Tag Archives: Childhood

31 Days of Spooky Stuff, October 18: As Helen Lovejoy always said…

18 Tuesday Oct 2016

Posted by in Books I like, Children's books, Hallowe'en

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“Won’t somebody think of the children?”

Yes, somebody will.

Halloween is coming and if you and your children haven’t read Bunnicula, you’re missing a literary treat.

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Bunnicula: A Rabbit Tale of Mystery, is a children’s book by James Howe and Deborah Howe, featuring a rabbit that sucks the juice from vegetables. Could he be a vampire bunny? Harold, dog to the Monroe family, isn’t sure, although the family did give him that strange name since finding the bunny at the theater where they’d gone to see a Dracula movie. Chester, the Monroes’ cat, is convinced Bunnicula is a vampire and tries to get Harold to help him save the family from danger. The story is dryly witty and the illustrations are great fun. (And there are six more books in the series.)

Think of the children and read a wonderful book together during this Halloween season.

To win a signed copy of each of my three Wisdom Court books, comment on this post. A drawing to determine the winner will occur on October 31.

Why I love haunted houses, and, really, aren’t they all?

05 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by in Ghosts, Hauntings, Mysteries

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552050_340069802746868_1757767987_nMy dad was a bricklayer, and during my childhood our family lived in a total of three houses he built at the edge of Boulder. Early on I became aware of how houses were made, how the inner wooden skeleton was covered inside by plaster and the outside with brick, how the plywood floors had surfaces of tongue-in-groove oak or asphalt tile or linoleum. Windows were finished with frames and sills, the doors lintels. Wires and pipes and vents and  switches were set into the spaces left for them. Eventually a brand new structure was the result, and soon the smells of wood and concrete, of paint and newly-laid carpet melded into the scent of home.

Just because I’d seen those corners created didn’t mean I was okay with what I feared might live in them. My acute peripheral vision and sharp hearing had me starting at the least motion and softest noise. And while I knew about the wood and brick and wires, I wasn’t as clear about the sounds those materials made when the lights went out. Boards creaked and windows vibrated.  Even new pipes could whine. The sound of tiny feet clicking across the floor was, I later realized, the ticking of the furnace vents as they heated. But, huddling under my blankets, I imagined small, vicious creatures beneath my bed and knew if I let even a finger extend past the edge of the mattress, they would grab me and haul me far away.

I smile now at some of the kid books I read back then, but a few of them had real power when it was dark and the images they’d evoked in my mind came out to play.  Television became an influence, and some of the fears of childhood were enriched by depictions of the evil people commit against each other, fictional and real.  It didn’t help that my parents let me watch the Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Or that my mom dropped my cousin and me off at the movies when we were twelve.  The feature was Psycho. Yes, I am twisted.

I live in a house built in 1909. It has three stories and plenty of odd corners and strange sounds. Over the years we’ve lived here, I’ve grown accustomed to the nooks and crannies–cleaning once in a while will eventually calm the jitters. When I dream, it is of the house my father built for us the year I turned eleven. A modest brick ranch house on an acre of land beside a stream, it was the place he and my mother loved best. It is where they lived until their end, and if it haunts me it’s more because of their deaths than their lives.  Old age and illness are far more frightening than those little creatures under my bed.

I continue to connect with the frightened child when I see a haunted house movie. (Next time I’ll write about the latest, The Conjuring.) The house, the home, the enclosed spaces where we spend our lives are haunted with our memories, our fears and triumphs, our most primitive beginnings. I’ve never made friends with the shadows, those vital shadows that feed my writing.

(Image from Spooky Places.)

Time is, time was, time is yet to be…

01 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by in Ghosts, Grief, Life, Random Thoughts

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2013.  I wake up this morning far too early, the thought of a new year dropping into place as I listen to the furnace and feel two dachshunds against my back.  I give thought to events in the last year, losses and gains, joys and sorrows.  I think of those who are no longer here, sad at the dwindling list of cast members in my personal drama.  My mind picks up speed, whirring into time machine mode.

1959.  A memory flashes of my thirteen-year-old self, crouched along with classmates on an open playing field at Casey Junior High School.  The air raid test sirens have caught us outside with no desks for shelter, and the gym teacher tells us to cover our heads with our arms.  I sharply recall the moment I realize odds are I’ll never make it to thirty.  Soviet nuclear attacks will take out Boulder early, and all the desks and cradling arms in the world won’t save me.  And why am I thinking this today?

2012.  Sunday night our granddaughter and grandson are here and we decide to make the gingerbread house we’ve talked about all through Christmas vacation.  We mix the batter, bravely soldiering on without molasses, pressing the smooth dough into the silicon mold I had the cunning to order on-line.  As the pieces bake, I remember the winter when our children pressed against me while I measured and sliced pieces of dough for walls and the roof, my eyes crossing as I tried to translate the recipe into supplies for 3-D construction.  They squabbled over who would use which piece for what, just as the grandkids now announce how they’ll build their house, voices rising in the oven-warmed air.  The crispy house rises on its foil-covered cardboard foundation, and the memory of that older cookie cottage recedes as the brave new structure is adorned with frosting and gumdrops and sprinkles.

1956.  I’m in the backseat of our Ford Crown Victoria with my brother Mike, and Dad and Mom are up front.  We’ve had New Year’s Day dinner, maybe roast beef with potatoes and carrots and parsnips cooked by Dad and a mincemeat pie baked by Mom.  We’re out for a drive, and when Mike says he’s still hungry Dad steers the car toward Twinburger, our favorite drive-in restaurant.  I can almost taste the tangy red sauce on the BBQ burger, my favorite.  The Flatirons have a dusting of snow and the delft blue sky stretches over Boulder.  We drive farther east, catching sight of a rabbit in the stand of trees beside the road.  I smile now, thinking Mike & I were probably giving each other the fish eye, just as my children used to battle over the line between their places in the backseat of our car.  I think I remember the satisfaction of believing we could go on forever in that car, together.

2013.  The morning is winter quiet, and even the birds are sleeping in.  It’s cold here in my garret and I reach for the wrap I keep nearby. Each January I feel such gratitude for what has gone before, such hope and possibility for what is to come. The present, the everlasting now, is sharpened by a sense of loss.  It is that combination, I suppose, that makes me who I am. I wish the world a happy new year, knowing it both will and will not be.

We loved you so…

14 Monday May 2012

Posted by in Life, Writing

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There’s a tinge of the bittersweet to Mother’s Day, even during the joy of talking with the children, as I miss my mother and mother-in-law and grandmothers.  This year held an extra pang with the recent loss of Maurice Sendak, whose books have enriched our world.  As I read them to my kids–so many times–their phrases became common usage, and he added to the lyrics of our family song.

How many times have I put a glass of milk in front of someone at the table chanting, “Milk for the morning cake!”?  How many times have I “roared [my] terrible roar and gnashed [my] terrible teeth” at one kid or another, taking away the sting by quoting Where the Wild Things Are as I do it?

The pages in Sendak’s books “became the world all around,” but more, they showed the walls inside us, limned and leveled by words and pictures.  Max wants to be “where someone love[s] him best of all,” and doesn’t that sum up everything?  Especially when an undeserved supper is served and it’s still hot.

The most disturbing of Sendak’s works is Outside Over There, and each time I read it–I bought my own copy so I could have it near–I rediscover an account of what I think of as the primordial feminine.  Someday I’ll find the words for what that book evokes in me, but not today.

So goodbye to Maurice Sendak, who evoked ideas for my own writing and left me wishing I could do so as deftly and deeply as he did.  He enhanced my motherhood as well as my children’s childhoods.

We ate you up, we loved you so.