1. Write more.
2. Exercise more.
3. Play more music.
4. Set my house in order.

My son has an interesting approach to his budget, which I am also going to try to put in place. He basically only tracks money in four categories: household, child care, car and motorcycle, and discretionary. He keeps a cushion at all times in his checking account (i.e., the amount he needs to feel safe), but whatever is left at the end of the month, he drops onto one of his credit-card accounts or adds it to savings. I kind of like that. It’s simple and straightforward, unlike most budgeting systems I have tried in the past. He doesn’t try to track every single expenditure or split bills. For example, if he goes to Walmart and buys a windshield wiper blade in addition to his usual household items, he enters the entire amount into his budgeted “household” account. If he buys a soda at the convenience store when he fills up his tank with gas, that comes out of the car/motorcycle budget, but if he buys a case of soda at the grocery store, that comes out of the household budget. It’s the total amounts he is interested in and the proportions, which makes a lot of sense to me. He also has some complicated system for projecting out and modifying his budgeted amounts based on spending trends over the past three months, but I’m not going to worry about that part.

His overall system for budgeting money also seems like it would help me keep track of how I spend my time. I like the idea of only four categories, even if the “discretionary” category is huge. It helps put things into perspective somehow. Whatever you do (or spend) has to be allotted to one of four categories.

Following my son’s lead, here are my four budgeted money categories:

1. Household
2. Gifts and Charities
3. Transportation
4. Discretionary (i.e., everything else)

Here are my four budgeted time categories:

1. Cooking, cleaning, maintaining home and gardens
2. Writing
3. Music and Dance
4. Discretionary

I did the math and was shocked to find that if I divide my time equally (after subtracting out time at the office and time spent sleeping), I should have 18 hours a week to devote to each of the other categories. If I really did spend 18 hours a week writing or playing music, I’d have quite a few pages at the end of the month and would be able to learn quite a few new tunes. Of course, the discretionary time will be the one I have to watch, and much of the music & dance time will be taken up with traveling to dances (following my son’s rule of not splitting tickets). And right now, while I have a big freelance copyediting project to do, most of the discretionary time will be taken up with that. I probably should make a chart to keep track of my hours. Is that being too, too compulsive?

Okay, forget the chart. But here’s how it might look for just one of my four categories–writing.

Mom and I figured out that if we write even 500 words a day, we will produce enough for three novels (average 60,000 words) by the end of the year, which seems like crazy talk. I’ve heard that people generally overestimate what they can accomplish in a day and underestimate what they can accomplish in a year, which I guess must be right, because who would ever think you could write three novels a year by only writing 500 words a day.

At any rate, we decided that writing three new works really was crazy, but we would each try to revise two existing works and write one new one. When she was doing the math, I kept thinking to myself, “Uh huh. Sure. Whatever, mom.” But  now I’m thinking that if I really do write for 18 hours a week, that’s more than enough time to keep up with journals, letter writing, blogs, and our long-term goal of writing/revising books. I can easily write 500 words in about an hour, if I’m writing about something I know about (as opposed to something I need to research).

In the meantime, I am starting a new blog called A Mother’s War, where I plan to record my thoughts and feelings from my son’s deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan over the past ten years, but I have not quite decided whether that will count as revising my book that I wrote during the first year of the Iraq war or if I am wanting to use the blog to see what kind of audience there might be for such a book. I’m thinking the book and the blog should be separate projects, with the blog more like a warm-up for the actual work of revising the book. I already know how to write short 500-word pieces, but I’m not so sure how to write a sustained work of 300 pages.

In addition, mom has started sending writing prompts every day or so, from a book she got for Christmas called My Book of Self. Mom is counting this as her new work, because she was already thinking of writing an autobiography. I had not thought about what new work I might like to write, so again, I’m not sure if this daily writing “counts.” It could be interesting, though, since we’re both writing the prompts together, if we put them together into a mother-daughter compilation. Not sure how that would work, but since we’ll be writing about some of the same topics, the same characters and settings, and using the same prompts, it could be quite provocative. So that may or may not be my new book.

