I'm probably as politically correct as a person needs to get through the average day, but I feel a big snooze coming on, tinctured by a spurt of irritation, when the discussion turns to the controversy over Malia and Sasha Obama's puppy dog.
    Every time I turn on the radio, I hear another animal welfare advocate pointing out that the President and his wife should set a good example and do the right thing by choosing their children's pet from The Humane Society or a no-kill shelter rather than getting the kind of puppy the children want - which apparently is a labradoodle, a fashionable mix of a Labrador and a standard poodle that has a great deal of pep and a nice personality.
    Why can't our inevitable intrusion in the Obamas' personal life wait at least until they move in?
    I think back to the flack over Chelsea Clinton's not attending a Washington, D.C. public school but going to the Quaker Friends school instead.
    She was ... the President's daughter. Different rules apply. Different standards of safety and scrutiny.
    If different standards don't apply, then why not relax and stop trying to force two kids to dance to a tune they'll have to dance to for the next eight years by backing off on Puppygate?
    I've adopted shelter dogs and even shelter ferrets and they turned out to be remarkable companions - as did the mutts given me by friends and the purebred pup I got for my last birthday. Giving a dog a new chance at life is admirable. Though I know this is heresy, not everything a President's family does needs to be admirable. In fact, given the last administration's friends-and-fam track record, the Obamas can hardly go wrong.
    In my opinion, President-Elect Obama should practice a couple of sentences:
    "I like my wife's dress" and "That's family stuff."
    Fashion pundits from several magazines in the know - used to photographing starlets, fully-established stars and over-the-hillers in clothes that leave nothing anatomical to the imagination, criticized Michelle Obama's red-and-black election night dress as "too aggressive," when her charms is exactly that: She does and says and wears mostly what she pleases and is, for that alone, a breath of fresh air. I, for one, am tired of seeing double-breasted suits and tunic tops with pumps and stacked heels.
    Delving into the personal life of such a new and different and eminently interesting family is almost irresistible.
    But people who have been on the other end of that kind of attention tell me that it's absolutely overwhelming, a sort of form of torture. It's bound to begin. But it might be kind to let two young girls have a deep breath and pick out their own puppy dog first.
    

 

This is kind of an exciting week.

Okay, I'm easily excited.

This week, my website will have a brand-new discussion forum. I'll be able to answer each of your questions specifically, without your having to scroll down to the bottom of a line of comments. I've wanted this feature for some time and my mighty webmaster, Steve Bennett at authorbytes.com, was finally able to grant my wish. You'll have to register (that's to keep porn-folk and spammers away) but only once. After that, we can discuss books (mine and anyone else's) and manners and politics (mine and anyone else's) to our hearts' content.

I really love a lively exchange with readers and haven't been able to have it recently because I wasn't able to use the gosh-darned forum myself ... and I am fairly computer-literate.

Speaking of computer-literate, my son Rob has begun college at Full Sail in Winter Park, Florida, and this week I'm going there as part of a campaign I'm doing to inform people about Dry Eye. I have this problem -- which, for me, includes really itchy eyes, blurred vision and extreme eye fatigue by the end of the day. You might have it, too, because it affects women over forty disproportionately, although plenty of younger women and men have it, too. Dry Eye is a real medical condition and while there is no cure.

But there is a treatment I now use, eye drops I use twice a day.

But the fun part is that the company that makes the product sponsored a website called www.dryeyebokclub.com. It's a site that features the top ten "tearjerker" books of all time -- narrowed from an original list of fifty. Among them is 'Gone With the Wind,' 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' 'Little Women,' and one I particularly like: 'The Deep End of the Ocean.' I'm going to be discussing some of these books over the next few months on that website, and i hope you join in. There's also a quiz on the site about Dry Eye -- so that you can see if you have it too. It's not life-threatening, but it can realy be a pain, especially after a long day at the computer.

Right ... back to computers.

My son started college last month at Full Sail University, a place that specializes in highly creative students who want to major in music production, entertainment lighting and game design. Rob, who worked for five years after high school, is my eldest, and thought college would never be for him. But he's so excited by all the offerings at Full Sail that the first thing he said was, "I'm going to have to go back for my Masters!"

