School Days

The constant noise of the train, heavy fuel-laden industrial trains, miles long. It starts with the urgent whistle and then the clang of metal wheel clattering against steel rail. The camp is nestled up against the west side of the tracks. The pallets shake, the tents rustle. Tiny drops of frozen dew fall.

Inside the camp, people huddle around camp fires, warming up after the light freeze from the night before, stamping off the chill and checking hoses for water breaks. A few bundle up children for a day at the local school.

The first train of the new day is accompanied by the school bus going down the road that parallels the tracks. The view from the school bus is a cluster of patched single-wide mobile homes, travel trailers that have grown roots and tents that might fly away at any moment. All covered by the blue tarps and duct tape.

My gorgeous children, full of wide-eyed wonder, asked so sweetly if they could please go to the school this year. At eight and nine they wanted to explore, and while I might have preferred a trek through the Amazon, their bravery was as strong as their desire for a year of School Days. We arrived early, when it was still hot, and set up camp a few weeks before the regular season to be there in time for the start of the school year. I went down and got them enrolled and placed into third and fourth grades, and each day pack them off to that strange world of vast cavernous hallways and flush toilets and florescent lights.

I never thought of School Days as anything other than those few days of the festival when it is open on weekdays for school field trips, And now, five days a week, 180 days of School Days. When we discussed this grand experiment, we decided that to make a full go of it we would stay put through the entire school year, so they would attend August through the next May. Here it is November, first freeze. Should be planning to move on, and instead we’re planning to bundle up.

Last night as the temperature dropped I remembered two brand-new flannel shirts, men’s xtra small, still in packaging and tucked into a corner of our tiny Scotty travel trailer and laid them out by their school clothes. Clothes are always picked out and laid out the night before. After we figured out no amount of light matches daylight for making sure things look good enough for school days. They walked off to the school bus stop in 90s grunge style, big flannel shirts over clean-enough jeans, their breath hitting the cold air and creating smoky halos around their bright blond spiky hair. I imagine families spending serious money trying to get all the style my little boys manage from carefully-curated thrift shop remains.

It puzzles me, almost terrifies me, each day, watching them leave on the school bus, suddenly disconnected from my boys for all these long hours until they are dropped off in the afternoon. Growing up, my family considered ourselves lucky that we’d never run afoul of the law or been picked up and picked on by so-called social services and forced into state schooling. And now my boys don’t consider it a dangerous place at all, but instead rush headlong into that world of wonder. Inside living, media rooms, standing in line, raising their hands, regimented controls on everything including the temperature with its central heating and cooling air conditioning, they are exploring new parts of the big wide world in their own way.

I’m grateful they are going together, I don’t think I could send just one child off to school. As a pair, they protect each other and compare notes. I doubt they’ll do this school thing again next year. They seem to have new-found appreciation for being able to read and study one book for hours instead of the constant moving and shaking and changing of a school day. They learned confidence that their skills in reading, math, and science are up-to-par for their ages. They learned the flow of the school week, with Monday coming so early, five straight days after a weekend of working the festival. Monday should be a day off after two 11-hour festival days, but their boundless energy took them right through the past six weeks, two weeks to go.

They are joined by a few others — out of maybe 60 children at the height of the fair season, five get on the school bus, three more from the end of the street known as the End of the World. Most children out here are home-schooled, with various results depending on their family’s knowledge and schooling. In most case children find in their teens a career path where they can put their talents to work expanding their family business, whether that is candle-making, elephant rides or food booths. More kids, more outlets, more work, more opportunity. Some are scholars and go on to tackle college and become scientists, writers, teachers. Some drop out, further and deeper from the fair community.

Raising my boys, I’m taking it a year at a time, not making any grand plans for their future for them but allow how they will explore and come to the right next steps. I don’t own a business for the boys to join, my family is gone and we are only three. My work is piecework, some beading and a lot of sewing, independent work as a seamstress.

A final wave to the school bus from my distant spot – never hovering, not too close but watching as it goes down the street, then turns out of sight. It will wait at the railroad crossing for the morning train to finish it’s thunderous progress. I open the doors on the shed, let the sunlight in and turn on the small electric heater. I don’t imagine that they want to pick up these threads of a career, as I sit to start sewing today’s stack of material. I wonder what they’ll want to explore next year.

