Thanksgiving

So after I posted earlier today, I started flipping thru writing prompts on Pinterest. There are so many! I found one I like while waiting for the dentist to call me in. By the time my drilling and filling was done, I had worked out most of the story. I rushed home to write it out and here it is!  The prompt was a 'first line prompt' which means it has to be the first line of the story. It was "The house shouldn't be this empty." Read on and leave me a comment letting me know what you think!

“The house shouldn’t be this empty” I thought as I walked down the hall to the bedrooms.  Where was everyone?  It’s Thanksgiving and all the family should be here.  The house should be bustling with activity: cooking and table setting and kids running and playing.  
When I pulled up to my grandma’s house, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.  The circle drive was packed with cars.  Sleds were thrown haphazardly on the ground near the front door.  Obviously, my cousins had all been sledding earlier in the day.  It couldn’t have been a great sledding excursion though.  The sleds were in terrible condition.  They were dirty, dented, some had cracks. “Time to get the kids new sleds, guys” I thought to myself.  I knocked on the door, but that was just a formality.  Family was always welcome at Grandma’s and she always said to just come on in.  So, I did.  I pulled the door open and it creaked on its hinges.  I made a mental note to find a can of WD-40 later.  I called out “Hey guys!  I finally made it!”  I hung my coat on a hanger and crammed it into the over-stuffed closet.  Twenty people’s worth of winter gear made the closet door nearly impossible to close. “The roads were pretty snowy, and icy in spots, but it wasn’t too bad.  I was only white-knuckling it a couple times,” I continued as I walked toward the kitchen.  It was quiet.  Quiet? I stopped.  On Thanksgiving?  I took a moment to listen.  It wasn’t just quiet.  The house was totally silent.  No yelling or laughing coming from the kids’ playroom.  No clanging of pots and pans in the kitchen.  There was no welcoming smell of turkey dinner in the oven.  In fact, the house smelled dusty and moldy, as if it had been closed up for years.  The hair on the back of my neck stood up.  What was going on?  I had spoken to Mom on the way here.  The expected noise of a big family gathering in the background had been clear on the phone. It had been so loud, we were having trouble understanding each other, and we had to cut our conversation short.  I was going to be here shortly anyway, we could talk then.  I stepped into the kitchen.  Nothing. No one was there.  Pots and pans were hanging from the rack, plates and cups were stacked in the cupboard.  The sink was empty.  I continued into the dining room.  The table was empty.  Grandma’s china sat in neat rows in the china hutch.  Everything was just as Grandma liked it: neat and orderly.  Except, there was a layer of dust on everything.  A thick layer, the kind that accumulates in an abandoned building over the course of twenty years.  What the hell?  My heart was pounding.  I felt like the victim in a horror movie, who hadn’t yet encountered the crazy masked murderer, but was about to. 
I continued through the house.  “Hello? Where are you guys?”  I called out as I walked up the stairs and down the hall to the bedrooms. Opening each bedroom door, I saw the family’s suitcases and bags thrown on the beds but, like the kitchen, everything was covered in dust and cobwebs.  I ran back down the steps and back to the front door.  I was starting to panic.  Something was very wrong.  Outside, I saw things that I hadn’t noticed when I first arrived.  Subtle differences that hadn’t caught my attention the first time.  Sure, the circle drive was packed with cars, but the tires were all flat and there was rust creeping into the paint jobs.  Grandma’s beloved garden had the leftovers of that summer’s flowers, but also the frozen shells of weeds that were moving in and taking over, as if the garden had been neglected for some time.  I looked around the side of the house and saw the swing set was in the yard, right where it should be, but the swing was hanging from just one chain.  The other had rusted and broken, and now lay in a heap in the frosty ground. 
I ran back to my car, jumped in and locked the door behind me.  The panic finally won, I couldn’t fight it anymore, and I started sobbing uncontrollably.  What had happened?  Where was my family? And why does it look like it’s been ages since they’ve been here?  Crazy ideas started flitting through my head.  Time traveling?  Bad joke?  Ha, really bad joke.  If this was someone’s idea of a prank, I was going to disown them.  Bad dream?  I latched on to that one.  It had to be it.  I was dreaming.  I wiped the tears from my face and took a deep breath to calm myself.  “Get yourself together Rebekka, it’s just a dream.  You’re in your apartment, in your warm cozy bed, dreaming.  Now you know you’re dreaming, you can wake yourself up, right?“ There had to be a way.  I pulled my sleeve up and pinched my arm, hard. *beep* What the hell was that? *beep* I looked around trying to find the source of the high-pitched noise.  *beep* My car was off and the key was out.  *beep* No power going to any of the car’s electronics. *beep* I lifted my butt off the seat and took my cell phone out of my back pocket.  *beep* There were no notifications. *beep* I sat still for a moment, listening. *beep* I needed to figure out the direction the beeping was coming from. *beep* I turned my head this way and that way. *beep* Direction didn’t seem to matter; the beeping was very close to me. *beep* Very close, like it was coming FROM be! *beep* What the hell?  *beep* I opened the car door and stepped out. *beep* It followed me out. *beep* I took a few steps away from the car, onto the grass of the front yard. *beep* It was…..in my head.  Beeping in my head?! Great. 
I tried to ignore the incessant beeping as I looked around some more.  It had been a couple years since I had made to Grandma’s for Thanksgiving dinner.  It looked exactly how I remembered it.  “Of course, it does dummy.  This is your dream, remember?”  I laughed at the conversation I was having with myself, feeling just one step shy of a loony bin. 
“Rebekka?”
I had barely heard it; the voice was so soft.  Who said it?  I turned slowly, on the spot, trying to figure out where the voice had come from. 
“Rebekka!?”
It was slightly louder this time, kind of far off and echo-y.  It was like someone had lost me and was searching for me.  My heart raced as I tried to tell which direction the voice was coming from.  As my heartbeat increased, so did the speed of the beeping in my head.  It punctuated every heart beat like those monitors you see in TV hospitals.
“Rebekka, can you hear me?”
The voice was loud and clear this time.  It was my mother’s voice.  But where was she? I started running. “Mom?!”  I didn’t know where I was running to, but I had to find her. Somehow, I knew she was the answer to waking from this dream.  This nightmare. “Mom!”
“Rebekka!  She mumbled something, but I couldn’t understand it”
“Mom!  Can you hear me?  Mom!” I was running without paying any attention to where I was going.  I passed tree after tree.  Some branches whipped my face as I flew by them but I didn’t stop.  “Mom!!”  By the time I saw the edge of the cliff, it was too late to stop, but I tried.  The ground was slick with frost and I slid right over the edge. 
I tried to catch myself from the fall.  But I wasn’t falling.  I was in a bed.  My hands were clutching the sheets.  The beeping matched the frantic beating of my heart, but it was no longer in my head.  I opened my eyes to bright lights above me.  My mom was standing next to me, smiling and crying at the same time. A searing pain shot through my temple and I closed my eyes again.  I was so confused.  The short glimpse I saw looked like a hospital room.  “What happened?” I asked, but it was mumbly and came out sounding like “wh-hapn?”
Mom took my hand.  “You were in an accident.  Do you remember anything?  You were on your way to Grandma’s for Thanksgiving dinner.  The weather was nasty.  Snowy and icy.  You called to tell me you were about a half hour away.  Do you remember any of this?”  I nodded slightly.  The dream was merging with bits of real memory. The phone call, it had been too loud there at Grandma’s, we couldn’t hear each other very well.  “At a particularly icy spot, another car lost control and hit your car.  Your car flipped over, you hit your head really hard.  You’ve been unconscious ever since. You’ve got a couple broken bones.  We’ve been so worried.”
“How long?” I asked (it came out much clearer than the first time I spoke). 
“You’ve been out for about a week.  For a day or so, the doctors weren’t sure you were going to pull through.  I’ve been talking to you the whole time.  It wasn’t until yesterday that you started mumbling a little, and your legs were kind of twitching this morning.”  My dream! The beeping had been the heart monitor here in the hospital!  And my legs twitching, that must have been when I was running. It had only seemed like maybe twenty minutes.  It had been days?! 

NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo.....National Novel Writing Month. It's a yearly challenge where writers of all ages, all over the country, collectively sit down at their laptops and start putting words to paper. New stories, stories that have been started but never finished, ideas that have been bouncing around inside their heads for years.....The goal is to write 50,000 words by he end of November. That works out to be about1667 words per day.  Doesn't seem like a lot at first. Sometime you just hit the ground running with a great idea and 1667 words just seem to come pouring out. I wrote for a whopping 5 days. My total word count? 3000. The story has a great start. An ok secondary storyline. The two storylines intermingle a bit here and there and then converge toward the end. Sounds great. But I have this timeline in my head. Like, the amount of time over which this story should take place. And I have a 2 week gap right smack in the middle that I don't know what to do with. No clue. Totally idea-less. So here it sit, now the 15th of November, with my head figuratively up against a brick wall.  I haven't added a single word to my count in about 10 days.  And yet, here I am typing away on my blog with hardly any effort at all. So, does writing about my writing here on my blog count towards word count? I have a journal where I type up ideas about the storyline. Do those words count? Because technically I AM working on the story.  I have almost twice as many words in that journal as I do in the actual story. 
I had another idea though. I'm pretty good at writing little short stories from writing prompts I find online. What if I find a new writing prompt every day and just write a 1667 word short story? I honestly think that would be easier for me than trying to push a story through a 2 week timeframe that, right now, it obviously does not want to go thru. Yes, I'm speaking about the story as if it makes decisions and speaks for itself - because it does. Any writer will tell you that their stories start off as their own ideas, but tend to end up having a life of their own and sometimes can have twists and turns that the author never anticipated. What do you think? I'm going to give it a go, starting tonight. And I'll let you know how it goes.

