SNOW!!

Is there anything colder-looking than a set of lawn furniture in the snow?

Last week my husband and I lunched outside and basked in 70° weather. Today?

I think not!

Yesterday, I awoke to find three inches of snow on the ground. Now I admit that three inches is nothing compared to what my friend Nancy Pickard’s been having out in Kansas, but we seldom see half this much in a year. I realized that people were believing the more optimistic accumulation predictions when my son reported that his nearest grocery store was out of bread and milk by 5:30 Friday afternoon.

See, that’s what Southerners do. As soon as snow’s predicted, we rush to the store and stock up on bread and milk because we have enough sense to know it might be two or three days before we can see the road again.

Some folks from “further up the road” (as one of my neighbors refers to our northern émigrés) will complain that Southerners don’t know how to drive in snow and ice. They’re right. We don’t. That’s because most of us don’t even try. I’m fully convinced that the ones that are out there skidding into each other are all Yankees who don’t know that you’re supposed to stay home when it snows.

So with no reason to go out, you’d think that the writers among us would be hunched over a warm computer screen, busily working on the next manuscript. Right?

Wrong.

In an informal survey of my writer friends in the area, I learned that one was cleaning her attic, one was down in the basement sorting through boxes, while another was alphabetizing her spice cabinet. I myself spent the day culling my closets. I filled two large shopping bags for a local thrift shop with clothes I haven’t worn in years, but were too good to throw away.

If you have as much trouble as I used to have deciding what to keep and what to toss, here’s a trick I learned that really works for me. If the item is something you think you might wear again and can’t bear to give away this time, put it back in the closet with the coat hanger turned the wrong way. If that coat hanger’s still turned around the next time you get around to cleaning out the closet, then you know you haven’t worn it in at least a year. Knowledge is power. Into the bag it goes.

So what do you do on your snow days?

From Sun to Snow to Basketball

March.  In like a lion, out like a lamb.  That’s the program here in NC, anyhow where  redbuds have pinked up all the roadsides, dogwoods and azaleas are beginning to bloom, and bees are so busy that the very air vibrates as if someone’s left a motor running somewhere.

It’s been fun to check in on some of my friends’ blogs to see what March has brought them.  Kathy Trocheck, who used to write the Callahan mysteries and who now as Mary Kay Andrews writes delightfully funny, non-mysteries about the joys of junking and love, has spent the last few months working on her new beach house down at Tybee Island. (www.MaryKayAndrews.com) Now it’s virtually finished and she’s ready for some Georgia sun and fun.

Nancy Pickard, when last heard from, was snowed in out in Kansas.  Nancy’s book Virgin of Small Plains was chosen by the Kansas library system as their “big read,” and she’s been trying to visit every single library in Kansas.  If  you scroll down on her blog  (www.sweetmysteryoflife.blogspot.com), you can see a map of all the places she’s been these past few months.  How she’s going to top this for  National Library Week (April 12-18, 2009) is anyone’s guess.

I get reading tips from Charlaine Harris (www.charlaineharris.com) who seems to read everything written both in and out of her field.   Where she herself finds time to write her delightful paranormal books is a paranormal paradox, too.

Up in Maryland, Barbara Mertz (aka Elizabeth Peters and Barbara Michaels) hasn’t yet posted anything about spring on her website (www.mpmbooks.com/notes.html), but she possesses one of the most beautiful gardens of all my friends and I know that it will soon reach its usual glory.  She, too, has trouble staying indoors to write when so much is happening outside.

I have to tell myself that it’s really just a little too early to be buying bedding plants yet and that I should stay inside and work.  Of course, I’m also telling myself that I can work this afternoon with the sound turned off on my television while Carolina plays Oklahoma.  Hey, March madness isn’t limited to weather you know!

Flamingoes, Nancy Drew, and Miss Betsy Sanders

Knowing how much pink flamingoes amuse me, Nancy Pickard eMailed a picture of  this old Nancy Drew book cover to Linda Grant, who cleverly photoshopped it and sent it to me as an anonymous birthday greeting.  (They also joined with other friends to send me twenty more anonymous flamingo pictures during the month of August, but that's another story.)   If you were as addicted to the Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys series when you were a kid as I was, it probably makes you smile, too. 

As a child growing up in the tobacco fields of eastern North Carolina, the bookmobile was my lifeline to the larger world and my first role model was Miss Betsy Sanders, who drove that lumbering old box of books on wheels.  I thought she must lead the perfect life:  driving around back-country roads all day, reading all night.  (I had no knowledge of the cataloging, shelving, etc. that went on behind the scenes.)  It was Miss Betsy who put the first Nancy Drew book in my hands.

When my colleagues and I compare our memories of Nancy, I’m amused that so many of them pictured themselves as that spunky motherless girl detective, dashing around the countryside in her blue roadster.

Not me.  My mother was too real, my father too un-indulgent for me to put myself in Nancy Drew’s stylish shoes and floor the gas-pedal.

Tomboyish George Fayne was quite another matter though.  Clearly answerable to a vigilant mother and unable to go adventuring every time Nancy beckoned, she was also less concerned with feminine dress and conventional feminine propriety than either her cousin Bess or Nancy.  Whenever I imagined myself into their world, it was as George.  (In a day when all pretty girls were supposed to have curly hair, it didn’t seem to bother her one little bit that her hair was as straight as mine.)

Bess was a wimp and Nancy played both side so that she could be admired for both her courage and her femininity; but not only did George not seek approval and admiration, there were times when she actively thumbed her nose at it.  I respected Nancy’s accomplishments as much as George seemed to, but oh how I used to wish there were more of the less-than-perfect George in each book.

Nancy Drew was a fine role model for young girls and I wouldn’t take anything for the hours of pleasure she gave me, but my image of her is inextricably bound up in the memory of the sturdy pragmatic woman who brought me her adventures every month.

Miss Betsy Sanders did not have curly blonde hair and she drove a cranky old worn-out bookmobile, not a sleek blue roadster.  She had to earn her own living, not exist as the indulged daughter of a well-to-do attorney.  She wore tailored gabardine slacks at a time when most women wore flowery print dresses.  If the bookmobile got a flat tire on some isolated back road, Miss Betsy changed it.  When the radiator boiled over or the starter balked, she climbed under the hood and fixed it.

I wanted to be just like her.

Miss Betsy wasn’t Nancy Drew all grown up.  But I bet she was George.  (And I bet she liked flamingoes!)  

(To enter Hachette's contest and win copies of my books, see last week's post.)

(Click here to read a sample chapter of Death's Half Acre.)