Quirky intelligent comedy with mystical fantasy elements

That’s what Netflix recommended as a category of movies for me: quirky, intelligent, mystical fantasy. Certainly gave me pause as I continue on my quest for a plot.

Most of Sullie’s meals of all her fourteen years were some combination of cornmeal, bacon grease, and greens. When she took work on the other side of town as a maid, tending to the clothes and needs of a young lady just back returned from boarding school in the east, Sullie picked at odd foods at her plate at mealtime and wondered at the fantastical landscape. The kitchen staff soon found they couldn’t reliably ask Sullie to pick a few sprigs of mint for tea; she was just as likely to come back with some purslane.

Trying to make her new lady’s maid feel more at home, Miss Caudwell got out parasols and took Sullie for a stroll around the garden, pointing out plants in the garden with her elegantly gloved hand.

Peas and beans. Lambsquarter, for stews. Mint, for tea. Purslane greens. Mustang grapes, for juice. Plants and seeds brought in from other places: sweet potatoes from the Caribbean, mirliton from New Orleans. Sotol, from the desert, for weaving into baskets. Sullie looked around, no one in the household was stripping the leaves down for basket-making, she continued listening carefully for the plants she might be asked to fetch for the kitchen.

“Magnolia tree.” Miss Caudwell sighed at the stunted tree brought from her childhood home back east, adapting the best it could to the dry landscape and harsh sun.

“But what is it for?”

“Big shiny leaves, fragrant white blossoms. It’s beautiful. An ornamental.”

Ornamental. Oriental? That’s a word Sullie had heard before, and it did mean things from the east.

“But what are or-na-mentals used for?”  Sullie had seen gardens before, but tending plants that weren’t useful on the supper plate?

“Or-na-menting,” she snipped with a snap of the parasol. Miss Caudwell was growing just a bit tired of this uneducated excuse for a lady’s maid, an orphan brought to work in the house from the dusty town near her father’s mine. But trying to be charitable and understanding. “Beauty is a solace when times are hard,” she added gently.

A bean bush seemed a mighty fine soul-ass when times are hard, but Sully struggled to let Miss Caudwell have the last word on the bush with no obvious use. Finding a place in this household had been a lucky break, and she was trying to keep her mouth from undoing her luck.

When Pa didn’t come back from the mining camp with the rest of the fellows, Sullie and her brother had watched carefully for wailing and gathering for a procession into town, following the sound of the tolling bells to the  churchyard. That’s what had happened with Missy’s cousin’s father passed on. Pa hadn’t passed on, he’d walked out, traveling further west hitched to a new wife’s wagon.

Ma remarried right fast, to a sheepish old man with an even older mother, Dowager Winchester. Sullie and her brother left to go find work; if the Dowager was still complaining about So Many Mouths to Feed, at least they couldn’t hear it. And her brother, a bit older and taller, had told her to Keep Her Mouth Shut.

So here Sullie was, listening to beautiful Miss Caudwell school her in tender plants brought in from the east and sometimes give dubious ideas on their purpose. That magnolia probably had some use.

Like that sotol. Baskets? She’d seen plenty of people weaving as a result of sotol down by the mining camps, drinking the juice pounded pulped and fermented and brought around in barrels. But Miss Caudwell didn’t seem to appreciate all the medicinal uses of the garden plants, and Sullie was practicing being the good student, practicing listening, not arguing, not challenging.

Nothing to be gained by showing people things they’ve already decided to turn a blind eye towards.

Writing practice: Character sketch for a steampunk elf

Raythorn smoothed her hair into a bouffant and carefully pulled it up into a big loose bun. She stood up straight as she tugged her corset into place, then stepped into her wide heavy skirt, securing it with suspenders over her shoulders. Next, the white blouse with handmade Irish lace collar, and then a jacket. A linen hankercheif with the same lace and embroidery tucked into a discrete pocket, along with a pouch with mysterious contents. The nipped waist and tall collar enhanced her slightly exotic appearance. The muddy greenish-brown of her suit and matching hat reflected just right to make the purple irises of her large expressive eyes fade into a deep well of purply-brown. Her dressmaker and milliner worked endlessly to craft new outfits for her carefully maintained figure. Each generation had trained the next to meet Raythorn’s demands for style, quality, and to use the current styles to make their client, a timeless beauty, conform to human proportions. Last, she pinned on the beribboned hat. She looked in the mirror, brushing a piece of hair into place to obscure her pointed ears.