I also want to go through my old poems and journals and prose pieces that are shoved in boxes in the basement, so that will be my second revision project. People used to say I was a good writer, and I won awards for both fiction and poetry while in graduate school, so there is probably something worth salvaging down there, something I could submit for publication. Okay, so here’s my writing plan for the year.

Three main projects

1. January-April—Revise books of poems (submit individual poems for publication and enter contests)
2. May-August—Revise war journal (post short pieces on blog)
3. September-December—Write novel about 13-year-old girl (watch for ideas while writing autobiographical prompts)

Neighbour's Improved Cottage Hive (1878) is one of the hives discussed in The Quest for the Perfect Hive by Gene Kritsky

I just spent a wonderful weekend with my aunt, during which we spent much of our time talking about books we have read and books we want to read. We are both avid readers of “real books” and don’t believe the dire predictions that e-books will take over the market so that no more paper books will be published. I mean seriously, you can’t read your iPad in the bath tub. My aunt prefers extremely long, well-researched biographies and current history and politics with hundreds of footnotes, but she also read a couple novels in 2011, including several science fiction books written by Philip K Dick in the 1960s and 1970s that have been reissued by the Library of America.

After hearing about the books she has read, I decided to go back and see if I could remember what I read during 2011. My list is less focused than hers. Many of the books I read are ones that people gave me or that I ran across on the new book shelf at the library or picked up in the break room at work. Here are the books I was clever enough to have written down (otherwise, I’m not sure I would have remembered all these):

Fiction

1. The Whistling Season by Ivan Doig. (I listed to this one in the car on our trip to Kentucky to attend the Christmas Country Dance School in Berea.)
2. Deception Point by Dan Brown (I picked this one up in the break room at work; a very enjoyable fast read, with lots of twists in the plot)
3. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (This one I borrowed from a friend, who thought it was extremely funny. She had gotten it from her 94-year-old father. The story was about an old man who married a young woman and upset his children. Some of the story was quite funny but the overall situation perhaps reminded me a little too much of gold diggers we have known.)
4. The Saturday Big Tent Wedding by Alexander McCall (One of the charming books about the Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency. How can you go wrong?)
5. Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver (I borrowed this one from my mom and really should return to her, but I loved it so much, I am tempted to hang on to it. Reading this book brought me close to the old feelings I used to get when I had the luxury of reading all day during the summers, up in a tree or on a blanket in the yard. I read Prodigal Summer basically in one setting. The novel “weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives inhabiting the forested mountains and struggling small farms of southern Appalachia.” I loved the characters, the setting, and the stories.)
6. Hour Game by David Baldacci (I don’t usually read murder mysteries, but I picked this up in the break room at work and found myself hooked.)

