“The Wives of Sunset” will be published for free in serial form on this blog. Please watch for my first published novel “A Ripple of Stones,” soon to be available wherever you buy your books.

“The Wives of Sunset” is a work of fiction. None of the characters are based on actual people, and any resemblance is purely coincidental.

Summertime

It’s almost upon us.

In Michigan, the trees have burst into full bloom and color has saturated the landscape. That nearly-forgotten brush of heat strokes our bare shoulders when we step into the sunlight.

Our kids are holding impromptu baseball games in backyards, racing through the twilight on bikes, begging to delay bedtime just ten minutes more.

Students are torrents of emotion, finishing those last lessons and holding tight to the community they’ve built with their teachers over the last nine months, even as their words say they can’t WAIT for school to be over.

As parents, we look forward to time with our babies, big and small. Our stress begins to melt as we look at calendars that aren’t packed with events from dawn til dusk. Some of us look forward to a bit of travel, some of us prepare that pool bag, and some of us look longingly at weeks of camp ahead. Regardless of our family plans, we are all about to transition. It’s summer: we’re supposed to feel excitement and relief! And yet, trepidation hides in the shadows.

Summertime can be driven by the things that make you happy.

Read On

What Comes Next?

Alrighty, my lovely reader. I’ve written about moving home, minimalism, mothering, kids, creating stuff, writing a novel. Each month I feel like I have a brand new idea. Actually, I have lots of ideas, but many of them fit into my Won’t Write About That Publicly File.

Such non-starters include:

*Explicit stories about my kids’ private thoughts and lives (too many future therapy bills)

*Dragging strangers over the coals to be funny (trying to spread kindness here, even though I feel like there could be a bitingly wonderful blog post about that one woman who moans throughout an entire yoga class…)

*The Basic Mommy Blog that goes “I hate my life and my choices and my children with a burning passion for 8 paragraphs except for the last paragraph where everything is sunshine and rainbows because I now I feel guilty let’s publish this yeah!” (Those are inauthentic, disturbing, and sappy all congealed together in a burning crockpot of slop. Not to mention the fact that I like my life and my choices and my children and I would like them all to like me back…)

*My teaching job (dancing on the edge of ethics and also against the actual law in many instances)

I’ll tell you a secret. Something that has interested me for awhile would be an online book, published chapter by chapter in monthly increments. You can read for free, get a taste of my storytelling abilities, and then, Godwilling, when I finishing Draft 2 of The Ripple of Stones, find an editor, the editor finds a publisher, and the thing actually comes into being, you may want to actually spend a small bit of $ to buy the thing! After all, you’ve already read one! Why not another? Really, it’d be a twofer.

But still. You’ve stuck with me this long. I would like to know what interests you. What is valuable to your time and attention when you receive these tomes in your inbox each month?

So for this month’s installment, we’re going to turn this blog into a Goosebumps-themed Choose Your Own Adventure! My darling reader, would you please take this lovely poll?

Subscribers, you may have to click over to the website to take the poll. Thanks for the extra click!!

As always, thank you for reading. See you in June!

Minimalist Kids

4:42 p.m

We pile into the house and my voice echoes in the living room. A daily admonishment to put the shoes away, hang the coats. I pull the half-bent folders out of the backpacks, wiping the strawberry smear off of the shiny cover of one of them. There are papers to sign, flyers asking for donations of money and time, more decisions to make and events to squish into a packed calendar. Notes from friends flutter to the floor. My son’s folder is crammed with “seat work,” adorable bears and narwhals counted and sorted and colored with crayons.

In exactly forty-eight minutes, my daughter is due on a soccer field across town. She is to be fed, clothed in layers of sports frocks, hair pulled up (that’ll be a battle…), and carrying her bag, ball, and bottle of water. Do her earrings need to be out for practice or just games? I can’t remember.

I’ve been exhausted since I was thirty. Everyone’s exhausted.”

Read On

Unburied

I gazed at the mountain of plastic bags and felt anger flow through my veins. We’d spent months donating and selling our stuff. An actual truck had come to haul half a house of furniture away. How was there this much left for the landfill? All of the plastic plush precious things I thought were so important were now shoved in black bags, off to pollute the Earth. I shook my head.

What had we been doing?

When the good husband and I got married, we combined our lives into one unified household, stuffing the past in the basement. As our lives expanded, the boxes of stuff accumulated and got put away in bigger and bigger basements. Eight years later, we made the big decision to move home to Michigan. We also made the choice to value location over square footage. This meant a big downsize.

It was time to face the Stuff.

“It doesn’t matter what objects leave our lives; the experiences are still there.”

Read On

I Just Decided To

The worst last words are, ” I wish I would’ve…”

These things we plan for When: when we have time, when we have money, when we retire… what are they?

During the minimalist ritual of Throwing Out The Stuff, I discovered an old notebook, buried deep in a box. It is truly a beautiful object. My dad brought it back from a business trip to India years ago. The textured sepia cover features an inset picture painted on hand-crafted paper. A lady dances by a stream, her crimson sari waving in the breeze. You have to look closely to see all the little details; the cover almost begging to be opened.

Inside, I found my younger self, scrawled in purple ink. I had even given my little book a title: “Random Words.”

I was so deep at fifteen.

Settling myself on the cold cement floor of the basement storage room, I leafed through more pages. Pencil sketches of wide-brimmed trees, lakes with rivers leading into the horizon, a portrait of a friend. Each drawing accompanied a poem I had written. The purple scrawl told of maiden heartbreak, the tribulations of adolescence. Death, who came for a friend much too soon.

The illustrations I had drawn were rough, but the words… my words, even teeming as they were with teenage angst… They held truth.

“It was gnawing at me from Someday, aching to be created.”

Read On

The Road Home

I gazed out of the car window, trying not to sigh audibly. The landscape was dismal and gray, no semblance of sun. When we left Atlanta that morning, the airplane rose gracefully over fields of fuchsia crepe myrtle and creamy silk magnolia blooms winking among the dark waxy leaves. Spring arrives early in the South, waltzing beautifully in after short, mild winters.

But I was no longer in the South. I was home. In Michigan.

…in March.

Everything was weary, from the clouded sky to the dead ground to the haggard, frustrated face of the puffer-coat swathed woman who had snapped at my children as we shivered in the cold, awaiting my husband’s arrival.

The drive to my husband’s hometown, what was to be our new hometown, was mercifully brief. I looked up at the gray trees and tried to imagine them as they would be in Michigan spring, two months hence. Delicate green and yellow leaves, flecked birch bark, the distinct sweetness of fragile Michigan warmth in the air. A bit of white on the dormant trees caught my eye and I smiled. Perhaps it had snowed. Our young kids would love the snow. Sledding, skiing, building snowmen; these were their inheritance. Maybe this would all be ok.

“I laid down a life-long shackle: fear.”

Read On

Minimalism

The Pie

The Blurb…

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