One of the great thigs about Full Sail (besides its being virtually in Orlando, a pretty good place for a young single guy, but also the way they "do" classes. Students take classes in intensive fashion, concentrating a full month on Calculus, for exmple, and a full month on Composition, eight hours a day with a lunch break and a lab. And then, they're finished with that course. For the kind of person who's easily bored, it's a dream school.  Rob will have his Bachelors degree in Game Design --- specializing in the kind of games that tens of thousands of people play simulatenously all over the world.

The last exciting thing is that I'll be teaching my first retreat at One Writer's Place on Cape Cod. Only four students will attend; it's a very exciting chance to focus on their work in an intense and intimate setting. We'll work together, eat together, walk together and turn our focus both inward and on each other's work.

If you have a book in you, fiction or non-fiction, you might want to write Pamela English at penglish@mailbag.com to find out about One Writers Place retreats and residencies. Soon, there'll be a website that more fully desribes this longtime dream of mine. On it, you'll be able to apply for residencies and learn about the schedule and cost of the retreats.

By the way, this blog is organized in a terrible way -- a way I would never tolerate from one of my students.

But I did that on purpose.

Yours,
Jackie M.

We came home from the Hawaiian Islands Writers Conference, where I'm lucky enough to teach some pretty gifted students every Labor Day week. Every morning, we'd opened our windows to the sight of surfers gathering with their boards under one arm and their Venti Mocha Latte with Skim in the other hand, paddling out into the undulating Big Blue, where sailboats with sails in colors nature never saw plied back and forth.

We threw open the glass doors and sat on the porch in tee shirts and skivvies, drinking our own coffee before the sun came up. Gradually, my daughters awoke - wondering what that day's adventure would be: Sea turtles? Waimea Bay? And I got ready to stroll to class.

When I came up my own driveway, I involuntarily pulled my sweater closer around my shoulders, although it wasn't colder than 60* F. The trees were dark with rain; the swimming pool was still warm but looked like an alien installation on our lawn instead of the integrated part of summer it had been just two weeks before. When I got inside, the children were all business, the girls quickly tossing their sundresses and swimsuits into the wash and emptying sand from their backpacks - to replace them quickly with pencil boxes and lined-paper notebooks.

Two tearful goodbyes to the college kids who go away and a renewal of old friendships for the one who still lives at home, but only in broadest sense of the term, and they were all ... off.
The catalogues that advertised the Last Blast Sale of Summer went into the recycling and the mailbox was already stuffed with new ones advertising Halloween costumes. (I immediately had to turn down urgent requests to be Iron Man, Batman, Superman and every other Man.)

Even my littlest, who's not yet two, came up and told me joyously, "I'm going to preschool!" And he wasn't kidding. Although his dad, who doesn't work outside the home, would have to stay in the building with him for the first few months, he would enter the three-year-old class on Monday.

Everything is so soon ended.

Fall makes me as wistful as summer makes me lazy and lush with the sense of possibility.

The drum is playing for me, too. Things thought of but not created are due. The editors are back at their desk and wondering about summer publications and Christmas stories.

It's as if I never wore an off-the-shoulder blouse to class, and that was just eight days ago.

This morning, my five-year-old told me what he wanted for his birthday - which was in August.

The next one, that is.

I wanted to say, in the words of St. Augustine, "One world at a time!"

He already knows the words to the song I sing to him and his brother, written by the Bard of Wistful, Joni Mitchell, which is painted in gold fabric paint on the arm of my blue jean jacket: "We can't return/We can only look behind from where we came/ And go 'round and 'round and 'round in the circle game..."

The surfers are still there, slugging their coffee, curling up on their boards for an nap, in the endless summer places where people with actual jobs slip off their business suits and into their wetsuits to hit the beach at lunch.

I love the changing of the season and would never want to live in a place that was always-and-forever sunny. For the brief time she lived in Florida, my grandmother sent me mournful poems. One read, "Let me see branches black against a winter sky/Let me go home to snow before I die."

