As is the Provincetown tradition, I’ve been working non-stop for the summer and only now finding the time to blog again. Not that I’ve got anything to show you yet, but I’m happy to announce I am now a founding member of Thorvald Road Writers and currently putting together our on-line presence.  We're a spin off from last winter’s workshop at the library except this group is writing novels.

So, no prompts, no poetry, just the difficult but very satisfying task of reading and revising and reading again in hopes of making it perfect. I’m still editing the same novel I was working on before but it’s getting better and better. One  member is self-publishing a book which is due out next week and has already begun working on the sequel. Another has started her first novel after writing short stories for years and it’s brilliant.

In fact, it was her idea we name the group after Thorvald, the son of Erik the Red and brother of Leif Erikson. He was the leader of a Viking expedition and spent some time in Provincetown around 1007AD when the keel of their boat was damaged and then repaired in our harbor. Local history tells of a stonewall discovered during the 1805 renovation of a house down the street from me that has Viking writing on it and is attributed to Thorvald. He is also said to be the first European to die in North America, perhaps by Native American hand, and thought to be buried near Boston.

We plan to do public readings together as a group and put out a collection of shorter pieces at some point in the future. But right now we’re just reading to each other and giving helpful feedback, the real work. Here’s a photo of mine that I’d like to use as our profile shot, stay tuned for further details!

It was a pickup truck, dirty blue, with a gash in the driver’s side door from some other angry episode. We pulled into the gas station right after he’d hit me harder than the usual. I heard a thunk inside my head, followed by stars and the weird hot metal smell of an iron heating up. There was a little whitewashed clapboard church across the road with yellow flowers in front. There was also a pool hall within running distance on my side of the truck, but those flowers got my attention. When he went to pay for the gas, I grabbed my bag out of the back and ran across the road to the church. I slipped inside and crawled under one of the front pews while two old ladies cleaned around me. I was only there a minute before he stormed in. One of the ladies, bucket and mop in hand, asked if he was looking for Jesus. Since even he wouldn’t hit an old lady in a house of God, he shuffled out, I wished I’d seen it, and soon enough I heard the pickup gurgle as he drove off away.

One of the ladies said I could come out, the other offered me ice tea. I climbed a ladder to wash the windows they couldn’t reach and that night a biker chick I met at the pool hall let me sleep on her sofa. In the morning, I hitched a ride home with a bug-eyed hillbilly driving a big truck who must have done 100 the whole time.

He was from the New Orleans crew who ate at the restaurant where I was the waitress. There was also a gang of Texans who looked like peace and love hippies. And a bunch of badass pot growers from Alabama who drove souped up Caddies that could out run any sheriff’s vehicle. These were not bumpkins, and I fit right in with my lipstick red hair and elaborate silver and turquoise jewelry. When I moved in with him, I hadn’t even started to unpack before he yelled at me. He ran hot or cold, I never knew which he'd be and I spent most of my time trying to stay one step ahead of him, it was exhausting. When he moved out, he left some of his furniture behind and stuck me with the bills. I pushed his stuff out on the porch; when he came to pick it up and saw what I had done, he shut off the utilities with a monkey wrench. Later, I was bad mouthing him at a bar saying I wished his new house would burn down when the woman next to me leaned back and there he was. The room froze, just like in an old western movie; we glared at each other for a cold moment before I walked out. That same night, his new place did burn to the ground along with his truck, which was filled with what he’d rescued earlier from the porch. He got out just in time, he swore I had cursed him and caused it. 

Odd, I dreamed about him hopping around barefoot in front of a bonfire when it was actually happening.

Early on, when things still looked good with him, he took me to Mardi Gras. He told me bayou ghost stories as we drove along the Mississippi with spooky Spanish moss swaying from the trees, and on the day of the big parade, he wrote the address of where we were staying on my arm in case I got lost. Which, of course, I did. We were dancing with the crowd and suddenly he was gone. I bobbed around trying to find him until I saw a cop and showed him the address on my arm; he walked me to the bus stop to make sure I caught the right one. I showed the address to the bus driver too and when I sat down, I realized my shoes were missing. I thought I loved him at the time, I do know he didn’t love me. Years later, I heard he was born-again and preaching to his own congregation. He was the first of the three blond Irish-American men I’ve been with who’ve tried to wreck my life; you’d think once would have been enough to learn my lesson.

