This week the activity has been thinking concretely about goals for the year. We e-mail our list to the group and cheerlead. I like reading what the others are cooking up and how their year ebbs and flows—kids at home and university campus neighbor, I know that really the new year starts in August (you even get new supplies), but I’m willing to play along with the January people.

But I’m having a rocky week. Work? Argh! Family? I’d like to put the “diss” in “dysfunctional.” Writing plans? I’m quivering. But I’ve done this before, and I’m starting to see that I go through stages.

Grandiosity: This is the year, baby! I’ve got this nailed! I will draft that FBI trilogy and a screenplay and I’ll sell a TV pilot! You can hardly tell I’m not thirty! Letterman, save me a chair!

Around this time the Christmas candy runs out.

Despair: Oh. My. God. I can’t even get the dishes washed in the same day that we eat off them. I’ll be lucky to finish a poem—no, a haiku. No, wait, don’t they have rules about lines or something? A free-verse tweet. Nobody wants to read any of this claptrap. I need glasses. I need a haircut. I need to spend my time looking for a real job. I’m going to put on all my fleece clothing and go back to bed.

Resignation: I’ll just keep slogging along . . . like I’ve been doing. It’s not glamorous, or fast, but I’m chipping away. Make the list, roll up the sleeves–and Facebook games are the Devil’s spawn.

A whiff of excitement creeps in: Some of this stuff is lame, but this one here is a pretty good idea. Yes, spring break never turns out to be Novel Writing Retreat Week, but I get inspired and get tons done in April. This is doable.

These next you might flicker through pretty fast. Recognize that feeling it doesn’t make it permanent.

Abandon the whole thing: This is crazy, I feel crazy, I’ve got things to do.

Paralysis: Where the heck do I start?

Research: With more background information, I’ll really be ready to launch this thing. In fact, here’s a whole stack of vital background info.

And finally . . .

Launch: Sitting down in front of a fresh piece of paper, a new notebook, a blank screen. Do you dip in a toe or dive?

I might be moving out of the resignation phase. Unlike my writing buddies, I’m having trouble making a numbered list. My main project is a revision, where the predicted timetable has been thrown out of whack as I realize that it needs a period of percolation before it gets another pass. My goal is to finish it (where “finish” means “get into readable shape”) rather than make myself frustrated missing more deadlines. So my other goal is to keep working, on other projects while this one rests. My plan this year is less about counting and more about process.

“There’s nothing like duck grease to oil a pan.”
–Grandfather Chick
Or maybe he said goose grease? . . .

I used to work at the public library, and I was scheduled at the reference desk on Wednesday nights. On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the desk was fully staffed but the public was not, and we had plenty of time to “familiarize ourselves with the collection”–scour the cookbook collection for what we would take to the dinner we’d been invited to the next day. Oh 641s, how you whiled away our hours!

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the library stayed open. The night before and after Christmas, however, the board looked at the traffic data and started to close for a few days. My mom and I seized the lull and dashed up to Chicago to spend Christmas with my grandfather. He hemmed and hawwed but his wife got them a tree; we got up at a reasonable hour and opened gifts, him having to reassure that he was not senile, he knew there were more presents for him but this one was very interesting, thank you very much. One year I guiltily rewrapped the white elephant I’d gotten at the staff Christmas party and gave it to my step-grandmother; she loved it and it remained on their counter for years after.

My grandfather was old school. They had goose for Christmas dinner when he was a kid. They went skating on rivers, not rinks. He could happily eat turkey and all the trimmings year round (“no, I am not senile now, either”), but his favorite was the cranberry sauce–the real stuff that you could see the berries in, not the canned gelatinous cylinder. A cylinder was served one year–schlooooped out of its can by someone saying, “Oh lord, Chick’ll have to have cranberry.” He pretended–I think he was pretending–not to know what it was.

So one year at the library two cranberry recipes crossed my desk at about the same time, and I decided to give them a whirl. Cranberry and sage, together–how could you miss! The other recipe was from Julia Child, a hero of my grandmother, who got some ribbing for her food experiments but everyone kept showing up for meals. Better yet with these cranberry recipes, you could jar them up and give them as gifts (solving another ongoing problem: what do you give the ninety-year-old who keeps hoping you’ll apply for a job at Monsanto).

