more new england writers

I have new places to add to the growing list of famous places Addie has peed in. Edward Gorey's backyard and just outside the cemetery H.P. Lovecraft was buried in. So buckle in and prepare yourself for another roller coaster of facts about writers.

--Stalking Target 4: Edward Gorey

His home in Massachusetts.

This house is, interestingly enough, located on Strawberry Lane, which I find very strange. Gorey bought it without much inspection. He just glanced through the windows and that was it. He also did not move into this house until a few years after he officially bought it.

His favorite restaurant was Jack's Outback. He framed the last waffle of the Millennium that was made there and hung it in his kitchen. It is 13 years old. Our tour guide was Gorey's first cousin (She can be seen in The Deranged Cousins. She is Rose Marshmary) and she told us that when he did cook, he enjoyed very complicated recipes. Once he stayed with her and cooked dinner that was entirely blue.

G is for George smothered under a rug.

The theme for the house this year is The Vinegar Works, which include The Gashlycrumb Tinies. So you can find all 25 children's deaths around the house. In the backyard, there is a tiny graveyard with headstones to represent each one.

He also sewed a lot. This came in handy when he was the designer for Dracula. When he won a Tony for his work, he didn't bother attending the ceremony and gave the statue to a friend who returned it to this museum after his death.

He collected almost everything. His collections include rocks, wood potato mashers, thick, metal rings, books, antique cheese graters, and tickets to every play he went to. His cousin said that he loved flea markets and whenever he found a metal object that the seller could figure out what it was, he would almost always buy it. He also collected so much stuff that an entire room was blocked off because no one could squeeze into it anymore.

One of his main characteristics was that he just liked to let everything be true to their nature. He let his backyard become overgrown and allowed his many, many cats do this to his furniture. He owned up to 7 cats at a time and when he died, his ashes were mixed with the ashes of 6 of his cats. Half of the ashes were scattered at Barnstable Harbor. The other half were scattered behind the house.

--Stalking Target 5: H.P. Lovecraft

His grave in Rhode Island.

Since this is just a grave marker, I don't really have a lot of interesting facts about this man. But what I do know is that this does not mark where his body actually lies. Though he is buried somewhere within the family plot, he only got his own headstone in the 70's when fans bought one for him. But this actually worked out for the best because in the late 90's, a group of people tried to dig him up but failed because they mysteriously gave up digging after 3 feet.

 Apparently, a Horseshoe Crab exoskeleton is an appropriate offering.

This has nothing to do with Lovecraft (OR DOES IT!?!?), but Addie really freaked out in the cemetery. We left her in the car and she whined and barked until Nick and I got back into the car and drove out past the front gate.



much love,
hedgie

buster doodle

Boyfriend got a new gadget today and it has a cool drawing app on it. This is the first thing I decided to draw on it. If you have ever talked to me for longer than five minutes, then you will know my burning love for Buster Keaton. If you haven't, then you're welcome for the wonderful journey ahead of you now.

much love,
hedgie

tea flash fiction

This, my flashiest of fictions, is the third installment of pieces based off the "Ten Things I Love" List started by my friend Bonnie.

3) 24-hour diners

            She took a sip of her tea and finished it.

            “What do your tea leaves say?” he asked.

            She looked into the tiny porcelain cup, but even if she had any idea how to read tea leaves, she still would have been at a loss for words. There was nothing lying at the bottom of her cup. “I guess I don’t have a future,” she said, pointing the cup at him so he could see in to it from across the table.

            He filled her teacup again from the silver pot that was between them. “Try it again.”

            She picked the cup back up and drained it in one gulp. But still, there was nothing. She just sat there and stared down into it.

            He leaned forward and refilled it. “Be careful this time,” he said. “You can’t keep drinking your life away.”

much love,
hedgie

boston strong

Over the weekend, I went back into Boston for the first time since the marathon explosions and was able to see the roadside memorial people have set up to show their love and support to the people whose lives have been changed forever.

These types of grief gardens have always had a powerful pull on me, as much of street art is renown for its irony and postmodern chic. But in contrast, roadside memorials—those small landscapes of candles and crosses, windmills and wildflowers—offer the passerby a spontaneous, collaborative, and often beautiful human artifact.

Here are some of the scenes I was able to witness there that day:

much love,

hedgie

new england writers

We have been in the area of Boston for about two weeks now and Addie has already peed on Emily Dickinson's front lawn, pooped in Mark Twain's backyard, and then later pooped and peed on the campus of Harvard. She has no respect for the written word.

And Jr likes to just poop everywhere.

But unlike my pets, I'm hoping you actually care about this kind of stuff, so here are some things that I learned while stalking writers.

--Stalking Target 1: Emily Dickinson

Her house in Massachusetts

The family owned 19 copies of the King James version of the Bible.