During the summer break between my junior and senior years in college, when my parents were living on a US Army base in Germany, my mother took me on a bus tour of Italy. She had said it was the only thing left she wanted to do, see Italy, and the way she said it scared me. It went well, although she’d have kept me on a leash if there’d been one handy, especially in Venice. But by the time we reached Florence she calmed down and I managed to escape her clutches long enough to trance out in front of Botticelli’s Three Graces. We had heard a howling dog outside our hotel window the night before and she, a big fan of Barnabus Collins on the soap opera Dark Shadows, asked the breakfast waiter about vampires. Confused by the question, he stared blankly at her until she made fangs with her fingers. Shrinking back in horror, he sent another waiter with our coffee. Thinking this was hysterical, she told the story at dinner to our table mates on the tour. Then I talked about my theory that angels are really aliens. The other tourists on our bus avoided us from that point on.

After I was back at school, two months later, she killed herself.

Just before I returned to the States, she took me for a drive along the Rhine. We stopped at an ancient church at the top of a hill and sat on a wooden bench just inside the door while a wedding was going on. The bride insisted we eat with them afterwards at the banquet table they had set up in the courtyard. Later we parked beside the river to watch the barges go by. A family was playing ping-pong on one while their dog barked at the mother who, her hair pinned up in rollers, was hanging out laundry. The sister and daughter of sailors, my mother declared that living on the river would have been a perfect life. Still eating our sandwiches from the wedding banquet, we got out of the car as a pair of swans, so small and pretty on the water, swam towards us. My mother tore up her sandwich and tossed the pieces at the swans. Their shiny eyes locked on the food as they plucked it from the water. I handed the rest of my sandwich to my mother as the swans clamored ashore. Marching over to us, suddenly enormous, the male snatched the bread from her happy hand as the smaller female, she was as tall as me, studied my buttons before turning to her mate hissing and snapped at the food in his beak. Splashing back in the water without even a second glance, they glided off with the current. Speechless, my mother stood for a moment before driving us home as the green hills of the Rhine valley rushed by our car windows. Three days later, there was a terrible moment when my father demanded she and I say our goodbyes at the house because she might make a scene at the airport. He had his own agenda for wanting me alone, which led to an airport scene between the two of us much worse than one my mother would have ever caused; but as she waved goodbye from the kitchen doorway, I knew I’d never see her again.

He buried her at the military cemetery in Arlington even though she’d always said she wanted to be cremated and have her ashes scattered over water. He also lied to her brothers, saying it had been a car accident. She did, in fact, die in the car, after locking herself in and washing a bottle of pills down with some of his gin before turning on the exhaust. He remarried a few months later and tried to bribe me into keeping his secret from the rest of the family. I choose not to speak to him now, but I know he has two grown sons I’ve never met because that’s the way I want it.

Shortly before I left New York for Cape Cod, I visited an old college friend in DC and we spent a couple of hours at the Arlington Cemetery. After a search of the records, we found my mother across from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. I tucked my AA anniversary coin, it was for 21 years, which is how old I was when she died, into the dirt that edged her stone where nobody would see it. I’d like to have her exhumed once my father’s gone and honor her request to be cremated and scattered across water. There are lots of ponds here, or maybe Herring Cove.

Do swans ever swim in the Provincetown harbor?

          

Haven’t written lately, life keeps getting in the way – at the moment I’m sitting in a cold dark store while an electrician works next door with the power off as I wait for FedEx to deliver a shipment. Luckily I brought my notebook since I’ve been waiting for five hours now.  So far, I’ve done both the New York Times and Boston Globe Sunday crossword puzzles and today’s LA Times Suduko. Too bad I forgot the tedious Elizabeth of York biography I’ve been trudging through, but it'd probably make me sleepy. So I’m stuck with my workshop assignment. The past few weeks our facilitator has been sick and we’ve been writing on our own, although last week instead of a prompt we read from our various projects and ended up having a conversation about our processes. We all do it differently, and the conversation led to this week’s prompt.

I’m a pen to paper kind of girl because of my painting background; I’m all about mark making. I’m also big on layers and will write something repeatedly until I feel like I’m done before I type a draft that will get revised until I’m satisfied. If it’s for this blog, I’ll copy and paste it to the site and then fiddle with it so it sits nicely between the margins. On the other hand, the novel I am currently, and hopefully, in the final edit of, has been rewritten multiple times. Originally it was told by the main character and done by hand in the grid paper notebooks I’m partial to. Then, and this is the process, I went back through that version and rewrote each page on the one facing it, the back of the previous page, and made whatever changes I felt necessary. Then I transcribed it into a fresh new notebook. Often this involved literal cutting and pasting, or more accurately, taping, whole sections in other locations until I had a version without anything scribbled on it. Then and only then did I type it into the computer starting with the opening of the story straight to the end. Once it was done and spell checked, I sent it to a friend for proofing. But before I got it back from her, I decided the three other characters should also speak, which meant writing the story over in each of their identifiable voice, and in their own individual notebooks, with a complex outline to keep the timeline moving naturally. We’re talking stacks of grid paper notebooks, several rolls of tape, and an entire box of the micro-ball pens I like. This all got typed up too, and revised of course, until eventually I was ready to have people look at it. Which was also about the time I joined the workshop and started reading it out loud to the group. 