Nonfiction

1. Ghosts of the Bluegrass by James McCormick and Macy Wyatt. (This was a birthday gift from mom, written by two of my professors from college.)
2. Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl. (I re-read this while at my mom’s.)
3. I am America, and So Can You by Stephen Colbert. (We checked this CD out from the library and listened to it in short segments on the way to and from work each day. What a great way to take the stress out of a commute.)
4. Dave Barry’s Book of Money Secrets: Like, Why is There a Giant Eyeball on the Dollar. (Another CD from the library that kept us laughing on our daily commutes to work.)
5. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt (I had read this one before but decided to read it again when my daughter-in-law brought it back after having borrowed it. Still seems odd to list it with the nonfiction.)
6. Reading Between the Wines by Terry Theise (I bought this one as a possible gift for my brother last Christmas, but didn’t get it in time, so I kept it and read it myself. Hey Skip, if you want your Christmas present now, just let me know. It was a good read.)
7. Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (This was a birthday gift from mom, which I had put off reading for a while, because I thought it would be depressing. When I finally got around to reading it, though, I found the book very inspiring, even though the author writes about difficult subjects; I’d like to read more about her and about the topics she addresses; much to think about and try to figure out.)
8. Four Seasons in Rome (This was a Christmas gift from mom, who thought I would enjoy the memoir about raising twin boys while trying to write a novel in a foreign country, and she was right about that; I’ve especially enjoyed the beautiful in-depth reflections on a city that I just barely met on a four-day trip with my son one Thanksgiving.)
9. Hard Times Guide to Retirement by Mark Miller (Basically, the advice here was if you are lucky enough to still have a job during hard times, hold on to it and wait as long as possible to retire. Not was I was looking for.)
10. Why Do Bees Buzz? By Elizabeth Capaldi Evans and Carol A. Butler (This book provided straightforward answers to lots of questions about bees, including: Do bees bleed? How do bees’ wings work? Do bees ever get fooled by predators? Do bees sleep? What is piping behavior? Not much of a plot, but interesting nevertheless.)
11. The Quest for the Perfect Hive: A History of Innovation in Bee Culture by Gene Kritsky (This book traces the evolution of hive design from ancient Egypt to the present and includes illustrations of some fascinating designs used by beekeepers before the invention of the Langstroth hive, which has been in use for the last century.)
12. One Year to an Organized Life by Regina Leeds (It’s been almost a year since I read the next four books, and my life is still not organized, but I haven’t given up hope.)
13. The Fast and Furious Five Step Organizing Solution by Susan C. Pinsky
14. House Works: How to Live Clean, Green, and Organized at Home by Cynthia Townley Ewer
15. The Office Clutter Cure: Get Organized, Get Results! By Don Aslett
16. At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson (I love Bryson’s books. In this one, he sets out to “write a history of the world without leaving home.”
17. Everyday Cooking with Organic Produce by Cathy Thomas
18. Pain Free: A Revolutionary Method for Stopping Chronic Pain by Pete Egoscue with Roger Gittiner
19. Wrong: Why Experts* Keep Failing Us–And How to Know When Not to Trust Them by David Freedman. (This one was more than a little depressing.)
20. Honeybee Democracy by Thomas D Seeley (This fascinating book discussed the ways honeybees communicate and make group decisions, as when they are searching for a new hive.)
21. Get Up Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite by Bruce E. Levine (This one left me feeling a bit unenergized and defeated.)
22. How Did the Government Get in Your Backyard by Jeff Gillman and Eric Hererlig (I really enjoyed all the background information the authors provided on the science and the politics of many environmental issues I care about.)
23. Big Dead Place: Inside the Strange and Menacing World of Antarctica by Nicholas Johnson (a fascinating book about contemporary life at McMurdo and South Pole, which my son let me borrow just before his most recent trip to Antarctica; apparently this is slated to be a TV series soon; too bad I don’t have a TV. I would totally watch this one.)
24. The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith (to be truthful, I did not read all of this classic book on liberal philosophy.)

A horizontal hollow log hive (Butterworth 1892) from The Quest for the Perfect Hive

Children’s Books

1. The Invisible String by Patricia Harst (a picture book that I bought for my grandchildren during my son’s most recent deployment, this time to Afghanistan)
2. A Paper Hug by Stephanie Skolmoski (another picture book on deployment that I bought for my grandchildren before my son had to leave again to attend captain school)
3. 39 Clues (I read this and several other books whose titles now escape me, while trying to decide which ones to bring along when we took the grandchildren to dance camp this past summer. I had forgotten how much I love to read children’s books. Those authors can’t afford to waste any time getting to the heart of a story, or the audience gets bored.)
4. Fablehaven by Brandon Mull (This is the one we finally settled on, a book about grandparents who ran a sanctuary for mystical animals. While at dance camp with our grandchildren in July, we read a chapter or two aloud each night before bed.)
5. Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie (we listened to this on CD while driving home from dance camp)
6. The White Fox Chronicles by Gary Paulsen (a sci-fi book that my 11-year-old grandson wanted me to read, and I was very happy I did, not just for the insight into how he thinks, but it also happened to be a gripping story.)