She stepped out into the street and gave a warm but curt nod to the young servant boy waiting to escort her on the day’s errands. First on today’s list was the monthly visit to her solicitor. They set out, walking briskly with their backs to the wind.

Many years ago she realized that trying to maintain her own accounts was a poor use of time. She found a young man starting his career and entrusted him to keep track of expenses, payments, and make sure her modest wealth continued to pay dividends. Mr. McCullough was full human, but strangely accommodating of the noble races. The handle on his office door was brass, not iron, and none of that toxic metal was found in his furnishings.

Although her footman was there to open the door for her. One of his primary tasks was to allow her to avoid touching, and being touched, by items that might sap her limited strength. He waited in a chair outside while Raythorn received her monthly report and made any decisions on changes in her portfolio. Due to the ongoing food shortage, caused by a blight in the fields, she increased her monthly stipend to the food bank. They discussed this month’s budget for lab supplies, and she informed Mr. McCullough of her plan for purchasing more equipment for their experiment.

“Yes, yes, indeed.” His voice hushed, his eyes darted towards where Jacky waited outside the closed door, then the window, open for the light spring breeze. “Madam, if I may suggest there is more we need to discuss at a more opportune time? The dogs walk backwards and are snickering.”

“Why of course, Mr. McCullough. Will you be available when the moon shines still?”

A subtle nod in reply.

“So, if that is all for today, with many thanks for your continued service, I shall continue on. Jacky and I will be at the lab today.”

With that, she gently offered a gloved hand and took her leave. Hugh McCullough sighed. He expected a more immediate reaction to the threat he was alluding to; he saw a huge threatening cloud ready to rain havoc on Raythorn’s carefully assembled group of scientists and explorers. She was blithely ready to postpone any discussion until the new moon, when they would meet. Hugh McCullough was not only Raythorn’s personal solicitor, but served as the secretary for their secret society.

Why would a group dedicated to improving the lot of all beings, humans and non-humans, on this earthly plane and throughout the aether, need to operate in secret? It’s just easier. No one can argue, protest, and try to stop plans they don’t see coming. What was that recent problem, where someone had thrown, what, a clod, a clog … something in a labor-saving machine. A machine that, if used properly, would free workers from drudgery and leave them free to cultivate more food and create art to the glory of the gods, to explore the aether. There’s quite enough to do keeping bugs from nesting in the warmth of the Babbage machine without worrying about clods who would destroy the very things that might save humanity, and non-humanity, from back-breaking labor.

As Mr. McCullough pondered how, and why, the society so secret the author doesn’t have a name for it operates, in, um, secret, Raythorn makes her way to her laboratory.

What she lacks in strength, with her low Strength and Constitution, vulnerability to Iron, tendency to be addicted to magic, and her unique appearance, she makes up for Intelligence, Wisdom (and old age!), Dexterity, and Charisma.

Her talents with language are due in no small part to her long years on this planet. Some people study classical Greek – while others people spoke it in the gynaecium with the women of classical Greece. While Raythorn patiently helped Jacky learn the scientific Latin he needed to further his studies, she remembered back to times spent engineering Roman ocean boats for greater speed on their trips around the Mediterranean.

Raythorn’s disposition towards continually creating opportunities for others was illustrated in how she took an interest in young Jacky. An orphan, who never knew his father, abandoned by his mother when she couldn’t keep him fed and clothed, growing up by his wits in the boys’ workhouse. He quickly figured out how the large looms operated and became part of the maintenance crew. On Sunday afternoons, he and his crew used thin wood scraps to make gliders, then competed for whose could travel farthest and fastest at the park by the river.

The contest caught Raythorn’s eye, week after week she stopped by the park, as a scientist involved in aerodynamics she was interested in the innovations of this group of novices. She noticed the boy Jacky’s winning week after week, his good nature when he lost, his analyzing and making improvements to his design. She needed a strong young man to carry packages, escort her safely through busy crowded streets, and open iron door handles, and hired him as her footman. Due to quick wit and engaging smile, and his great care he took of Raythorn as they stepped through the city streets, strangers and shop keepers assumed he was her nephew, it improved her ability to almost pass as human. He was a studious sort, who had puzzled out reading English on his own and was picking up Latin just as quickly, especially because he didn’t see it as a different language, just the language of the lab. His great care around the dangers of Eldritch Copper that powers the great airships.