And yes, revising it even some more based on the feedback that I found helpful. Sometimes this feedback was about the structure, but usually it had to do with distractions or flow. Both of the people who’ve finished this version have said not to make any big changes because they like it the way it is. Because, really, the book is finished, I just need to tweak the typos and get better at presenting it to the public. Nit picky, just like the way I paint, but I don’t understand going with a first draft. I want perfection; and since it’s me, I’ll copy this again before I type it.

The assignment at this week’s writer’s workshop was to compose a letter to a contemporary of the same age and gender with a similar background who lives in Afghanistan. This was for a possible book the group might put together, Greetings From Provincetown, that sort of thing, but alas, after some Internet research that only confirmed what I already knew, I simply would not exist in Afghanistan. I am older than the life expectancy for women there, it’s sixty-one, although the average age of death for them is closer to fifty given the high childbirth mortality rate and the undisclosed number of honor killings.

I never had children, but I did get divorced and earned a college degree. I’m also an artist and obviously a writer, and have supported myself for over forty years. None of which would bode well for me in Kabul, but what most certainly would have done me in was my sexual behavior as a younger woman. I’d surely have been stoned in my promiscuous twenties, or perhaps later for shaming my family or community by being the victim of a felony assault that involved both a knife and a gun. And if I survived into my forties, my brush with cancer at forty-three could have killed me since I wouldn’t have received treatment or seen a doctor in the first place.

More likely, I’d have been forced into marriage at twelve and promptly beaten to a pulp or thrown myself off a cliff. Instead I was lucky enough to grow up a white girl American with the privileges and luxury problems attached to that status. I may not make as much money as my male counterparts, but I can vote and choose to live alone or how to dress regardless of what other people may feel about my choices. 

So. No Afghani contemporary to correspond with; no letter written, addressed or sent. But not an exercise in futility either, it was more one of gratitude, because I am grateful for my health, my opportunities and my life. Which was probably, wink wink, the point of the assignment to begin with.

This Tuesday’s prompt at the writing workshop was a little embroidered felt yurt ornament and a small ceramic box shaped like a lighthouse that might have held kitchen matches. There were some interesting responses from the group, poems, a bit of fiction, a limerick, but I was too caught up in my taxes, don’t ask, to work on it until now. My first thought was about the Tibetans I had met while living in New York. They're the most beautiful and generous people, both physically and spiritually, I’ve ever known. There was one in particular who had lived in a yurt with his yak herding family until he came to America to make money to support them. He arrived not speaking a word of English and immediately had to learn to navigate the subways to get from the room he shared in Queens with another Tibetan to his job as a janitor at the store where I worked in Manhattan. Imagine. Not only did he have to deal with the noise and dirt and turbulence but abrasive New Yorkers as well. He'd just smile and nod and push his broom, he was the essence of gratitude.

I also thought of writing about the Tiny House movement because I'm fascinated by it having lived in a few tiny abodes myself. The Arkansas shack I mentioned a while back, and my first apartment in Soho that was 14x14 feet with the ceiling and walls all painted park bench green and felt like a forest cave. The cabin I had my first summer here was small too, it was half the size of my current living room but very cute.

But it was the ceramic lighthouse box that caught my attention. It was probably made in China, I didn’t look for a label, and no doubt had been bought in a tourist trap only to end up being sold again at a flea market or yard sale from a collection of knickknacks that decorated a kitchen shelf. Someone, or several someones, had taken the time to design and make it, then someone or several someones had bothered to buy it. And there it sat, along with an embroidered yurt ornament, on the table upstairs in the library where our writing workshop meets in front of the big windows with the view of a real lighthouse out in the harbor.

We have three lighthouses in Provincetown. The one you see from the library is called Long Point, another at the west end of the harbor is known as Wood End, and the third at Race Point is on the ocean side beach off Herring Cove. All of them are picturesque and show up all the time in paintings and photographs of Cape Cod. They’re our Statue of Liberty, beacons, symbolic; although my favorite is the lighthouse is in Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard because you can walk right up to it on the beach. I did it on a frigid gloomy February afternoon almost ten years ago. I’d gone there for a job interview and was so sure I had the gig I had put a deposit on a funny attic apartment, but it was not meant to be. I was heart-broken when it didn’t happen, but I've got over a hundred pictures I took that day, and the knowledge, at least now, that if it had happened I most likely wouldn’t have found my way here – how sad would that be?