I found interesting Mason jars and made some up. I left the sage leaves and onions chunky. It was a hit with my grandfather and me, but I suspect no one else ate it. No one else eats it when I make it down here, which I do about every third year when I remember to grab fresh berries.

This year I made the sauce in the middle of all our duck experiments.

Our own Thanksgiving dinner was Asian and I forgot to bring it to the traditional one, so I’ve got the full batch, all for me, in the fridge. And the first time I got it out to eat, I cried. My grandfather has been dead for nearly twenty years now, but still sometimes the missing him blindsides me–some smidgen of rules or carpentry or curmudgenness clenches my throat tight and I must chant “Monsanto” until it passes, eating this relic cum snack on what used to be his dining room table. But it does pass, and I go on to the next building or cooking or reading project knowing that some he would love and some he would hate and that I knew him! As an adult, I was there enough to know him, and what a gift is that.

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Chutney is a generic name for fruit and spice sauce; ketchup is tomato chutney.

I semi-combine versions of the below two recipes to make this year’s sauce.

• Julia Child and Jacques Pepin’s cranberry chutney
• Cranberry sage chutney

I almost never have nuts handy, use regular ginger instead of crystallized, and figure the cranberries are the fruit course–no need to make a special trip for raisins.

How Grandfather Chick sometimes signed his letters

So we were staring at our shoes, younger son and I, instead of at the birds, the cars, the passersby; wedging our chins into the openings of our jackets and wondering whether it was time to look at the time again, when we noticed something on the sidewalk.

You see, last summer a new water main was installed, and there’s about thirty feet of fresh smooth concrete on this section of the block.

One word on one edge, another on the other, and eyes in a different direction.

The fancy manicure, twenty minutes in

I’ve been shredding my nails and it’s time to stop. One thing and another, I decided to glue on fake nails–give me some time to get out of the habit of picking at them and give my fingers a chance to heal.

It’s jarring catching a glimpse of this foreignness at the ends of my hands. I can’t pick at my fingertips any longer–but neither can I smear on lotion (it gets gunked under the long nail tips), open soda cans, or let my hands soak in water (the glue isn’t that great).

So I can’t wash dishes without rubber gloves (would that I could palm that task off on someone else) and I can hardly get the gloves on over my new talons. I can’t soak in a bath; I can’t knead dough. I can’t pick papers up off the floor. When I type, the nail tips clack on the keyboard (until I filed them down–that couldn’t stand). It’s easiest to grasp things with the pads of my fingers, tips (and fancy nails) curved away from the object. Whatever substance the fake nails are made of, polish gets chipped just as fast as on my real nails.

In short, there’s a raft of body language I’m learning, and all it cost was seven bucks at the the drugstore. That woman you see at the coffee shop with some affected way of picking up her change–how long are her nails?

What’s the fallout of a character’s appearance? If you can’t use your finger tips, how do you work with stacks of paper? (What jobs require agile hands?) If you can’t do anything that might scrape your nails, what can’t you do? If the manicure gets dinged, how do you react?

Dogs breathing, fridge purring, a squeak from a bird and a click in the heater sound the broken gait ending the day’s action. Corralled in her kitchen, she reads. Night hours are the hardest, the anguish rides in on the backs of old memories or sticking to still-fresh details of today. She rises and knocks around boxes and jars of verbena, spearmint, slippery elm, lemon balm, some she picked leaf by leaf and dried in the still atmosphere of her cellar, knowing she would concoct the sleep-gift combined from these. She searches for an herbal-induced calm. Through the window she lists the colors in the halo of the streetlamp; she rereads the letters; she remembers wind in her hair, a gallop, the free rein she believed was her automatic gift to her offspring. She knows there’s no open range, there’s no grassland, there’s no herd.

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Reply to “The Storm” by Julie Youmans. Read other responses to the prompt.

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The air hung heavy, portentous curtains muffling any activity but watching. Occasionally there was a push of wind—a practice gust, directed and forceful instead of the random zephyrs and eddies of a sunny summer day, but enough to flatten grass and churn dust. It wasn’t sunny. Wispy puffballs of clouds had scudded east to more congenial regions and our sky was blanketed with gray and grayer coils and snarls out of a sheep’s nightmare. Somewhere, the wind was moving fast—we’d been under a tornado watch for hours, finally upgraded to a warning—but these same globs simmered over our street, blotting out all the blue.

