Starting a Blog. No, Really I Am

Welcome! When my spiffy new website was completed in the summer, and the designer had sent me instructions,  I planned to blog regularly. I did. Really. I used to be part of two group blogs, both of them now ended, and often guest blog when I have a new book out.  I both missed the process and felt I was losing an opportunity to connect.

Life interfered, as life will, but here at the start of a new year, I am back to good intentions.  My goal is to have a new post twice a month. There will be pieces on writing, both the process and the life;  mysteries, both my own and others; other reading, of course   and whatever observations (interesting, I hope) I have to make on life in Brooklyn, life in New York, life in senior years, life in its lovely, surprising and bewildering process. No politics, no complaining, no animals and no (ok, very little)  family chatter.  Please be forgiving if it looks a little odd at times. I'm still learning how to use it.

And please come read,  enjoy and comment.        

 Sometimes I might repost an old blog if it seems relevant. And today is one of those days! New York is having a rare, turn-off-the-city blizzard. There is a white sky, heavy winds, hours of snow falling, everyone  trying to stay indoors.   And I happen to have an old piece called “Snow Day.” It reveals I am not a native New Yorker, too. 

I hope you enjoy reading it, whether you are looking out at snow falling or sitting in sunshine. 

Snow Day

It’s Friday, January 3, 2014 here in New York and we were hit by a big snowstorm last night. And I want to say “Hooray!” That would not be a popular point of view here today, but there’s nothing I can do about it. One of my earliest memories is banks of shoveled snow along the sidewalks, piled higher than my head. Winter was permanently imprinted when I was young and impressionable.

In other words, there is a little girl in me who still gets excited about the words “Snow day”. I remember early winter mornings listening to the radio for the list of school closings before getting out of bed. Usually it was only the central schools, out in the county where the farm kids couldn’t get to school until the back roads were plowed. It took a big snowstorm to defeat those efficient, experienced snowplow drivers on the Watertown city streets. When it happened, and “City schools are closed” was announced, joy ensued. (For the children. Maybe not so much for their mothers.)

I remember the tall metal poles, painted yellow at the top, next to all the fire hydrants. They were there so hydrants buried in snow could be located when needed. I remember being on college vacation, waking up to hear the sound of shovels scraping the sidewalks and thinking “Ah. I am really home.” I remember the time my aunt and uncle, driving from New York, got caught in a snowstorm and spent the night at a farm, and the time my sister, driving back to Buffalo for college, was trapped in a car by a storm for about twelve hours. And I remember going back to my job in Boston, leaving town under clear skies and hitting a blizzard halfway to the Syracuse airport. My dad just turned the car around and we went home. And this was in April!

My sister, who recently moved from snowbound upstate NY to warm Texas, tells me I would not feel that way if I’d been battling snow all these years. Maybe she is right, but it is only a maybe. My husband has his own snowy memories, and we actually went to Winter Carnival in Québec City a few years ago. It was very, very -very!- cold, but we had a wonderful time. If we ever move away from New York, it will be north, not south.
The snow has crept into just one story I wrote,( kingsriverlife.com/04/27/snow-light-a-mystery-short-story/) but I suspect there will be more. I love books that capture that feeling of the weather as a character, one that can be enjoyed but must always be respected. When I read Julia Spencer-Fleming or Sara J. Henry or Jenny Milchman, I feel that they are writing about my own native country.