And soon enough there will be a few magical flakes, then a few hundred distressing ones and a few million horrors that will make a mess of everything but never (not ever) close down school.

Spring creeps up, shyly revealing bits of itself leaf by leaf, teasing with a green promise.

Fall ... falls. And until something really fun happens, so do my spirits.

There is nothing to which I bring more expectation than summer - not Christmas, not trips to exotic or even comfortable destinations. In a book I read once, and which, to my occasional distress, I can never forget, a woman loved summer so much that in June, she told her daughter summer was upon them; at July 4, she said that it was important to treasure every golden day. And in August, she said regretfully that summer was leaving.

I suppose that if I didn't have so much work to do - work of the earning kind - I would home school or un-school my children. I don't know that I could teach them the new math or the old math but I could teach them to recite poetry and draw, identify leaves and birds' nests and teach them to love music. Summer approximates that. It isn't as though I have endless hours to spend wandering the fields and beaches with my kids. But I am greedy about the days I spend with each and all of them - whether it's going to an afternoon movie or finding the perfect scallop shell. We don't do many fancy things, wherever we are, but we do them together.

In September, when most parents heave a sigh of relief, I am miserable.

Now that three of our kids are in college - two away - the house feels not only empty, but barren. And though I believe that all but one of my children have more or less liked school, I really don't. I think the social side of it resembles a savanna with prey and predator relationships of the most searing emotional kind. All I ever needed to know of shame and heartbreak I learned in seventh grade. Every birthday party to which my daughter isn't invited, every recommendation that we set more structure for our son - these affect me as personally as the torture inflicted on me at the hands of four girls in middle school who systematically excluded me from their sleepovers and their pre-party dinners and discussed them in front of me. I am reminded of the nasty little kids who made fun of everything from my braids to the fact that I wore jeans instead of dresses to school -- and yes, in the 1960s, little girls at my school were required to wear skirts and dresses to public school.

The advertisements for stocking up on lined paper and washable markers, when we only taken a swim ten times, offend me.

But it's more than that I don't have much use for school or the fact that doing well in it is more a matter of negotiating systems of status and social complexities than learning.

Every morning in summer, the way we do summer, is an unopened book. We might just walk the dogs. We might just play Scrabble. We might watch the old version of 'Little Women' and cry. We might get lucky and convince our two-year-old to take a nap so we can. There might be a play that someone who's twelve and someone who's twenty-one both want to see. And the conversations we have over dinner, almost every night, because in summer, dinner is a big deal almost every night, would make comic and poignant reality TV.

It's July. It's time to treasure every golden moment. Soon, the corn will come in and sadly, summer will be leaving us. My children will grow older, and move, and have families of their own. But I think their closeness to each other will change, but not diminish. Still, I savor every drop of that laughter, that teasing, those whispered confidence. I want not only every golden day, but to be around to see forty more golden summers - even if one day, all I do is watch.

So many people have a story to tell.
But they’re writers without hands.
They may have the talent, but they lack the tools that can turn a great story or idea into a great piece of fiction or non-fiction.
Those tools are hard to find.
You can buy a book – and the shelves are filled with books on writing. But a book can’t stop bad habits in their tracks and substitute strengths. A book can’t teach how to sense the indefinable things, such as where a book “begins” and where it “ends,” which is both a knack and a sense. You can’t ask a book questions or toss around ideas with a book, even if it has a blank page to write down your ideas.
That’s the reason I’m starting One Writer’s Weekends.
Don’t confuse these intensive seminars with the kind of training you’ll get at a conference – although conferences are wonderful, especially for networking and giving writers a taste of just what they need to work on.
This is the place you’ll work on whatever that is.
One Writer’s Weekend will be the kind of intensive training in structure, character development (which is crucial even in non-fiction), self-editing, pacing, starting, finishing and finally getting a book out into the marketplace that I teach in “macro” form when I lecture and do retreat teaching at universities and writer’s conferences. But I can never go deep enough even in those terrific venues because the time is to short to really accommodate eight or ten or fifty students, all of whom have the same needs but slightly different strengths and weaknesses.
The first one, in September, is filled, but the next -- October 10, 11 and 12 – still has two openings, and the final weekend in 2008 will be held October 24, 25 and 26 and has three openings.
I’ll work one–on-one and in small groups with only three writers, living and working in a beautiful house in Massachusetts.
The atmosphere will be pleasant and comfortable. We’ll start each day with guided yoga or stretching together (led by an instructor, and it’s not mandatory!). We’ll also take walks and sunset drives and enjoy a gourmet meal every evening. Lodging and food are included in the cost of the package.
But mostly we’ll work. We’ll work hard on the same exercises that led my friend and student Patricia Kesling-Wood to become a publishing sensation with her debut novel, Lottery, now a short-list contender for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. When Pat began working with me three years ago, she had only an amorphous idea of what she wanted to write about and no idea how. She did the work. My friend and student Holly Kennedy has written four novels, two optioned for film. She had already written a book to critical acclaim but says that working with me took her writing to another level.