At the moment I am about halfway through reading The Moral Lives of Animals by Dale Peterson and The Beekeeper’s Lament by Hannah Nordhaus. (I often have more than one book going at a time.)  I came home from my aunt’s with a 983-page novel called The Kindly Ones, originally written in French by Johnathan Littell and winner of two prestigious French literary awards. It is “the chilling fictional memoir of Dr. Maximilien Aue, a former Nazi officer who has reinvented himself, many years after the war, as a middle-class family man and factory owner in France.” My aunt  warned me that it is morally difficult reading but said it explained a lot of things that she often thinks about.

I have been trying to simplify my life for years and have made quite a bit of progress. By some standards, I don’t have a lot of clutter, but I sure own a whole lot more than 100 things. So when I start thinking this would be a fun challenge to take on, I immediately slip into the same sort of bargaining: Do I count all my books as 1? What about the china cabinet filled with dishes? Can I count them all as 2 (1 for the set of dishes that belonged to my grandmother + 1 for the set of dishes that belonged to my husband’s grandmother)? By that logic, the table and four chairs would be another 1. And the stereo and CDs—only 1! Hey, this is easier than I thought! At this rate I’ll be down to 100 items in no time!

1 set of dishes + 1 set of dishes = 2 things, right?

From December 1996

This Christmas, my younger son, who is ten, asked for several board games, which we have been playing on our days off. When I take the time to sit with him at the table for a few minutes and play a game of Yahtzee or Mancala or Catch Phrase and stop worrying about the endless piles of clutter;

When I stop for a moment;

When I decide the dishes in the sink can wait;

When our older son, exasperrated, finally gives in to his insistent younger brother and sits at the table with the family to play guessing games;

When my husband and I give up trying for the time being to find some time for ourselves, to stop looking at the house and these children as just a phase to get through so we can finally be what we think we’d like to be: artists with no responsibility but to our muses;

When we can stop the endless chatter in our heads for a moment, the droning list of have-to’s, ought-to’s, and shoulds playing day and night like elevator music;

When I can choose to be there for my son and stop saying, “just a minute,” “after I do this one thing,” “I’m almost there”;

When I can shut my eyes to the piles of clutter on the counter;

When I can just stop and look at this child, who seems so small in many ways and yet will outgrow me over the next year;

And take the pair of dice in my hands;

Feel their cool sides, their solid weight, the way they knock together in my cupped hands;

When I can focus all my attention on wishing for a certain toss of the die, share my son’s excitement when he rolls to an inside straight, know how important it is to roll the right combination;

Important enough to call certain rolls fair or unfair_.

Then I feel a deep satisfaction and a quiet joy, and I am grateful for my son, who does not need to be reminded to play.

While we play, I think about a lot of things. I realize with some surprise that I think real families are supposed to play games together, although I don’t have any memories of that ever happening in my childhood, so I’m not sure where that thought comes from. Certainly, my husband and I have not done much in the way of playing games with our own children, although we try from time to time, like this Christmas.

Games I remember from childhood include Chinese checkers, checkers, parcheesi, dominos, a box of 64 games like Fox and Hens, but I associate those with my brother, not with my parents. I remember playing card games when I got older, including a complicated game called something like Shanghai Rummy, which you played with two decks and a sequence of hands you had to play. (Was that a game someone made up during some war? Where did that name come from?) My mom and dad used to play chess from time to time. Then after my brother learned to play chess, he would challenge dad, and it became a kind of show-down for them. I vaguely remember Monopoly and Life. I can’t imagine my grandparents playing any kind of board or card games, but grandaddy played basketball and football growing up. My older son enjoys live-action role play and computer games but has never cared much for board or card games, except for Magic the Gathering, which he played for several years.

What is it about different kinds of games that makes one kind fun and another not so fun? What purpose do games play? Why do they seem so important?