Continuing the heritage vein, my mother's parents, he the Ulster Presbyterian Christian Scientist convert and St Lawrence Seaway steward, she the Isle of Man Anglican, were strictly lace curtain. He was the grandfather who died when I was a baby during the time my mother and I lived with her parents while my father was away fighting in the Korean War. I have a clear memory of their house with its dark floral patterned wallpaper and the Jack Russell I was terrified of. There was the stone birdbath in the front yard and Canadian geese that ravaged the back garden. We were in a car accident, maybe in the parking lot after visiting my grandfather at the hospital, nothing major, no serious injuries, just another car ramming into ours from behind. I saw it coming through the rear window as I leaned over my mother's shoulder while she held me in her lap in the front seat; I tried to warn them, but I was too young to speak. Here comes the bump; all shook up. Uncle Paul must have been driving because my grandmother was in the back. He wasn't actually blood related; he'd been my grandfather's best friend on the boats and spent all his winters at their house even after my grandfather died because he had helped them pay for it. I loved his tattoos; my favorite was a hula girl on his forearm who wiggled when he clenched his fist. When I got my own tattoo in 1980, I was thinking of Uncle Paul. The night he died, he woke me up by sitting on the side of my bed and saying goodbye. He blew one last kiss in the doorway as the ambulance pulled up outside because, in fact, he was already dead. My first psychic experience, my communing with the ghost of Uncle Paul, I talked about it over and over, this was before my father came back from Korea so I wasn't even two yet. I doubt it bothered my Isle of Man grandmother, but my mother would say later she was afraid I’d inherited the Manx talent for such strange things, and I had. Especially as an adolescent, there was the incident where I woke up one night and saw the child of our neighbor swinging in the old rubber tire her father had hung from a tree only to find out in the morning she’d died, again, at about the same time. A few years earlier, when my family was leaving the States to live on an army base in Germany, I remember being very upset saying goodbye to my paternal grandmother because I was convinced I’d never see her again. All the adults laughed at me, but in a few months she was dead as well. I saw things, it was simply information, and usually my mother was in some way involved, if only as a conduit since she said she didn't believe in ESP. Once I stood with her and watched two deliverymen bring a sofa up our stairs and I knew they were going to fall. So when they both slid back down the steps with the sofa between them, breaking one of their arms, I already knew it would happen and said so. One of them said something about me being a little witch. And perhaps I was, although this questionable skill would more or less stop when my mother passed while I was in college, but that’s another story.

Always in a hurry, I was born on the way to the delivery room and then walked at eight months. This was confirmed by my mother's memory of me toddling around at her father's funeral although I can't remember it. Or him either, he was an Ulster Presbyterian from Belfast who became a Christian Scientist once he moved to America. His wife, my grandmother, was Isle of Man Anglican; in other words, they were strictly tee-totaling lace curtain, and one can only imagine how upset they were when my mother got mixed up with my Mick father. I have friends who have either a single black or Jewish grandparent and say that one quarter of their heritage makes them who they are. This was how my father's father's Catholicism affected the family. Not so much about the church, but politics and patriarchal rage.

Legend has it my paternal grandfather stowed away on a boat leaving Cork while the Black and Tans were looking to hang him for blowing things up. He supposedly jumped ship in Nova Scotia, swam ashore and then wandered around Ontario until he met my grandmother who was there on vacation. She was Irish too but came to the States as an infant with her mother after her sailor father drowned in a fishing accident. Her mother got remarried to a Michigan farmer who adopted her two orphan daughters and raised them as strict Methodists. I believe that my Methodist grandmother made my Catholic grandfather take the Pledge not to drink before she married him. Either way, he was a very angry man who had no tolerance for children. I learned quite young to gauge his mood by how much English he was speaking. The thicker his brogue the angrier he was, and Gaelic meant all small children should get out of the house. He stabbed me with a fork once for having my elbow on the dinner table.  My brother and I didn't eat with my parents since our father had an aversion to small children too, so our table manners were not the best.

But I loved my grandfather; I still get a thrill when I hear an Irish accent. Besides being Sinn Fein, his siblings were horse thieves and prostitutes. Not a lot of job skills there, so there was not a lot of money to be had either, especially during the Depression when my grandfather is said to have been running booze across the frozen Great Lakes gangster style, although he was working as a mailman by the time I knew him. Which is probably why a whole other family from across town showed up at his funeral and introduced themselves to my father and his sisters saying they were his children and grandchildren too. I met one of them once, those long lost half cousins, in New York, in a bar, who insisted I looked like his sister and that we were related. I ignored him, we’d both been drinking and I didn’t trust him, but he had too much information for it not to be true.

Ah, the luck of the Irish, I wore green on Tuesday – did you?