"Jacquelyn Mitchard has the rare ability to recognize a writer's strengths/weaknesses, and then she gently nudges you down the very path you've been avoiding for fear of failure. Better yet, she instructs in such a way that you don't realize you've jumped off a cliff until you're airborne and some of your best work has been slammed down on the page!"
-- Holly Kennedy, author of The Silver Compass

There will be homework assignments in every facet of writing, as well as close editing and critiques that simply aren’t possible in the setting of a conference class.
It will be the hardest work you’ll ever do as a writer.
But if you do the work, you’ll leave armed with the tools.
You’ll have learned how to use them, with guidance. That is what has led my students to succeed – not only Holly and Patricia, but many others.
You’ll read from your work in progress, and so will I, because writing is a performing art. You’ll receive valuable reactions from your fellow writers.
All of it will take place in a beautiful setting with a sense of safety, collegiality and mutual support that I think is unique.
To find out more about One Writer’s Weekend contact Pamela English and penglish@mailbag.com.
See you by the sea!

Like Velvet Brown in National Velvet, we dreamed of horses.

We dreamed of horses and we found them and brought them home. Just like Velvet's, the best one was a piebald - a tall white horse with gray spots, like a child's pull toy.

I had a big and beautiful house then, deep among the trees, that had once belonged to a veterinary surgeon. A horrible thing had taken place there. Once, while the owner was on vacation, the pipes had broken and the water backed up, drowning the horses in their stalls when there was nowhere else for the sludge to go.

We didn't think of it as an omen.

Last night, we said goodbye to our girls.

A lovely woman took them, and will love them, and deserves them. We spent six years trying to figure out how to fit enough love and care for them into our lives, as those lives grew to include - between my friend Pam and me - first five, then eight, then nine kids. I was much worse. With travel and the writing that supports my family and me, I was unable to give the horses the time Pam gave them. My kids weren't, to my regret, interested. At one time, we had four horses: Our two Clydesdales, a quarter horse and a thoroughbred with, someone once said, the personality of a serial killer.

The quarter horse mare died, in a sad freak accident, of a ruptured aorta.

The serial killer went to someone who could change her ways.

No one wanted Maggie and Tally, and in truth, we didn't want to give them up.

But we had to sell the big beautiful house and now motorcycles sit in the big, beautiful barn. Maggie and Tally were living in makeshift quarters. We just didn't have the money, or especially the time, to keep their manners up and solid.

On a winter's day, six years ago, we met Maggie, a big, beautiful black Clydesdale whose given name was Black Magic. We didn't know then that the phrase "horse trader" applied to her owner, who left out the vet records that showed Maggie's foundering and subsequent foot and back problems. She said only, "She's never been alone. I hope she doesn't die."

That was when I spotted the rocking horse. A full Clydesdale, Lady Natichia was also a blue roan, and not much use for traditional Clydesdale purposes. And so we asked how much that little weanling would cost. When she came home for the first time, Tally was actually able to kick with all four legs at the same time. My dog, then a puppy, lost four teeth and I learned the true definition of a pain in the rear as a result.