Games I Used to Play

• jacks
• jump rope
• Strut Miss Lucy
• Drop the Handkerchief
• Red Rover
• Red Light Green Light
• Chinese jump rope
• double dutch
• tiddly winks
• bingo
• checkers
• Chinese checkers
• parcheesi
• tic tac toe
• scrabble
• Monopoly
• Old Maid
• Go Fish
• Memory
• Pay Day
• Life
• Mouse Trap
• caroms
• dominos
• poker
• Crazy 8s
• Uno
• Wink
• mancala
• Yahtzee
• freeze tag
• The Price is Right
• Hi Ho Cherry Oh
• hide and seek
• 20 questions
• alphabet game
• kick ball
• duck duck goose
• marbles

I think a lot about retiring, and sometimes I even manage to convince myself that if I didn’t have to spend 40 hours a week at a paid job, then I would have more time and energy to do something important. Though what that might be, I’m not sure. I used to think education was important, so my job in online course development was satisfying enough, but lately everything seems like a big money-making scheme, higher education included, so I find myself disgruntled and wanting to get out and do something more satisfying and worthwhile. Of course, if I were to seriously consider retiring, there’s that issue of how to pay for health insurance and the very real fear that my modest retirement savings could vanish in the blink of an eye.

To try to counteract my downward slide, I’ve been spending a fair amount of time researching organizations that work on issues I care about—the environment, child protection, health, human rights, hunger, international relief and development, public policy—and I’ve been reading reports on various charities by Charity Watch, Charity Navigator, and Better Business Bureau. My thinking is that since I have limited amounts of time and money to donate to worthy causes, I should try to give to organizations that use their resources wisely to do good deeds, so I have been focusing on those organizations that spend at least 75% on direct program expenses and don’t spend excessive amounts on fundraising and administrative costs. But I don’t know how to think about chief executives and presidents who make over $350,000 a year directing charitable organizations. Of course, even that amount, which sounds outrageous to me, is a drop in the bucket compared to the $13.2 million compensation package that went to the president of Goldman Sachs in 2010. Such discrepancies make me physically ill.

I am so glad to see the Occupy movement growing as it has in a little more than two months and hope they are successful in “fighting back against the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process” and shining a bright light on “the role of Wall Street in creating an economic collapse that has caused the greatest recession in generations.” In recent years I had wondered why people weren’t out in the streets protesting, so I’m glad to see some change in the public discourse. I am fascinated by their process of decision making through the “people’s assemblies” and the presence of so many creative individuals working together to change the current paradigm. I wish them well. I hope we all have the courage and the stamina to resist “the factual ignorance, misinterpretations, bad advice, lies, and outright villainy of the uprising’s various critics,” as described in the Hightower Lowdown. Not to mention the police brutality and other crackdowns that have occurred in too many places. I don’t know what to think now that so many cities, including my own, have cleared their parks and public spaces of the Occupiers, but I hope the people’s assemblies are meeting to plan how best to keep their message in plain view for all to see.

I have also been trying to inspire myself by reading stories about people who are finding ways to live better on less money, as they downsize; reduce their carbon footprints; start their own businesses; engage in DIY projects; support each other in challenging times; rebuild relationships with friends, family, and community; learn to live sustainably; reclaim time; do things that matter. I subscribe to several progressive magazines, most of which tend to depress me with the facts and make me think we are all going to hell in a handbasket, but when I want to remind myself of the power of people to bring about important change and to work toward practical solutions to important problems, I turn to Yes Magazine.

My last strategy is to challenge myself to get out and take a walk. I have the whole day off, and it’s above 50 degrees out, so I really have no excuse whatsoever. Being outside almost always makes me feel better, although I continually forget that fact.

This Aran square was designed by Judy Sumner, who says she got her inspiration from a birthday card she received from her twin granddaughters. The card had little cartoon bugs and spiders, and Xs and Os.

I finished this square in the car on the way to Lawrence, Kansas, for a contra dance and then immediately began to work on another square. I’m not sure this next one is going to be quite as much fun to work on, but it should at least keep my brain active. Each of the patterns in the book The Great American Aran Afghan shows a photograph of the completed square and presents the instructions in both words and charts, along with complicated keys and descriptions of the various cable stitches. There is also a glossary at the back of the book that explains common abbreviations and a “knitter’s school” that provides steps and diagrams for the basics (cast on, knit, purl, bind off, graft). Most of the patterns have at least three or four charts, each with a different number of rows in the repeat, so the challenge is to keep track of which row you are on for each different chart.

