Carolyn Paul Branch

Every house was dark when she passed through town at 3:30 a.m.  This was the quietest time of the night, a little too late for partiers, a little too early for day shift workers and just right for Sarah Henderson.  Cruising unimpeded through the empty streets was usually a quiet pleasure for her, but today she was too focused on the job ahead of her to notice. She had to be inside the plant, started on her assignment no later than four o’clock.

As soon as she passed out of the city limits she could see the cooling tower with its huge mushroom shaped cloud of steam.   It was hard to believe she still had almost ten miles to drive before she reached the nuclear plant that glowed so brightly against the dark sky.

The state highway was narrow, hilly and full of unexpected twists and turns. She  drove carefully and kept her speed a bit below 55, both for safety and because of the highway patrol officer  she knew might be lurking somewhere along the way, waiting for speeders and ready for the inevitable daily accident.  State Route O was designed for a tiny farm town with one grocery store, not for the hundreds who streamed back and forth to the plant every day.

The cooling tower grew larger with each mile, filling her view.  When she pulled through the gate at the first chain link fence she could see the tremendous fall of water at bottom of the massive tower, but she ignored it because she  was focused on her goal, one of the blank concrete buildings gathered near the base.   Even though the guard knew her and her car, she had her badge out and ready for inspection.  She could feel the minutes ticking away, but she kept her voice cheerful and calm.

“Good morning, Randy. How have things been tonight?”

“Just fine, Mrs. Henderson. No problems at all.”

Randy looked at her badge carefully, then back at her face. He swept the beam of his big mag light through her back seat and checked under the Chevy with his long handled mirror before finally pushing a button to open the gate to give her access to acres of mostly empty parking lots.

Sarah parked in her usual place and locked up her car.  The walk across the wide expanse of concrete seemed to take forever, but fortunately the guard at the inner gate waved her through with only a cursory glance at the badge hanging around her neck. She stepped through the turnstile, dropped her keys, shoulder purse and phone on the conveyor belt and walked slowly through the metal detector.  The explosives detector booth was next. She stood as still as possible until the device breathed a quiet puff of air over her body and clicked open the door on the opposite side of the booth.

After gathering her things from the conveyer belt , she  pushed her way through the last turnstile  to the final security check. The retinal scan was automatic and impersonal, but she still hated pressing tight against the bright lens and feeling it stare back and record the tiniest and most intimate details of her right eye.  She pushed her badge into the card reader, held her eye wide open while the machine compared the two, found a match and clicked open the massive door to the main plant.

Once through the door she was outside again and had another expanse of concrete to cross and a blank building with a plain metal door that opened with the simple turn of the key in her hand.  Low humming machinery greeted her and dim security lights reflected off polished steel. She flipped on a row of switches and bright lights flooded the sterile white room.

She pulled her white coat from a rack near the door, buttoned it up carefully, drew a deep breath and plunged into the job she had set for herself.   All the ingredients she needed were there waiting for her.   She knew she could do it right if they only gave her enough time.

She measured and mixed precisely to instructions. She set the dial at exactly the right temperature and checked with a separate thermometer.  She moved around quickly getting all the parts to her plan started in the right order.  It would all come together perfectly just as the day crew began to flood the building at 5:30 a.m.  No one was expecting it. They didn’t even suspect.

But they had asked for it and now they were going to get it.  The process wasn’t as hard as she thought it would be and Sarah wondered why she had never dared before.

Homemade biscuits from scratch would make this morning special.

• Storyaday home
• Can you write a Story A Day in the month of May? (writeontheworld.wordpress.com)
• Make Visible: Story a Day (poetic-muselings.net)
• Create Minded (createminded.com)
• Mulberry Wars (Julie Unplugged)
• Beware them Homo Sapiens (safireblade.com)
• Phoenix Song
• The Thicket
• Chosen

Second Hand Heart by Catherine Ryan Hyde

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Vida is 19 and has a life-threatening heart condition. Richard is 36 and has just lost his beloved wife in a car accident. When Richard is invited to the hospital to meet the young woman who received his wife’s donor heart, Vida takes one look at him and feels she’s loved him all her life. Is Vida just a sheltered and confused young woman? Or is there truth behind the theory of cellular memory? Can a heart remember, at least for a time, on its own?