My mother would not go inside. An old armchair had been redecorated out of the living room but never made it to the curb, and she’d settled into it as finally as it had settled onto the porch. A glass of iced tea sat on the rail, moisture coagulating until beads of it were drug down the sides. My mother flicked pages of a magazine that I expected to be ripped from her hands at any moment to join a black and white torrent of haystacks, houses, neighbor ladies on bicycles.

Les enfants perdus (andrefromont/fernandomort)

The first thunder rumbled. While my fingertips still tingled, aftershocks shuddered out from deep within the cloud bank. The leaves of the elm next to the porch shivered. The undersides of their leaves were nearly white.

My mother looked up from the magazine. “This is going to be a good one.”

“We should go down to the basement now.”

“We’ve got plenty of time. It’s exciting to watch them roll in, isn’t it.”

There was another gust, a swirl of exhale, and then the breezes shuddered into one steady current. A car drove by, headlights illuminating the empty street.

“We should go inside.”

“We’re fine. This is a big system.” She reached forward, swept the droplets off the tea glass and took a long swallow. I walked to the edge of the porch and peered out. The slow roll in the cauldron around us had acquired direction. I stepped back under the eaves.

“You can go in if you want, but I’m going to watch for a while longer.” She flipped the magazine shut and leaned back in the chair, stretched her feet to prop them on the railing.

The first drops of rain smacked the ground. I unlatched the screen door and went inside.

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Really, no, for all the usual reasons.

Apostrophes denote dropped letters or possessive, so you don’t need one before that s in constructions like “the music of the 1940s.” You could argue about “1940s’ music” (look closely at the position of that apostrophe), but I will maintain that “1940s” should be treated as an adjective and keep my eye on you for the rest of the semester.

Dropped letters, remember, so this is okay: “These conditions endured through the 1870s and ’80s.” We’ve dropped the numbers showing the century.

“I love those ’70′s haircuts.” No! Two kinds of no! Unless you’re being campy, in which case one kind of no! The s is there to denote plural–the several years that make up the decade–not to show possessive.

Many questions of grammar can be answered by trying a substitution, and for apostrophes there are two.

1. Is this a conjunction, thus needing an apostrophe? i.e., could it be written without the dropped letters?
   • It['?]s a foregone conclusion–> It is a foregone conclusion. –> It’s a foregone conclusion
   • it['?]s only drawback –> it is only drawback –> its only drawback
2. Is this a possessive, thus needing an apostrophe?
   • It['?]s a foregone conclusion–> the conclusion of it? no–”it” isn’t doing the concluding, so this isn’t a possessive.
   • their/they’re [?] final reward –> the reward belonging to them [in other words, possessive] –> their final reward
   • 1950['?]s fashions –> do fashions typical of the decade belong to that decade? If you think yes, you put the apostrophe after the s because it’s a plural –> 1950s’ fashions

Maybe you really do mean it possessively, as in a sentence like “I’m a child of the 1960s.” But the word order there undoes the need for an apostrophe–we don’t write “the throne of the king’s” as equivalent to “the king’s throne.” Or again, placement: “the House of Blues” would be rewritten “Blues’ House” unless you meant that dog who gets mail.

Here, finally, is a situation where you would use an apostrophe:

• The countdown ended, the ball dropped, and 1950′s reign came to a close.

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Here’s a great list of things to assess while line editing

I have never in my life needed to dress like a medieval lady, but my mother was in a baroque band for a long time, so it seemed like a plausible circumstance to find myself in. They might need extra courtiers at the madrigal dinner, or one of my eleventh-hour tambourine fill-in gigs might be someplace where they wanted you costumed.

Another of my grandmother's dresses (she's the one on the right)

In the about six years since this dress has been in my closet, though, not even an invite to a renaissance faire. It was my grandmother’s, so it’s a little too long—for Halloween it’s easier to trundle out my default hobo costume (which requires nothing in my usual wardrobe! Nothing at all!).

But I’m trying to clear the place out. Room to move, fewer places for dust to gather. Less time spent finding space for the current objects. Acknowledgment that, with my mom out of the baroque band, my kirtle-wearing, tambourine-playing days are over. That’s the real hard part: admitting that the world isn’t my oyster, that I’m choosing this instead of that, and yes, the one really does rule out the other.

So I let go of a dress I’ve never worn, some banjos, a trip, a November project. I gained some space, some sleep, some continuity on projects that are already in motion. Clearing things out but staying full.

You know when you’re ready.