I look at the photograph a lot as I work, but since I am basically a “linear person,” I generally find it easiest to follow the written instructions, not the visual charts. Part of the challenge with following the visual charts is to remember to read the chart from right to left for the odd-numbered rows and from left to right for the even-numbered rows. I use four different colored counters to keep track of the rows, plus markers to identify where each pattern begins and ends.

On the surface, the Tipsy Cable square that I just started seems easier to work on than some of the other squares I have done, because it has two small cables on the outside of the square and two larger cables on the inside, separated by sections of twisted knit and reverse stockinette stitch. However, the tricky bit is that the pairs of matched cables are mirror images of each other, so in essence there are four charts to keep track of, not two, as I had originally thought. For example, the outside cables are represented by Chart A, so I happily started Chart A on row 1, as expected, but when I got to the outside cable on the other side of the square, the instructions told me to start at row 21 of the same Chart A.

The larger inside cables were even more confusing. Again, it started out clearly enough, even if a little complicated, with the first of the larger cables represented by Chart B and the second by Chart C. And I could look at the photograph and the visual representations of the charts and see that they were mirror images of each other, so that made sense. However, I nearly threw the whole thing out the car window when I got to row 2 of Chart C, which told me to follow row 24 of Chart B—which told me to “Repeat row 14.” I felt like I was on some sort of insane scavenger hunt. I just keep telling myself to concentrate on one row at a time and to pay attention, and it should all work out. The curious thing is that this pattern is not considered to be one of the more difficult in the book. At least, the editors of the book don’t consider it difficult. I’m still not convinced. But they thought the square with the Spiders was difficult, and I just thought that was just plain fun.

Farley's Music Hall was built in 1885.

I love the old dance halls and am always thrilled to discover such places still standing, usually in small towns, where the community still gathers to dance and make music together. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the village dance hall was the place where young people could mingle and where friends and neighbors could relax. Most dance halls at that time were single-story buildings with a wooden floor, benches along the sides, and a small stage at one end for the musicians. These community halls offered entertainment, refreshment, and opportunities to socialize after a hard week of work. In many communities, dance halls were built by ethnic groups, fraternal organizations, or individual social clubs. The dance halls tended to be family friendly, while the roadhouses and taxi-dance halls were often located beyond the jurisdiction of town and tended to draw a wilder crowd.

Inside Farley's Music Hall.

Farley’s Music Hall in Elsah, Illinois, was built by Dr. Farley in 1885 and served as the center of village activity for many years. In addition to dances and musical events, numerous other gatherings were held in the hall, including travelling medicine shows, literary club meetings, church socials, and school plays. In the early part of the twentieth century, the Knights of Pythias bought the hall and added a second floor. After the building was severely damaged in the flood of 1993, Historic Elsah Foundation purchased the hall and began the difficult process of renovation.

Today Farley’s Music Hall once again serves as a gathering place for residents of the village and visitors from around the region. On the calendar for November and December are two community dances, a lecture, and a Christmas hymn sing. The village of Elsah is not a historical museum, although it feels that way; people actually live in the charming stone houses and other nineteenth-century buildings. There is no commerce in the village, since the one restaurant closed, although there are a couple B&Bs–the Green Tree Inn and the Maple Leaf Cottage Inn. Many of the residents of the village are retired; others work at Principia College up on the limestone bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River. Some villagers commute to nearby St. Louis, MO, or Alton, IL, for work; others telecommute.

We have had the good fortune of dancing at Farley’s on two separate occasions so far–once in May for a graduation party for a young friend of ours, and this past Saturday, for one of Elsah’s regular community dances. (One of the bonuses of being married to a dance caller is that you get to dance in all kinds of places you might never have found on your own, and you get to dance with people you might otherwise not have met.) The community dances were started about eight years ago by residents of the village to give their children a place to play music and socialize. Both dances were charming. The first time we went to Elsah, I knew I was going to love the place, as soon as we turned off the river road onto the narrow village street and saw the warm glow through the windows and heard the fiddle music through the open door. It felt like walking into a story book, where the dancing was in full swing by the time we arrived.