I read the dinosaur blog post at an open mic reading in the library last night. They liked it; there were satisfying murmurs and several bouts of laughter as well as a nice round of applause when I was done. I started off by saying I’d joined a workshop and had been doing readings for my novel but I now find myself more involved with memoir work. In fact, because of the time limit at most of the open mic sessions I’ve been to recently, usually I read from the blog. My Zippy the Roller-skating Chimpanzee post and the one about John Lennon were so well received that I read them together at the presentation the workshop did for Valentine’s Day. I’ve read the first chapter of the novel twice now, each time led to revisions, but the feedback I'm getting from both the other writers in the group and the audiences is that the memoir work is much better than my fiction. 

I’m enough, my history is enough, but what to do about this novel? When I first joined the workshop last fall and began blogging again, I was in love with my characters. I’ve been living with them since before I left New York, they’re my friends, I know them. I was dedicated to their stories and bringing them to life, but I wasn’t ready yet, I didn’t have the extra cash to copyright it before sending it to agents much less out into the ether. I am ready now; I have enough money, a webpage, a blog, and an acceptable following under my pen name on Facebook and Twitter. I intend go forward with the copyright registration, and once that’s in place, I’ll start contacting agents with my query and elevator speech synopsis, and the first chapter if appropriate. But it’s the memoir work that has my attention. Hopefully I can do both; the job of selling a finished product I love but have let go of, and this new, more truthful peeling back process. It’s actually not new; I wrote a memoir at forty-five and another about a specific event when I was sixty. Neither went anywhere, but they are excellent source material for what I’m doing now, and in each case, basically all that is required is minor editing and stylistic revisions so they have the same voice. 

I turned sixty-five last weekend, we had giant chunks of ice wash ashore in the harbor yesterday, perhaps now is as good a time as any to combine those two memoirs into one cohesive piece; if not for you, the public, then at least for me.

When I was five or six, my mother gave me a Golden Book about dinosaurs for Christmas. I clearly remember disappearing into those pages while sitting in a patch of sunlight on the rug in front of the tree beside the fireplace. When I got sober at thirty-eight and the eggshell around my addiction and sorry choices collapsed, dinosaurs once again called out to me. In the beginning it was just toys, a Godzilla lighter gushing flames from his mouth, a pair of glow in the dark stegosaurus. But it was while walking through the dinosaur rooms at the Natural History Museum and reconciling with my wounded inner child that I became an adult; by the time I'd seen the whole exhibit, I felt safe and grown up. Afterwards, I went to the souvenir shop and found the same Golden Book I had read by the tree that Christmas. We, my invisible inner child self and I, bought the book, then walked through Central Park and promptly went into Bergdorf's for a bottle of Chanel #5. It was 1990, and suddenly dinosaurs were everywhere, all my friends were giving them to me. I went into the hospital during that time and when I left ten days later, I needed a shopping bag for all the dinosaurs I’d acquired. I must have been a funny sight, a predatory blonde with an IV and two catheter bags in bed with an army of little monsters to protect her.

In college, I saw FANTASIA in London with my mother. Each seat in the theater had an ashtray on the armrest. A joint was being passed down our row, the English stranger to my right handed it to me. I took a hit, and then without thinking, offered it to my mother. She took a long drag and passed it back to me. There are dinosaurs in FANTASIA, fabulous ones in fact, and nymphs and fairies to tell the story of my demons and redemption for me. I think this may go back to another incarnation, my Irish tinker roots perhaps. I feel the pull of a caravan wagon, I also feel the tug of a tepee and following the buffalo; I was born at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, which is where Geronimo died when he was imprisoned there with his tribe, so maybe I picked up one of their souls. But I feel those pioneers venturing west too; if not the wife or child of an Apache.

Humor me, how many pairs of feet have I walked on? A buxom wench slopping grog and servicing drunks against a wall behind the stables who died in childbirth or drowned in a bog unnoticed only to return and die again of famine or political violence. Then it might have been on to the States as a Shaker or Quaker or a missionary nun; another hard life of service. I could have been on the Trail of Tears, or a white woman on a wagon train who ended up as a little scrap of blonde scalp on some Indian's belt; which would justify my coming back Native American. Those Wild West saloon girls call my name, too; I was there. I can smell it, the sweat and smoke and dust, the sum of my parts. A warrior whore now wrinkled and old in her shapeless black clothes suits me nicely.

I haven’t written in a couple weeks because all I can think about is the weather.  Unprecedented they say, and I’m struggling to stay warm like everybody else on the East Coast. But I surrender, I’m going to write about the snow even though I’m absolutely sick of it. I’m sick of looking at snow, sick of complaining about snow, and yet, after last night’s snow, there is more in tomorrow’s forecast.