She became the gentlest of ladies, seventeen hands tall and so sweet she ran toward us and laid her great head on our shoulders.

Since Pam's eldest and my two younger sons were born, the horses became a raw subject, a huge issue between Pam and me. We're the best of friends, virtually sisters, and we co-owned the horses. There were green days when we were certain that it would all work out. We'd make time where no time existed. Pam worked full time and was busy with two young children. I had old and young children, and barely time for a little sorely-needed exercise. Sleep was hard to find for both of us.

And it was as Velvet Brown's father, the butcher, said. The beautiful doe-eyed creatures simply ate and produced fragrant piles of what was left over and ate more, and needed medicine and bits of saddlery and were innocent and expensive.

Finally, the offer of a kind person was the offer we had to take.

Last night, I fortunately had a pressing appointment and so I could stop by Pam's barn only for a moment. There they stood, lovely and tall, Maggie fit at 20 years old and Tally a grown mare, their halters with their brass name tags on their heads. Embarrassed, I kissed each of them on the nose, though, of course, they hardly knew me any longer.

Now they're gone.

The pasture we often wished was empty is, except for Pam's goats.

But last night I dreamed of horses, as I knew I would, because people, unlike horses, remain foolish forever.

Am I outnumbered?
You bet I am.
Even as I sit here, trying to write a chapter, sew up a slew of holes in a slew of jeans and put the finishing touches to this blog, my son Will is in the downstairs bath, announcing to his friend Carter, “I can see your butt! And it’s disgusting!”
Not my kind of bathroom chat, if there is such a thing.
My girls and their friends (at least at ages 9 and 12) tend to use the bathroom one at a time and without commentary.
Yet I have a husband, five sons and two male dogs – all of whom evidence what I consider unseemly glee in every kind of bodily appurtenance and function, especially emissions therefrom.
When my husband came home not long ago with a particularly grim-looking “natural chewie” for our Saint Bernard pup, he made a circuit of our house asking everyone, “What do you think this is?”
No one could guess.
So filled with glee was he that my husband even took a picture with his camera and sent it to our son at college.
“It’s a bison penis!” he finally announced triumphantly.
Even the dog seemed unnerved.
And yet, more times than I can count during a week, I say things like, “Chewing a stick does not replace brushing your teeth!” or “No, you can’t threaten to pee on anyone!” In fact, there are few other contexts in which I can imagine saying things like that at all.
But that is the reality of living with sons.
They don’t have to pretend that they like things that would make you or me cringe; they really do like things that would make you or me cringe. They really love anything that sounds like flatulence. They really love anything that refers to their nether regions. They don’t even mind examining and comparing dog poop sizes and contents. It’s what makes their wheels turn.
They love their new things. Then they set out on a concerted and devoted effort to bust them, crack them, disembowel or otherwise make them stop doing what they were built to do. They jump on cardboard blocks. They bite high-bouncing balls. My boys seem genuinely dismayed and even distraught when what they set out to destroy actually ends up… well, destroyed.
There are great things about having sons. Some of the things they do that are nuts are actually also funny. Once, when he was little, my son Dan kept resolutely dipping the petals of a daisy in milk before eating them.
Finally, I asked him, “WHY are you doing that?”
And he answered patiently, “Otherwise, I can’t stand the taste of the petals.”
There’s always the chance, of course, that they could outgrow the need to stomp, point, growl, gurgle and burp.
My husband’s only 42.
If you want to know more (and can handle more toilet jokes) read my piece from a recent Wondertime magazine on http://wondertime.go.com/parent-to-parent/article/where-the-boys-are.html
I write a column in Wondertime called The Long View, (I didn't name it) which delicately hints at the truth that it seems I've been a mother since I was born.

It's still a month before publication but teen readers are beginning to weigh in on ALL WE KNOW OF HEAVEN and I'm absolutely in heaven about what they have to say!
Here are some early ratings from "previewers" who must all be very intelligent young women...or else I'm just one lucky author. ALL WE KNOW OF HEAVEN means a great deal to me, in part because I have a beloved friend who has been in a persistent coma for more than a year now, and whose condition is much more severe than Maureen's ever was. Sharing these emotions of devastating love and devastating loss helped me begin the long process of healing (which, in some ways, will never end).
Please glance at my web page (www.jackiemitchard.com) and read the blog from last winter called 'Just The Way You Look Tonight.' You'll understand more about where all that understanding began.