Last Saturday we went earlier in the day and had dinner at the home of the dance organizers, then walked down the street together to open up the hall for the dance. The hall is intimate enough that the band can play acoustic, so we only needed one speaker and a microphone for the caller. Our hosts had made snacks for the break, which they set up on a table in the small foyer, along with a cooler of water. The chairs were already set up around the perimeter of the hall, so after we got everything ready, we began the somewhat anxious wait for people to show up.

Class members from the Folk School of St. Louis provided the music for the contra dance in Elsah, Illinois.

The band (members of a group music class at the Folk School of St. Louis) began to arrive around 6:30, but the dancers were slow to arrive, and we were beginning to wonder whether the band would outnumber the dancers. Jim, the caller for the evening, began sorting his dance cards into ones we could do with as few as six dancers, squares if we got eight dancers, or “as many as will” if we got enough dancers to fill the hall. Shortly after 7:00, however, our anxieties were relieved, when several students from Principia arrived, and before long the hall was filled with music and dance. It was an altogether satisfactory evening.

Dancers lined up for a contra dance at Farley's Music Hall.

The first block was at least somewhat familiar–more a detour than a block, I thought. We had overbooked our weekend, as we often do, so I knew I would have difficulty meeting my challenge to myself of writing every day. But I still thought I could do it, and I believed the extra activities would give me new things to write about, even though the time to write would be severely limited.

The next block was a physical limitation that I had not experienced before to this extent. After a week of cutting and pasting literally hundreds of files at work for a special project we were working on, which is too boring to even talk about, my wrist and index finger became so sore that I could hardly use the keyboard. I tried typing with an ice pack velcroed around my wrist, but that wasn’t very satisfactory.

Next, my built-in mouse on the Netbook I like to write on went haywire. At first, it seemed as though the buttons somehow got switched; then they would hardly work at all. I couldn’t click to open files or browse to my blog or do anything, without extreme aggravation and pain. Eventually I was able to get into the control panel and find out that the buttons were not, in fact, switched. So I got disgusted and went to bed early. The next day the buttons started working again, just for spite.

And now, I’m facing the most difficult block of all–that inner voice that says, in a sneering tone, “Well, well, looks like you might as well give up now. You missed writing for three whole days, so you lose. I knew you couldn’t write every single day!”

But I say to all of these clever blocks, “You’ll have to try harder than that! Get out of my way.  I’m coming through.”

Lupus General Store all lit up for a concert, November 11, 2011

To get to Lupus from Columbia, Missouri, you head west on I-70, then take the Wooldrige Overton exit and follow state road 179 south for a ways, then take county road P for another 4 miles or so. Before you cross the railroad tracks and drive straight into the Missouri river, stop. You are in Lupus. The general store and the city hall building will be on your left.

Most of the houses in Lupus are elevated on stilts about 10 feet high to reduce damage from floodwaters. The story is that after the 1993 flood, FEMA offered residents money either to move out of the floodplain or raise their houses up on stilts. Most went with the stilts, which also had the advantage of providing additional storage space below the living areas.

The town is best known for its chili festival each October, which has been going on for thirty-some years. When I first moved to Missouri, I had never heard of the town of Lupus, so I mistakenly assumed that the chili fest was held to raise money to fight the disease. I have since learned that the festival started out as a fundraiser to help pay the electric bill for the city hall and the four street lights in town.

Doug Elly, mayor of Lupus for fifteen years, is credited with bringing musicians to the chili fest. He and Meredith Ludwig also sponsor the concert series in the Lupus General Store, which has brought in hundreds of folk musicians and bluegrass musicians to play for small but enthusiastic audiences over the years. The concert on November 11 by Bill Poss and the Useful Tools was reportedly the eighty-seventh of these concerts. Posters from previous concerts line line the walls and fill a flip book of plastic sleeves on the counter by the old cash register.

The musicians come from all over the world. Bill Poss (vocals and guitar) grew up in Detroit and now lives in Texas; the Useful Tools (Justine Fischer on bass, Kori Heppner on drums, and Matty Simpson on banjo) are from Canada. We once attended a screening at the General Store of a documentary on American roots music that was made by Dutch film makers. The joke among performers at the General Store is expressed in a bumper sticker displayed near the old cash register, “We’re Big in Lupus.”