Everything about this book is unexpected. You think you’re in for one thing, but you get quite another. The characters don’t behave the way I thought they would, the story unfolds in a landscape utterly different to where it begins and instead of being pleasantly entertained by a sweet story…I found a moving lesson about living as opposed to just existing.

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Last week, on April 11, 2012, I retired.  At the lovely reception the library hosted on my last day, everyone  was asking what I planned to do with all my free time.  I told some folks about the hammock my husband had just hung for me.  

Others got a more serious answer. I retired because I have always wanted to write and have never felt there was enough time.

I know what you’re thinking.  ”Not enough time” is the standard excuse given by every would-be writer in the world.   Those who really want to write find the time somewhere. They get up earlier, stay up later, write on lunch hours and in waiting rooms.   I have done those things. Sometimes.

One of my gifts was a mug that says “Retirement – when you stop making a living and start making a life.”  That’s WRONG. The absolute wrong way to look at retirement or at leaving your job to write.  FIRST you make a LIFE doing something that means more to you than “making a living”.  Without that Life to build on, your retirement and your writing is empty and uninspired.

I made a life. A good life full of family and work, joy and pain, love and anger.  Every day, every moment of my life is a seed of a story waiting to be told.

Now.

I have time.

Sunny Winter Morning

1. Photo Challenge: Sun is Up! | La mandrola de la Mandraka
2. Weekly Photo Challenge: SUN « The Other Courtney
3. Weekly Photo Challenge: Sun | Because
4. Weekly Photo Challenge: Sun « « The Great Escape » Life from behind a lens
5. Joakim Knudsen
6. Weekly Photo Challenge: Sun « Pathfinder: MotherWifeStudentWorker
7. Weekly Photo Challenge: Sun « Changeversations
8. Weekly Photo Challenge: Sun « bukaningrat ™
9. Weekly Photo Challenge: Sun (2) « e-Me
10. Weekly Photo Challenge: Sun « e-Me
11. The Sun « Teepe’s weblog
12. Weekly Photo Challenge: Sun – Tanzania « Wanderlustress
13. Here Comes The Sun « Spirit Lights The Way
14. Weekly Photo Challenge: Sun | Beyond the Brush
15. Weekly WordPress Challenge: Sun « A year in the Life
16. Weekly Photo Challenge: Sun | lizabethlacey photography
17. Weekly Photo Challenge: Sun | { a Memory Bliss }
18. Weekly Photo Challenge: Sun – Mostly inspirational chit-chat
19. Weekly Photo Challenge: Sun | Wind Against Current
20. Weekly Photo Challenge: Sun « Mike Hardisty Photography
21. Weekly Photo Challenge – Sun | Just Snaps
22. Weekly Photo Challenge – Sun | Chittle Chattle
23. Weekly Photo Challenge: Sun | mothergrogan
24. Weekly Photo Challenge: Sun « The Urge To Wander
25. Weekly photo challenge: Sun « Alice through the Macro Lens
26. Weekly Photo Challenge: The Sun | Writing Your Destiny
27. Connie’s World
28. Weekly Photo Challenge: Sun | colderweather
29. Weekly Photo Challenge: Sun « Julie Dawn Fox in Portugal

The Weekly Photo Challenge  over at The Daily Post is a photo with two subjects.

Shayna and her artwork

Boy with sparkler and lake

World at the end of the tunnel

• Weekly Photo Challenge: Two Subjects (dailypost.wordpress.com)

Embrace by Jessica Shirvington

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It’s about a girl who finds out on her 17th birthday that she is half angel and destined to spend her life guarding & protecting humans from evil exiled angels. There are two love interests – one is her predestined partner, who is also a guardian half-angel. The other is a centuries-old dark angel who looks about 20 and is totally hot. I loved it! Guess I am more open to evil angels than I am to vampires. There is a neat interview with the author in School Library Journal. This is her first book. http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/slj/…

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11/22/63 by Stephen King My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not what I expected