Jackie M.

Reader Reviews from FirstLook
A heartfelt story involving two best friends, All We Know of Heaven tells the tale of when one friend has to learn to live without the other. A tragic accident has changed the course of several lives, and an even more devastating mistake muddies the water. The scarily realistic situations, plot, dialogue, and characters make the novel seem more like nonfiction. Readers follow the surviving friend through her recovery gains and setbacks, her love life, and her lessons on how to live after death.
— Hannah (Saint Johns, FL)

All We Know of Heaven is, simply, a great book. The detailed writing, coupled with the in-depth exploration of the characters’ feelings, caught my eye immediately. Jacquelyn Mitchard obviously has a talent for writing, and for a first-time reader of one of her books, I definitely cannot wait to read more.
— Haley (Pittsboro, IN)

Enchanting, addictive, as soon as you read the first page you become enthralled as it takes you into another world. It’s like you become the characters and feel what they feel, react and show emotions as they do. You can feel the emotion in each line, and it completely drags you into the world of death and sadness, love and loss, and you can’t escape until you reach the end. Even then you won’t want to put it down. I think it was one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.
— Amanda (Britton, MI)

I love this book! Once I started reading it I couldn’t put it down. It is such a touching story. I actually started crying in class as I was reading it.
— Amanda (Kandiyohi, MN)

An intense novel which was unique and profound. Memorable story that was meaningful and unforgettable.
— sharon (albuquerque, NM)

There are books that make people laugh, cry, and think, but there are only some books that can make you week for the happy and the sad or that can touch your life in a way that makes you look at the world differently. This was the book that did that to me. The message was strong and you can bet that I will have my friends, teachers and family read this book because it was that good. I only have one warning for you: have a tissue box ready next to you…make that two!
— Sara (Bloomingdale, IL)

This book is the kind of book you will want to read over and over and over again.
— Jazmin (culpeper, VA)

This is an outstanding book. It had me standing on my toes the whole time! It is a true story that tells you to never give up hope.
— Abby (west lafayette, OH)

I absolutely could not put this book down. It was a very gripping book, sometimes tragic and sometimes joyful. I could feel the parents’ grief as well as Maury’s pain and frustration. It was a very well written book.
— Monica (Amo, IN)

All We Know of Heaven is an amazing book, telling the story of a girl who survived all odds and made something of herself. It helped me realize that we take the simplest tasks for granted, but they can be a big accomplishment. It also showed how one girl lost everything, and yet, gained so much more.
— Cecelia (Ste.Genevieve, MO)

This is a very moving novel. After reading it, I honestly counted my blessings. We take for granted little things that we are able to do daily, such as feeding and clothing ourselves. This novel is very inspirational and brings to light how thankful we should be for the simple things in life.
— Sheila (Ste. Genevieve, MO)

All We Know of Heaven is a book with a sad beginning, but you can’t put it down. I found myself crying with the characters—from sorrow and from joy—through their struggles to overcome the grief of lost friends, confusion about love, and living up to their own expectations of themselves. The inspiring story had me cheering for the characters the entire time. It really makes you look at your own life and to be grateful for what you have, while realizing that if you put your mind to something, you’ll get there eventually.
— Lynda (Antelope, CA)

This is a great book; I read it in three days. It does a stellar job of portraying the lost friend, and the one who survives becoming a real person again. This book is about hope, trust, love, loss, repairing a life, friendship and romance. Jacquelyn is an amazing writer and deals with the intense topic very well. All We Know of Heaven is a great book, which I think everyone should read.
— Manya (Saxtons River, VT)