The cinder-block building was built in 1926 to replace an earlier wooden building. The store is no longer a business, but the building is chock-full of merchandise that never sold and memorabilia from years of river life.

The old general store is filled with merchandise that never sold, many items still with their original price tags.

We were among the first to arrive, but everything was all set up for the concert, with several electric guitars, a banjo, a bass, and a drum set toward one end of the room next to the wood stove, and rows of couches and old chairs facing the stage. A large tapestry depicting a howling wolf hangs behind the stage. We let ourselves in and charged ourselves $7 for admission, then wandered around looking at the shelves and walls filled with old merchandise, while a small black cat ran under our feet and rubbed up against our legs. The room glowed warmly from the light of candles and lanterns; strings of twinkling white fairy lights and red hot peppers hung from the walls and ceiling. The coffee was percolating in the back room, and the hot water was ready for tea. Shortly before 7:00 Doug Elley showed up with the band members. Doug was carrying a big bowl of potato soup for the break.

Waiting for the concert to start at the Lupus General Store.

By the time the concert started, most chairs were filled with all the usual suspects, including young children, as well as men and women in their eighties. Several local folk musicians were also in the audience, including the legendary Lee Ruth and his amazing beard.

The musicians would undoubtedly be staying long after the concert ended for a song swap and music jam. We weren’t sure what to expect when we saw the drum set on stage (a first for the General Store, as far as I know), but when the band stepped up and began singing, “Hay for Sale,” we knew we were in the right place.

More about the band and the town can be found here:

• Video of Bill Poss and the Useful Tools singing “Hay for Sale” in Bloomington, Indiana on October 31, 2011
• Video of spinning fire hoop at the 29th annual chili fest in October 2010
• Road Essay about Lupus, Missouri, by Dana & Susan Robinson, who performed at Lupus General Store in October 2010:
• Lupus General Store Blog, including an essay written by a local singer/songwriter who grew up in Lupus.

I always like a challenge, and I don’t like doing the same thing over and over again, so I decided to make an Aran sampler afghan. The blocks I have made so far have been everything I hoped for–interesting and challenging, but not so difficult that I get frustrated and give up. The problem with samplers, though, is that by the time you figure out exactly how the pattern goes, it is time to move on to the next one. I am knitting with100% washable wool from Peru, in a brilliant blue yarn that I got at the Yarn Barn in Lawrence, Kansas, one weekend when we were in town for a dance.

There are several knitters who attend the dances in Kansas, and we like to compare projects when we see each other. One woman is making a gorgeous lace shawl. It’s a good way to keep motivated, knowing that people will expect to see progress the next time you show up at a dance. I used to knit while watching TV, but now that I no longer watch television, I mostly knit in the car while criss-crossing the state to various contra dances and square dances.

The pattern I am knitting is from a booklet called The Great American Aran Afghan, which consists of 24 original designs by 24 knitters (20 blocks for the afghan itself and 4 more to make a couple accent pillows). I am currently working on a block by a woman named Judy Sumner, whose square (which she calls kisses and hugs; spiders and bugs) was inspired by a birthday card from her twin grandaughters. I am having a great time knitting this square, making the bobbles that form the body of the spider, and watching the leafy vine emerge along the left-hand side of the square.

Here are the squares I have made so far.

This Aran square designed by Hanna Burns combines two DNA strand-like patterns with the Trinity Sticth to represent the Holy Trinity in Christianity.

Barbara Selesnick designed this square to remind her of the treasures people carry inside lockets and the stories they inspire.

Ann Strong got her inspiration for this square from pomegranates. She used the Seed Wishbone pattern and the Double Texture Cable to illustrate the contrast between the smooth exteriors and the seedy, bumpy insides of the pomegranate.

This tree by Ada Fenick was incredibly fun to knit. It represents the Tree of Life shared by many cultures. The cables were taken from the wedding invitation of a good friend from college.