It’s been all about wool and layers and a down-filled coat and my fur-line boots with the non-skid bottoms and insulated gloves. And lip balm, lots and lots of lip balm. March is only a week away; but I can’t wait for this winter to be over. At least I have neighbors who will drive me to the grocery store or home from the library or clinic if I ask. I have ventured out on the rare occasion when the sun was shining; I found the one route with the least amount of ice, although it does mean walking in the middle of the road. But thankfully, this isn't Boston; and I’m not dependent on the T to get around. The store where I work in Ptown is usually closed during the winter unless I feel like opening on the weekends. I did, for Valentine’s Day, and we had some business, but it cost me a fortune to get shoveled out and I think I’ll wait until the latest three foot drift in front of the door melts before I do it again.

In the meantime, I realized last week my behavior has been very similar to how I acted immediately after 9/11. Yes, yes, it’s just snow, no planes are crashing into buildings half a mile away, no horrible smell, no living behind barricades, but paralyzing nonetheless. I’ve been trapped in the house alone not knowing if the power was going to stay on and washing clothes by hand in the tub because carrying a basket of laundry anywhere was more or less impossible. Oh, and I’ve probably gained five pounds, which happened after 9/11 too, since all I’ve done is eat and read – Lila by Marilynne Robinson, it ends with a blizzard, Alan Cumming’s Not My Father’s Son, heart-breaking as well as heart-warming, and The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, which was perfect for lying on the sofa for days on end. And I’m not alone. I finally went to the writer's workshop which has been cancelled the last few weeks, and not one of us in it has been writing. You'd think we would, having nothing else to do, but all of us were shut down and incapable of anything close to contemplation.

So, snow. Not life threatening unless you caught in the frigid cold, but beyond our control and utterly, completely, unquestionably boring. 

I don’t like it.

Last week, after I wrote about the blizzard, and John Lennon of course, I mentioned how the snow would probably be gone in a few days. This has not been the case, in fact it has snowed several times since plus one day of freezing rain on top of the plowed up remains of Juno that then froze into solid mounds of ice. There is snow in the forecast everyday for the following week except tomorrow, although tomorrow it will be wicked cold. It even snowed today, it was just a dusting, but slippery enough if you happened to be out being blown around by the wind.

Ah, that wind again. There’s an old joke about not bothering to have a hairdo on the Cape, and more than once I’ve had a snugly pulled-on stocking cap blow off. It makes me wonder about Melville’s whalers and other sailors braving the hazards of the open seas. Imagine. Hollywood doesn’t do them justice, it’s a miracle any of them came back home alive. One of my Irish great-grandfathers was a fisherman who drowned because he got tangled up in the rope of an anchor that had been tossed overboard. This was my father’s mother’s father but there were sailors in my mother’s family as well. Her father was a steward on the Saint Lawrence Seaway who was gone much of the year, and her three brothers were in the Navy during World War II. So it seems living close to the ocean is in my blood. But spare me boats, I’m a firm believer in not going places I can’t get to on foot.

This week, between the weather and minor surgery on Friday, I’ve been more or less house bound and have spent most of my time on the sofa reading Eleanor Catton’s brilliant novel "The Luminaries". Confusing, yes, tricky and with a complicated structure, yes, and I must confess I went online to clarify a few questions, which, as it turned out, were the same questions as everybody else’s about the supernatural aspects of the book. Almost a ghost story, it also has harrowing seafaring voyages, I could hardly put it down. 

But back in the real world, I made a trip to the grocery store after posting on Facebook that I needed a ride since the roads were not walkable and within five minutes three complete strangers had volunteered. That wouldn't have happened in New York, neighborly strangers, it's what I love about Provincetown.

Yesterday, when the power blew because of the 60mph winds during the blizzard, I took my birds into the bedroom and read by candlelight until it was too dark to see anymore. It is, for the record, possible to keep a room from freezing if you burn enough candles but eventually the air smells strange. That was the point, when I worried about what I was breathing, when the lights blinked back on and I heard the water heater kick in so I knew it would be warm soon. It continued to snow through the night only stopping forty-three hours after it started, and I‘m not surprised that what I wanted most besides a hot cup of coffee was my Wifi connection.

This was not my first Cape Cod blizzard; it may not even have been the worst. Two years ago, power went out several times during a series of nor’easters, once for twenty-three hours. The winter I was in Yarmouth Port there were storms that knocked trees down and when, as I lived in the basement, I couldn’t leave the house. Or, I could get out but not off the property since so much snow was piled up against the fence I couldn’t open it. Yesterday I heard someone outside yelling for help. I couldn’t see them from my window so I went downstairs but the snow was so deep I couldn’t open the front door. Someone else must have called the cops because shortly thereafter I saw flashing lights and glowing neon vests through the white out, although a plow had to come dig them out. But at least it didn’t flood like on Nantucket. The beaches around Herring Cove took a beating and a bad breach in the Truro barrier dunes flooded the Pamet again, but unless it snows Friday as predicted, most of the snow will be gone by the weekend, unlike in Boston or New York which can hold on to their snow for weeks.