Jacky recognized his current job as Raythorn’s footman was much more; it offered opportunity to study and become a respected lab assistant, or possibly sit for his college entrance examinations, where he’d be a less-respected lower class entry into the academic world. He rather preferred the status of high-class lower class than always struggling to overcome his lack of birthright.

Raythorn, with her assistant Jacky and solicitor Hugh McCullough, take to the skies in fantastic adventures in “Steampunk RPG.”

Fiction: The adventures of TK and Girlfriend, chapter iota

She stumbled through the woods, ducking past greenbriar, avoiding poison ivy. “Whaddya smell, Girlfriend?”

Standing up, she looked around. A flat area. Terraced up the hill. About five feet above the top of the dry creekbed. Rock-lined campsites, with stumps surrounding cleared cooking spots and little lean-tos of drying firewood.

Pausing, remembering the dog, bent down, and got out the water bottle. Girlfriend gratefully lapped up some water and while TK snapped the leash on. When she stood up, she was facing the overgrown brush. Turned around, brush and cedar woven through with greenbriar formed a canopy. Girlfriend started through the narrow cut through to the path, and TK followed with a close hand on the leash.

The elementary school bell rang, signaling 7:35AM throughout the neighborhood. The girl and her dog pushed up to the sidewalk and merged with the parents and strollers walking home from dropping off their kindergarteners and first graders.

One thousand words

Ray Bradbury wrote a thousand words a day from the time he was 12. Michael Moorcock sat and wrote from his early teens. Everyone agrees, you just sit and write and let the characters lead you to the places they need to go.

Wow, what a tall order. Yesterday, I agreed to rest and sleep and allow myself simply to absorb the freakin’ good fortune that leaves me with food and shelter and a soft bed an a sweet beau and a good dog and wow, blessed fortune. I don’t believe it, and I’m terrified sometimes. Often times.

I bought a painting yesterday. A good fraction of the extra bit I try to put down on the mortgage each month, spent on art instead. Meant to help quell the terror, uplift me and allow me to accept the fortune that put me in a house and home.

How many words is that? I’m up to 155. Well, a thousand isn’t that far away.

Friday we went to a photo shoot, Denis was helping set the stage for steampunk modeling, and four or five men with big cameras, two very small models. The stylist had come up with these fabulous collars and bustles that dress up an ordinary little black dress into something from steampunk meets buck rogers how we’d re-imagine it, Ming meets Vogue. I wore heat of summer steampunk western casual, a fluffy shirt over a corset, a mid-knee skirt, boots, a collar made of the tiny porcupine quills and beads.

When I getting out jewelry, I refound the necklace Blue made for me some 25 years ago. Blue was elder, hard to tell age when people are living on the streets, but he was definitely over 50.

You’ve seen someone like him. Craggy, brimmed hat against the sun, travel-worn but clean and neat light-colored shirt and canvas pants, boots, bedroll and cases of jewelry ready to show. Stands tall, at home in his dusty skin. He’s not down on his luck, he’s made his own luck. A sort of luck that won’t drop him too far if he falls.

Blue hitchhiked between Santa Fe and Austin, trading his work at music festivals for food and substances. He was a master at collecting stubs and re-manufacturing cigarettes and joints. He carved antler and found objects into these fantastic sculptures with moving parts that floated on the collarbone.

Imagine a thunderbird, with articulated wings, body, head and tail. Inlaid with crushed blues and greens of lapis, turquoise, malachite. Beautiful inspired work, by a man who sits quietly in shady doorways and watches how things move, and collects the bits and parts and pieces from the roadsides to twist discarded rope, bones and antlers, lost beads and findings. Hand drills and super glue and improvised vises. With stunning results. The birds lifted the spirit. Hawks, doves, the phoenix, owls. I think there were other shapes, but I remember the birds, the tiny feathers.

He was a calming influence, I think. I learned later that many of the men were very careful only to show me their best sides. It’s not that the drunken incoherent rages didn’t happen. I just didn’t see them. There was a deep undercurrent of drug addiction that went far beyond my trading food scavenged from the food pantry for cigarettes and beer. But I enjoyed talking to him, learning of his travels. I don’t remember specific stories. I remember him describing how much he truly loved women, their ripe roundness, that in summer they smelled like ripe tomatoes.