I was intrigued by the idea of 11/22/63 as soon as I saw the first review months ago. Stephen King sends someone back in time to save JFK and change history – I knew right away I wanted to read it. But I didn’t buy it until some of my writer friends began to talk about how it kept them compulsively reading through 800+ pages. It was the same for me. I lost sleep reading at night, was late getting back to my desk because I read it during lunch. I couldn’t but it down, even though it was nothing like what I expected. It isn’t the story of the Kennedy assassination. It isn’t about Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife Marina. It doesn’t really speculate on what the world may have been like if Kennedy had lived. All those parts are there, but the meat of the story (the part that keeps you reading recklessly on when you desperately need sleep and have a dozen other things you should be doing) is a tragic love story of two high school teachers in a small Texas town.

It will make a great movie.

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My husband and I recently celebrated our 48th anniversary.  I went online to see what kind of gift would traditionally be associated with 48 years. Turns out the answer is: nothing.  According to Anniversary Ideas   the 48th Wedding Anniversary has no traditional materials, symbols, flowers, or gemstones associated with it.   After the first twenty, anniversaries are only special every five years!

I didn’t know that. Probably because this is the first anniversary that I have had time to think about it.  We are slowing down this year, working part time, even spending an occasional morning sleeping late together. It feels like a milestone to us because our lives are changing, entering a new phase. We wanted to do something special, to celebrate in a way that would last beyond the day. We wanted to spend a quiet day together doing something we would both enjoy and remember with smiles.

So we went to the dog pound.

Yes, I know the politically correct term now is “animal shelter”, but it’s still the place where dogs are impounded, caged, and if not adopted, eventually put to sleep.  Our local shelter is a better place than it was in 1963. The staff there were friendly and helpful. We were allowed to roam freely to make our choice. Every pen and cage was full.

The staff warned us the mixed terrier puppy we chose was a “live wire”.   They were right. I’m sure I will be telling stories about Cookie and how she took over our hearts and our home for years to come.

It may not be on the official list, but for us, the 48th anniversary will always be the year of the puppy.

It’s November 21. National Novel Writing Month is two-thirds over and so far has not gone according to plan.

It was already out-of-wack on November 6 when I found myself in the hospital recovering from an angioplasty and stent placement. I’d been ignoring the off-kilter feeling just as I ignored the chest pain and shortness of breath.  My husband, who knows me very well, refused to let me ignore the physical signs of a flagging heart. Thus, a visit to the cardiologist and a hurry-up stent was efficiently placed to take care of the 95% blockage that was stopping up my heart.  All fixed.

Home from the hospital I settled in my little office and forced my fingers to tap-tap-tap for a few days, even though I knew I was writing crap and it was HARD to even do that.  Just keep the words coming, I told myself. That’s all that matters. Word count. By November 14 I was up to 20,542 words.  That night I went back to the hospital emergency room again. Pneumonia, they said. Not all that uncommon after a heart “event”. Antibiotics. Prescription cough syrup that actually  slowed down the coughing enough to let me sleep.

Sleep. That’s what I did for several days and nights, waking up just long enough to swallow pills and more of that lovely cough syrup. Once in a while I staggered to the computer to check my email or scan my G+ stream. But I did not write.

When a day came that I was feeling human again, I went outside, sat in the sunshine on the ground, and planted red tulips. That bag of bulbs had been lying on the counter, bothering no one, for at least two months. Suddenly, it seemed essential to get them in the ground so they could rest and be ready to burst into beauty next Spring.  As my trowel dug into the soft black earth and I patted each papery white bulb into its bed, I pictured myself striding down the walk on a sunny morning, smiling at the brilliant red flowers blooming beside my door.

It was a good day. But, still, another day I did not write.

November 21. I  know I will not write 30,000 words during the next week. It is possible, some people have written entire novels in a weekend. But, not me. Not this time.

I will sit quietly while a fat yellow cat snoozes on my lap. I will sip tea, listen to my wind chimes tinkle in the breeze.  I will feel grateful for the steady beat of my own heart, the breath easing in and out of my lungs.  If I wait quietly, the tulips will bloom.

And the words will come.