There was a blizzard in January of 1978 during a garbage strike and I remember getting out of the subway at Rockefeller Center and not being able to see across Fifth Avenue since there were piles of trash under the plowed up snow along the sidewalk. I worked at Saks that winter and was in a boutique in front of the elevators on the seventh floor when the doors of one slid open and out stepped John Lennon and Yoko Ono in those famous fur parkas. I was stunned; they basically had the place to themselves because of the weather, and he was very charming when he told me Yoko needed sweaters. I would wait on them again at the Soho Charcuterie. I was a busgirl when there was no such thing - I’d show up at a table with water and customers would always comment on their busboy being a woman - and the waiter had sent me over without warning me who was being served. They were with Peter Boyle and his wife, and John asked for water with boobles in it. I capped his ashtray, I still have his cigarette butt in a little green box, and Yoko, who was cranky and picked at her food, needed a doggy bag. I also saw the Beatles first US concert; they played the Ed Sullivan show and then took the train, if you can believe it, from New York to DC where my family lived at the time. There was a snowstorm then too, I was 14, it was February; my life would never be the same.

Donegal Chronicles Redux is not my first blog. Before I left New York, I had three more. One was Maureen Donegal where I posted my photographs of downtown Manhattan, but when I moved to the Cape and started taking new pictures of the dunes and moors, my followers lost interest. Another was the original Donegal Chronicles, which was created about six months prior to the move to address events that led to my leaving and the memoir I was working on at the time. I continued write on it while in Yarmouth Port, but stopped by the time I got to Provincetown since it was no longer relevant to my life and what I was working on. I liked the title though, so I revised it when I began blogging again. Both of those older sites are linked to this one, neither is active, but the third, Archetypal Angels is not although it is still there, (here’s the link to it) http://archetypalangels.blogspot.com, but you have to go to the beginning to see what it’s really about because it evolved into something else. At first it was my paintings, then it expanded to include other artists I saw while working at galleries in Soho, Chelsea and Brooklyn that I felt a connection with, whether their art was angel related or not.

Archetypal is a Jungian term referring to an image that transcends cultural boundaries and spiritual practices. Westerners usually think my pieces are ghosts but for me, as a Buddhist, they're angels, which are basically the same as ghosts except less scary. The earliest example I have is a mug I made with my grandmother, who was a professional ceramicist, during a family visit when I was five. There are seven sloppy winged and haloed figures on the mug with my name, which matches the messy blue handle, written in Grandmother’s scroll. Later, in college, I did a series of prints and paintings that were literal angels, but even as an adult, my abstract work had something like wings in them. That was what I was doing, abstracts, when the Archetypal Angel series was born. I’d gone to a Native American drum ceremony at the outdoor plaza of the World Trade Center in the late 90’s. We arrived before dawn and sat inside a circle of musicians who sang and drummed as the sun rose. I went home and started a new painting in honor of a friend who’d recently died of AIDS, and once the sketch was done I realized there was a howling face in it. I went on to do over a hundred paintings as well as a series of small collages that incorporated more traditional angels along with astronomical imagery during the period after 9/11 when it was too painful to put a brush to paper or canvas because of what I saw that morning.

I don’t paint angels anymore; I actually don’t paint at all since I became serious about writing. They’re too New York, people in Ptown find them alarming, but I don’t feel that energy, the need to be guarded, anymore. So I just write, I love my characters, but it’s nice to know my angels are still around.

In 1974, I lived on Avenue C and 7^th Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The block was always on fire and the junkies shot up on our doorstep. It was, supposedly, an improvement on where I’d previously been, which was a shack in the Ozarks where I had a wood burning pot bellied stove, and an outhouse because there was no running water. I went briefly downhill from Avenue C while I slept on a rollaway cot in the back of the stockroom at the boutique on West Broadway where I worked as part of my salary. It was thrilling to look at the lit up Trade Towers as I snuck in at night and quietly pulled the security gate down behind me. Once inside, I’d sit silently in the dark so the landlady wouldn’t know I was there, and I bathed in the industrial sink in the morning. But at least I got to be alone, which was part of the draw for the old shack in the woods, and eventually I found the rent-controlled apartment I then lived in for thirty years before that landlord paid me to relinquish it.

