This is one of my occasional participations in David Abram’s Sunday Sentence project, sharing the best sentence I’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
“Here was the terrible truth had hadn’t wanted to see: he was on his own.”
Source: Everybody’s Fool by Richard Russo
I hope to see you tomorrow at the Tonganoxie Public Library from 1:00 to 4:00 for the Author & Book Market. I first wrote about it here.
Along with books of every kind, including my two novels, there will be other vendors, food trucks, a raffle, children’s activities inside the library, and a scavenger hunt for charms. Scrapefoot will be there.
Tonganoxie is about a half hour west of Kansas City in Leavenworth County, Kansas. The community of 5,000+ touts itself as being halfway between the east and west coasts and halfway between the Canadian border and the Gulf of Mexico. The word “Tonganoxie” derives from the name of a member of the Delaware tribe who had lived in the area at the time the town was founded.
What you see above is the shell or husk of two or three buckeyes, growing on one of several buckeye trees I have planted beside my little cabin in the woods. Unlike the more commonly seen variety of buckeyes, the ones I’ve planted have red flowers in the spring, which the hummingbirds love (and so do I). One day in the past, I decided that I wanted to have red-flowering plants around my cabin. I had built an entire bed of (expensive) topsoil behind a retaining wall in front of my cabin, and I filled it with bedding plants that would bloom red and make life wonderful. The deer found them wonderful, and the plants did not find the Ozark heat wonderful. The topsoil bed was a failure, and it’s now covered with gravel to help hold the upper retaining wall in place. (For a sense of this structure, have a look at the photos in this post.)
My hope this year is to collect the buckeyes in these husks when they are ready (when the husk splits open) and try to cultivate them into new plants that I can encourage in little pots (after four months of stratification in my refrigerator) until they are ready to plant around the cabin. (The price of a sapling red buckeye tree is astronomical! I think I got lucky when I bought mine years ago.)
Most of our day at the cabin yesterday was spent on the front porch, looking at the rain falling on the lake and listening to it drumming on the metal roof. We had no specific agenda other than to make good use of an opportunity to flee the city for a while, and I think we fulfilled that. We ate lunch. We peered across the lake through my wife’s newish spotting scope. I used my Merlin app to listen for birds to identify. I made notes in my visit journal (humdrum things, but the son finding his father’s visit journals in the family cabin in my novel One-Match Fire is profoundly important to the plot).
The forecast called for the rain to lesson as the day drew on, and it did, so we outfitted ourselves for a march to the top of the lake to see about our efforts to eradicate the Tree of Heaven incursion we found there some months ago. I had taken my chainsaw out there and slashed as many of them as I could (I estimate there are 50) until a nut loosened itself on the saw and the chain jumped the bar and the wielder lost his courage and the sun continued to beat down. That was about three weeks ago.
I’ve since learned that cutting is not an effective way to eradicate this invasive tree, as you can see from the photo below, taken yesterday. (Also, the cut wood smells like peanut butter, and for some people it’s a skin irritant. Such a lovely tree!)
I’m not sure what I’m going to do about these. (I welcome any suggestions.) Since they grow in the headwaters of the lake, I don’t want to use chemicals on them. Yanking them out of the ground is also ineffective if even a few root hairs remain in the soil. And lopping off their green parts is clearly only a temporary fix (above). I’ve noticed that they don’t seem to grown is shade, so I think their spread will be localized. I guess what I’m going to try to do is slash as much and as often as I can. Maybe I can get ahead of it or at least halt its spread.
This is one of my occasional participations in David Abram’s Sunday Sentence project, sharing the best sentence I’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
“When you wake up in a fictitious world, your only frame of reference is fiction.”
Source: Severance by Ling Ma
Parent Imperfect is my second novel. It is a sequel to One-Match Fire and follows the family into a fourth generation as two men adopt a son of their own to love and raise as well as they can. Many familiar characters return, new names and faces are introduced, at least one character has left, and the family cabin in the Ozark hills remains as anchor and solace for these men and their fragile souls. (There may even be a talking fox in this tale, though only a troubled boy seems able to see her.)
Parent Imperfect was published in 2024 by Blue Cedar Press.
Parent Imperfect is available directly from the publisher (and purchasing it from them gets me an extra nickel or two in royalties), but you can also buy it from all of the online booksellers. And any bookshop in the world can order it for you. You might also check your local library. Many have it on their shelves or in their electronic book selections.
I’d love to know what you think of this novel.
Lucky Rabbit's Foot 