She lived in this house for the majority of her life, but she briefly lived in a different house a little bit away during her teen years before moving back here. In that other house, her bedroom window opened up to a view of the cemetery. 

This tree was here when she was alive.

Emily Dickinson and I are the same height.

Shortly after relieving herself.

Our guide did not mention this, but I remember it from when I came here as a kid: due to her highly religious family, many of her poems can be sung to the tune of hymns. The guide referred to it as the "Hallelujah Chorus". But her poems can also be sung to the Gilligan's Island theme song.

Addie really does not trust Robert Frost.

--Stalking Target 2: Dr. Seuss

A sculpture garden dedicated to his works in Massachusetts

Since this memorial garden's location does not have any connection to Dr. Seuss' life, all I learned here was that parents apparently cannot read signs.

Unless it's part of a photo op, in which case they will stand right in front of it to block it from anyone else nearby waiting to take a photo and take 20 minutes to read a children's book.

--Stalking Target 3: Mark Twain

His home during the highest point of his career in Connecticut

In the library, there are a set of objects going across the mantle above the fireplace. Samuel would tell a new story every night to his daughters using each object as a part of the story, always starting on the right with a painting of a cat wearing a ruff (how great is that?) and ending on the left with a painting of a young woman that his daughters named Emmeline. Emmeline went on to be a character in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Also shortly after relieving herself.

On the third floor of the house, there is a room that was designed to be a guest bedroom. However, not many people slept in there, so it became the room where his daughters stored live, wild squirrels to keep as pets.

On Samuel Clemen's actual bed, the pillows are propped up at a steep angle. People in this time slept sitting up because, according to our guide, "Victorians are weird".

And this exists!

much love,
hedgie

i swear i actually write sometimes

I promise, I actually do. Things have been extra crazy lately with Nick's job training. But I am working on stuff. Here's a rough draft of something that I'm stuck stuck on. It started out as one of the flash fictions inspired by Bonnie's ten list, but I'm over 400 words already and don't know when it's going to end. It might still be flash fiction, but I don't know yet.

Anyway:

For a year, after my uncle had lost his job, he lived in a tent in our backyard. Every morning over bowls of soggy cereal, he would tell us about all the animals he heard and saw.  He would hear mosquitoes, owls, and coyotes during the night until the sprinklers sloshed him awake. He never had kids of his own, so his yarns lacked the whimsy and ridiculous details that we craved from stories. His voice would drone on to remark on every detail of two cats fighting and then seemingly finding a way to settle their differences as it lasted for no longer than three minutes. Then there was a time that he snuck into the house to go to the bathroom and as he was zipping himself back into his tent, he saw the silhouette of a possum on the backyard fence before it scurried back into the night. 

That summer, Jenny and I decided that we wanted to become either archeologists or bathtubs when we grew up, and we spent most of our time in the backyard while Uncle Andy pulled weeds as a favor to our mother. Armed with plastic shovels and paintbrushes stolen from our dried and stained watercolor paints, Jenny and I searched for dinosaur bones and ancient burial grounds. Jenny would wrench a stone from the dirt before gently attempting to brush the dust off it.

“What do you think it is?” she asked me breathlessly.

            I narrowed my eyes in the bright sunlight. “That is a dinosaur egg.”

            Jenny cupped it carefully in her hands. “We have to keep it warm so it can hatch,” she said urgently. She was about to walk back into the house when she noticed something in the hole where the egg used to be.  

            There were bones. They looked like pieces of burned popcorn, but hard and flat in weird places.

            “Probably just chicken bones.” I said, but I wasn’t so sure. “Maybe a caveman cooked food here a long time ago.”

            Jenny plucked a few of the bones from the hole and carried them to Uncle Andy. She dropped them into to the flowerbed he was squatted near.

            “What’s this?” He asked. He picked one up and examined it carefully. “Looks like part of a spine.” He looked at it for a little bit longer and then he suddenly let go of it. He turned on his knees to look at us, wiping his hands quickly on his thighs. “That is a human bone,” he declared. 

much love,
hedgie

in sickness and in health essay

Several years ago, I had two essays printed in daily devotional books that are all about being a Christian in college. My first published one was about an incident freshman year of college when one of my roommates got very drunk and I had to learn how to deal with people who held different values than I did in a loving way. My second published essay was about working at the YMCA and trying to create peace between large groups of children that had different beliefs. But I wrote two essays for the second book. My other one got rejected as it dealt with the controversial subject of same-sex marriage. Due to recent events, this subject has been on my mind once more.

Without any further ado, here is my rejected essay on that complicated area, In Sickness and In Health.

[[Trying to pitch this essay to a few places. To be returned at a later date.]]

much love,
hedgie