Postcards from Russia

Postcards from Russia. Sounds like a movie right?  I googled it.  No movie.  There is a book, and some kind of orchestra music. Someone should make a movie called Postcards from Russia.  It could be about a couple people who start as pen pals when they're kids, and write to each other all their lives.  It would be an interesting movie.

But why am I talking about postcards from Russia?  Well actually, I'm more concerned with postcards to  Russia at this moment.  I'm sitting in my living room, addressing a Lake Michigan postcard to a stranger whom I have never met or heard of before.  Why?  Because I joined something. 

I am a member of the Hogwarts Running Club (HRC).  It's a group made up of geeky Harry Potter fans who also happen to like walking and running.  And we use our walking and running mileage to make donations to charities via an app called Charity Miles.  Check it out, it's pretty cool.  And the group is a really great group of very supportive people that's really more like a really big family. 

What's it got to do with postcards?  Well, nothing really.  But the group admin posts a profile of a member once a week or so, highlighting the person's history with running and the HRC as well as other hobbies they enjoy.  This particular member has a hobby called postcrossing.  Huh?  What the heck is postcrossing, you ask? Yep, I asked the same thing,  Lucky for me, they provided a link: www.postcrossing.com so I checked it out. Simply put, you sign up, they give you the address of some other random person who signed up, and you send them a postcard.  By signing up, your address gets thrown in the hat too, so other people may be randomly assigned your address and send you a postcard.  There are people around the world doing this.  So you get real for real mail (that's NOT a bill!  Who wouldn't appreciate some bill-less mail?!), kind of meet people around the world, and get picture postcards from who knows where.  I thought it was cool, signed up, and immediately requested an address.  The address I was assigned?  Yep, you guessed it.  Russia. 

So here I am, sitting in my living room, addressing a Lake Michigan postcard to a stranger whom I have never met or heard of before.  And I hope, somewhere else in the world, someone is sitting down and addressing a postcard to me.

Seeing in Color

I found a writing prompt online that intrigued me. I tried to keep it short. This could easily go much longer with more details.  Let me know what you think:

I used to enjoy sunsets.  In fact, they were my favorite part of the day.  I loved watching the sun, a ball of blazing red- orange, sink into the horizon while the clouds shifted and swirled in various shades of pinks and purples and oranges.   When I close my eyes, I can almost see the colors in my mind.  Almost, but not quite.  Not anymore.  It’s been so long, I can’t quite remember them anymore. 

My soul mate died nearly twelve years ago, but I can remember the day we met like it was yesterday.  I had already stowed my carry-on bag in the overhead bins, as the flight attendants repeatedly told everyone, and was settling into my window seat.  A woman with nearly black hair in a white shirt and long loose white skirt with big gray flowers printed on it slid down into the aisle seat next to me.  “I can’t wait to relax on the beach and soak up the sun, I’m so tired of winter,” she said to me with a smile.  I intended to politely respond.  I really did.  But when I looked up to answer, her eyes caught me off guard.  They were a bright, piercing…….color.  What was the name of that color?  I had never seen it before.  Hadn’t seen ANY color before actually.  I just stared. 