I remember that Cher collected his work from a gallery in Santa Fe, and I was not astonished, I completely believed this to be true. Someone has got to catalog Cher’s jewelry collection, she has collected many fine pieces from great artists over these many many years.

He made me a piece. I was happy to let him work on a piece for me. I imagined some fancy piece from nature. I received a simple jar shape with my initials inlaid in blue, a tiny hole in the top for a blue cord. The body of one of the birds; no wings, no tail feather, no head, no eyes, just a simple jar. A slightly rounded rectangle, but no curves.

Names are funny things, for women, mutable, one receives a husband’s name, discards it when neither of you are capable of living up to your best intentions. And here it was, a body, labeled TKD. A vessel for all my best intentions that could never take flight. I wore it for years as one of several beaded necklaces that carried different remembrances and meanings, never quite realizing it was an irrefutable mark of hippiedom and traveling life. Until 15 years later, I was working a day job, the perfectly-coiffed blonde receptionist from Salt Lake City made some comment about the complete authenticity of my “granola” look and I wondered just what that meant, I’d tried to clean up … and touched my necklaces, a combination of hand-made pottery and fimo and antler.

I lost track of Blue. I’d asked about him, when I saw another of our little temporary tribe. He got a place down on South Congress, at the Don-Mar motor courts. Word was he was deep into heroin again and sharing it with the hookers who wandered the street in some sort of double death wish of the wasting disease of AIDS coupled with hungry skin and bones. I never was brave enough to head down to that area and investigate, I was busy escaping South Congress by attending the community college and working a job in a huge government facility, while continuing to wear the hand-carved fetishes around my neck.

And with that I cross into 955 words, making me think that 1000-a-day is not a difficult task at all. And in my way of being oh-so-easy-on-myself, scared of scaring off the potential writer, it’s still a weekly goal for a year. Happy, oh-so-happy, and thank you Blue for being part of that initial growth spurt of my young adult scavenging years. Helps me not be terrified, if, when, I end up on the streets again it’ll be OK. In the meantime, I give thanks for this great place to grow and create.

Deep in the land of single-wides and spring fed swimming pools

In writing class, I practiced character sketches. I don’t want to be bound to human characters, so I challenged myself to write from the viewpoint of a plant.

Stone water tank

Looping around the road construction on the way back to the motor court, we noticed a large stone tank in the middle of a crowd of dilapidated single-wides on the high lonesome prairie.

A bit later, looking at archive pictures of the Big Bend area, there was a picture of a very similar stone tank with an explanation of how the settlers found springs and built tanks.

That tank? May be spring fed. “Yup, here we are in the land of single-wides with spring fed swimming pools.”

And from that idea, these paragraphs bubbled up:

It was midnight, and she rustled as the owl landed, shook her leaves, and accepted the weight on her branches. She followed the owl’s gaze searching the scrubby land for any movement, searching for possums and tasty treats.

Shadows from the distant bright moon danced across the landscape as the clouds parted. The owl launched off, flying fast, not swooping towards the ground, heading directly away from … what? As the tallest tree for miles, she could see great distances over the windswept plain.

Nothing. There was a whole lot of nothing. In all the many years she’d stood sentinel over this land, the spring had attracted deer and foxes and mice to sip a drink of cool water bubbling from deep in the soil.

She remembered when she was a seedling, then a sapling, twining her roots deep into the rocks where the cool clear water tickled. As her shadow grew, traveling tribes came for the spring water and rested a spell under her branches for shade.

She looked at the tiny sod house to the right, which she’d watched being scraped out of the meager prairie all those many years ago. The home builders toiled mightily with mules and sharp blades to scrape stones from the ground, put seeds into the dust, and stacked the stones around the spring to build a tank. The others came furtively by the light of the moon.

Thinking back, way back, to that time of the bright flowers blooming, and the anger of the traveling tribe denied access to their spot. And the fire, the hot fire. It scorched her lower branches, but left the home builders unable to move, stretched out across the staked plains, until the coyotes came and howled and tore at their flesh and the big cats ran away with their white bones.

And still the spring burbled and filled the tank. The flowers bloomed. Travelers filled their pouches and rested in her shade. Until this past time of cold, when the white snow tickled her leaves. The warm time came again, but the rain didn’t fall, the flowers didn’t bloom. The spring was dry. Her deepest roots could barely find any water to sip, and none reached the surface for the visitors.

But she couldn’t follow the owl. She must stay here, waiting for the rain, waiting for the spring.