We moved constantly when I was a kid growing up in the military. In fact, my parents were driving from Texas to Michigan when I was born. They stopped in Fort Sill, Oklahoma so my mother could have me, then two days later they were on their way again with me asleep in a wicker laundry basket on the back seat. Even in college, I switched dorms and then apartments five times in four years. So I was afraid, when I moved to the Cape, that those nomadic days were back because I had four addresses, including the one in New York, in less than a year. I have a gypsy style, lots of black, lots of shawls, and lots of small scaled furniture I'm able lift myself, but transience makes me nervous. I can do it, I can stand it, but I want to stay put and be grounded. Luckily, I won my current apartment in a lottery and it’s the nicest place I’ve ever been in. Not even my parents had it better, and because it’s brand new, nobody else has lived in it. There are shiny floors and plenty of closets, luxuries in New York, as well as a tub and a shower in the same room as the toilet, which for me, was unheard of. But I was so intimidated by my fancy kitchen appliances, it took me months to use my high-tech oven.

I baked cookies in it last night. And ate them watching the big TV in the living room. There’s a smaller TV at the foot of my bed, both of them were given to me, as was the Pottery Barn sofa I was lying on and listening to the parakeets I rescued this summer try to sing louder than the background music on Downton Abbey. I had a life in New York, I was young and pretty then, but it got scary on 9/11. I have a life here now, I’m safe, I have a great view of the backside of the Provincetown skyline and I’m making friends. I even have hot water and heat that whisper instead of those old metal radiators clanking away all night. Oh, have I mentioned my dishwasher? It changed my life. So stay in the moment, wait for the miracle, I know for a fact they happen.

Monday, I had my first foray into Cape Cod jury duty. This entailed waking up at 5AM to get ready to catch a 6:30 bus to Hyannis. It was still dark and the full moon was flirting with stormy clouds as I walked my usual shortcut into the center of town, although the sun was creeping up by the time we drove east along the Beach Point section of the harbor. That was the easiest part of the morning. Once I reached Hyannis, I caught a pokey little shuttle bus that meandered through a myriad of what pass for malls on Cape and a multitude of medical centers to get to the Barnstable courthouse.

The trip took a little over three hours and I arrived with just enough time to hit the ladies before my group of prospective jurors began being processed. This was jury duty, after all, with the typical hurry up and waiting until the judge finally started individually asking us questions. I was, miraculously, number six on his list and all I had to do was show him my stack of letters from the New York State Parole Board Commissioner's office thanking me for my Victim Statements, they are entirely another story and always get me out of jury duty, before I was excused. Then, equally a miracle, as I left the courthouse, the pokey little shuttle going back to Hyannis pulled up and got me to the terminal just in time to catch the 12:30 bus home so I didn’t need to wait for the one at 5:30. I was having lunch at 2:30, I hadn’t eaten since the oatmeal I wolfed down before leaving at dawn and I was starving.

Somehow, the trip back was shorter, less time in Hyannis, and my favorite part, as always, was that moment when the bus comes over the rise in Truro, you know it if you’ve seen it, and you get a glimpse of Provincetown and the harbor before they disappear behind the strip of summer cottages that line the water side of the road. I’ve seen it hundreds of times, in every season, both night and day, and it still takes my breath away. Monday, on the way back from my brief stint of jury duty, the bay was full of white caps cresting across the water under an icy blue sky. Today it's grey, but you can get a better look upon re-entering Provincetown at Beach Point, which is always pretty, coming or going. And, for me at least, the place where I know I have, once again, found my way home.

Twice now in the last few days, as I came out of the bank and again, walking passed the school, a fox, all bushy and gorgeous, trotted by me.  This would never happen in New York; there, it’d have been a huge rat digging in trash or terrorizing subway riders.

I had a rat in my Soho apartment once, I’d dealt with mice and they were bad enough, but a rat is, as they say, a whole other animal. For the record, they do smell. And shriek like a two-year-old, and charge at you in the middle of the night if you get up to see what the hell is going on. I threw shoes at mine and trapped it under a metal bucket. Then I hid in the bathroom trying to reach animal control on my cell phone. Somehow I got transferred to 911 and they sent two burly cops who, on seeing the size of the tail whipping around outside of the bucket, debated about whether to shoot it but decided against blowing a hole in my floor. Only slightly less afraid than I was, they finally shoved an old cookie sheet under the bucket and carried that thrashing, screaming nightmare out the door. A Manhattan moment if ever there was one; but at least the damn thing hadn’t leapt out of my toilet after swimming through the sewer or actually bit me.

Perhaps my favorite interaction with a non-human species was at a loft party one New Year’s Eve where Zippy, the world famous roller-skating chimpanzee, plopped down on the sofa next to me and held my hand. His paw felt like a leather glove, and with his toothy grin and little suit and bow tie, he looked exactly like George Burns. We sat holding hands until one of my friends half jokingly said I had better watch out or I might have to get married. Not that I haven’t dated worse, my ex-husband, for one, was a bit of a beast - but I do remember Zippy fondly.

Happy New Year!