“Something wrong?” she asked, her smile faltering.   

I stammered “Your….it’s just…..I’ve never believed the stories but, your eyes.  They aren’t….gray.”

She knew which stories I meant.  Everyone heard them when we were little: everyone on earth has a soul mate and when you meet your soul mate, you gain the ability to see in color. Until then, you merely see black, white and grays.  Some people believe in the tales so whole-heartedly that they spend their lives searching for their soul mate.  Some even claim to have found them and try to convince others by describing things they could suddenly see.  But most people brush off the stories as just that: stories.   My parents were non-believers.  So I was raised in the mindset that soul mates don’t exist and color was a fairy tale.  And yet, here I was, staring into the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen and they were most definitely color.  

Over time, as we got to know each other, and grew closer, I saw more and more colors.  I found a book that listed colors and their names and we learned them together.  So many different shades of green in the trees, lemon yellow, purple flowers.  Neither of us ever really knew how beautiful the world was before, when we only saw shades of gray.  My favorite color was the blue of her eyes.  We spent 5 years exploring and rediscovering the world we thought we had known.  

Then it all changed.  She was in a car accident.  An ambulance rushed her to the hospital.  When I arrived, they were still working on her.  She had lost so much blood.  As I watched, the blood faded from red to a dark, shiny gray, and I knew.  They hadn’t given up yet, but I knew she was gone.  I looked around me and saw that everything was again just black, white, and shades of gray.  And I cried. 

I go to her grave every year on her birthday.  I bring her a bouquet of flowers.  She loved flowers.  They grew in all sorts of colors.  I’m never sure what color flowers I’ve brought.  I haven’t seen any color since she died.  Until today.  As I placed the bouquet on her headstone, I realized one tulip was pink.

Road Trip Days 9 and 10 - The Long Road Home

Well, that's all folks.  Our big adventure is over.  We spent all of Saturday and Sunday in the car, driving home. It's approximately a 16 hour drive from Vicksburg to Petoskey.  Ugh.  That's a lot of driving.  So we broke it up into two days.  Saturday we drove from Vicksburg to Mattoon, Illinois and Sunday we drove from Mattoon to home.  It was a fairly uneventful drive.  I do have a couple pictures for you.  We also made a list of all the states we either visited or passed through on this trip.  Michigan (of course), Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee (just barely).  8 states!  And we ended up crossing the Mississippi 10 times!  Well, Madison and I crossed 10 times, Carl crossed 8 times.  For an explanation of that, please check out Road Trip Day 2.  The most exciting thing that happened on the way home is when we passed by a cotton field being burned.  Apparently this is done to kill off boll weevils and prepare for the next planting of cotton.

Road Trip Day 8 - Vicksburg

Vicksburg appears to be such a cute little town.  As I said before, we stopped here for lunch on our way to New Orleans.  We ate in downtown Vicksburg which is an adorable, old-fashioned downtown with sidewalks covered by balconies and shops lining both side of the street.  When we came in to the town last night, we came via the interstate straight to our hotel, never passing through downtown.  I realized that someone who is only passing through, who doesn't take the time to look around a bit, would never even know that the quaint little downtown is even there.  And they'd be missing out!

Today was a day full of history.  We started bright and early with a guided tour of the Vicksburg National Military Park.  It turns out Vicksburg was the location of a pivotal battle in the Civil War.

 General John Pemberton was the confederate leader at the Vicksburg fort.  General Ulysses Grant attempted several attacks on the fort, and failed due to the rough terrain.  He finally decided that the only way to win was to lay siege.  What's that mean, you ask?  Well, it means that the Union army cut off all supply sources to the Confederates, and then just waited.  There was some fighting during most of the 43 day siege, but when Pemberton surrendered, it was due to the disease and starvation plaguing his fort.  Our guide was a bottomless well of information.  There were memorials for every of soldiers who were involved in this battle.  The cool thing is that this park was built while the Civil War veterans were still alive.  They came back and told the park "This is where my regiment was stationed" or "This is as far as we got during an attack before we had to retreat" and that was where the memorial was built.  Right there in what appear to be totally random locations.  The biggest thing I took away from this tour was this:  the front lines for the Confederate and Union armies were so close in places that the soldiers could and did talk to each other between skirmishes.  Some of them were friends, family, neighbors.  And when Pemberton and Grant agreed on the terms of surrender, one of the first things that happened was the Union soldiers sharing their food and supplies with the starving and sick Confederate soldiers.  I also learned

that there are several known woman-disguised-as-men serving in the Civil War - and probably many more unknown - as well as boys as young as 8 years old who served in, and were injured in, the Civil War.  We also got to walk around the USS Cairo, the last of the ironclad warships from the Civil War.  It was torpedoed and sunk in 1862 and raised 102 years later.  It sunk in 12 minutes.  No lives were lost but the crew didn't have time to pack up their belongings before abandoning ship.  The museum is full of the things they left behind.  The medicine bottles you see in one picture are exactly how they were left.  The cork kept the water out and the medicines in.

After our tour was done, we did a tour of our own around town at some of the historical homes that were built as far back as the 1820's.  We also walked through the Old Courthouse Museum and walked through the soda shop where Coca-Cola was first bottled - not BY Coca-Cola, but by the owner of the shop.  You see, Coca-Cola would just

send their syrup to the shop.  If you wanted a Coke, you had to go to the soda shop where they would mix the syrup with carbonated water in the soda fountain.  The owner realized that people who couldn't make it to his shop would probably enjoy some too, so he put it in some bottles and traveled around town with them.  And tada!  Bottled Coca-Cola was invented.  

We also found two other cemeteries to check out.  First we drove around the Anshe Chesed Cemetery which is an all-jewish cemetery.  Then over to Beulah Cemetery - which is an all-african-american cemetery. Unfortunately, this one is currently closed to the public so we couldn't explore.  But it looks like they're working on making it more accessible.  We also accidentally found what appeared to be an old hospital that was most definitely not in use anymore.  The whole building was fenced off, weeds were taking over the yard and driveway, and kudzu was covering parts of the building. We drove all the way around it and found a sign that said "Marian Hill" - according to the internet this is a rehab center, currently still in use.  But it sure doesn't look like it.  

We did find a bunch of "No Trespassing" signs though, so we didn't get too close. It was cool and creepy at the same time.  Got some pictures of it here.

Tomorrow we start the long trip back home.  It's about 16 hours from Vicksburg to Petoskey.  We're breaking up the drive with an overnight stay in Mattoon, IL.  Why Mattoon?  Well, it's about halfway, it's along our route, and Carl has fun saying the town name LOL  

Road Trip Day 7 - New Orleans to Vicksburg

Today was a travel day.  We drove from New Orleans to Vicksburg.  Thankfully, it was one of our shorter drives.....only about 5 hours.  Before we even got out of New Orleans, we saw that a cruise ship had arrived at the docks of the French Quarter.  I've seen pictures of these cruise ships but they just don't do them justice.  This thing was HUGE.  Seriously.  It was taller than the bridge over the Mississippi River!  There was too much traffic for me to get a good picture of it though - boo :(

Anyhoooo, we didn't just take the GPS-designated route from New Orleans to Vicksburg.  We took a more scenic route.  It started with the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway.  There's a reason we went this way.  There's a story.  When I was younger, I used to dream about being on a long, long road in the middle of water, water as far as the eye can see.  It was a recurring dream kind of thing.  

Then one day, I saw a picture of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway and thought oh my god!  It exists!  I must visit it!   So, this trip, we did!  It was pretty cool.  24 miles of nothing but water.  

Then, In Mississippi we stopped at the Windsor Ruins.  These enormous pillars are all that's left of a pre-civil war mansion that was accidentally burned down soon after the Civil War ended, by cigarette ashes being dropped in an

area that was being renovated.  Stay away from cigarettes, people! They're bad for you and your house!  We also found a crater...no, more like a canyon, totally covered in Kudzu.  It was so covered in Kudzu (an invasive vining plant) that I couldn't tell if there was anything at the bottom of it.  River?  Train track?  Sandpit?  Secret entry to hell?  Who knows?

When we arrived in Vicksburg, we had some time before eating dinner.....all the museums were closed so we visited the city cemetery.  It's a pretty big cemetery.  In addition to over a hundred years of Vicksburg residents, it also contains the graves of 5,000 confederate soldiers.  In my opinion, they should have been buried in the national cemetery inside the civil war park in Vicksburg BUT I'm guessing they were seen as traitors to the country, and so were not allowed to be buried there.

Speaking of the civil war park, it's HUGE and tomorrow we're going on a 2 hour guided tour.  I can't wait!  I love history!