We heard it first in the taxi, the wonderful London taxi -- they can turn in the radius of their own length -- on the way to our hotel near Hyde Park.
It was to be the worst storm of the winter, and perhaps of a generation. There were warnings that buildings would be damaged, bits of coastline washed away, trees down and power outages. We had come from our own home, where the total snowfall for the year had reached nearly 100 inches. Surely, this was a mistake.
It was no mistake.
I huddled into my lightweight trench coat. Early spring in London is soggy and gray but not usually torrential. In coming days, I would wish I had gear more suitable for the Himalayas. My trip to meet the people of my amazing new publisher, John Murray, including an amazing editor, Kate Parkin, was a bit dampened, shall we say. As we traveled by train all over northern England for literary festivals given by libraries, we saw fashionable girls in double pairs of pants and green Wellington boots, their umbrellas not only blown inside-out but torn out of their hands entirely. With the help of the publicist, we booked trains that were immediately cancelled and, when we could show up for events, learned that we were staying in quaint hotels with sports fans made surly by the fact that the annual race had been cancelled the day before and they had to spend another night before betting on their favorites.
Among the people who did brave the weather to show up, the favorite question was why I didn't set more books in England.
I didn't quite know how to answer. I love England, but although of English roots on my father's side, I don't know enough about England -- although I got a great plot idea while there, even though my husband kept elbowing me to stop asking about it because he thought I was being too blunt and impolite -- to really "set" stories there.
I asked my reader friend, "Do you only read books set in England?"
She answered, "No, I read books by Janet Evanovitch and Patricia Cornwell."
"But they aren't set in England," I replied.
"I didn't say that they should set their books in England. I said you should," she told me.
And the whole experience took on this sort of wonderful-terrible Alice-in-Wonderland quality. Every time we turned on the television, we heard that the foul weather was going to be targeted exactly on the place we were headed the next day.
We had three suitcases the size of Volkswagens, and every bloke we encountered had a comment about them: "Here for the weekend then?"
"Got the kiddies in there?" "Planning on immigration?"
We didn't know we could have left all but one of the smaller bags at the hotel in London to which we would return -- in the U.S. that would have been tantamount to provoking a federal investigation or, alternatively, throwing the contents from an eighth-floor window. But as we struggled up and down the multiple flights of stairs from train platform to other train platform, I was reminded of the phrase about things being in the saddle and riding mankind -- which I believe did originate with an Englishman.
On the other hand, the few people I met were hardy and hearty, kindly and gentle. I loved being called "love" and "ducks" by total strangers, loved the cheerful attitude that a big pot of tea would fix me right up and, don't bother, the innkeeper would bring it to me. I never encountered the repressed, stiff and chilly English of legend, just people with a great deal of bounce and plenty of philosophy -- who were deeply interested in the outcome of our presidential election and hoped Hillary would win. They were gentle with me and my eccentricities, my bad knees and the toe I sprained (on one of the suitcases). They were charmed by my husband, one of the gentlest souls on earth, and one of those people who can't help slipping into the dialect of whatever person he's with -- be that person from Yorkshire or Jamaica. And so everything that seemed tiresome at the time seems funny in retrospect -- something I'd gladly do all over again.
In the end, the weather and the suitcases, and even the fellow who took off his socks and washed his feet in the next seat on the plane ride home, made for a good story.
There'll always be an England, fortunately. The flowers will bloom and the moors flock with sheep in the heather.
And I'll be back.

In my last blog, you can see just the edge of the chair that nearly ended my marriage.
My daughter is sitting in it. I’m leaning on it, because in that photo, I still have the chair, although for a while, it was the chair or me.
I could say it looks much like any other chair, but that would be a lie and make my husband sound nuts instead of only neurotic. We’re all neurotic, but he’s neurotic about furniture and paint. And for the past three months, we’ve engaged in a war over a mini redecoration that has been more sniper attack than all-out cavalry assault. It has not escaped our children’s notice however. Fortunately, it is not the kind of parental warfare that will scar them for life or even until Wednesday. It has proven to them only what they already know – that their parents have feet of clay and heads of bone.
First, a little history.
Personally, I couldn’t much care less what kind of furniture we have so long as it’s serviceable and comfortable.
My husband couldn’t care more.
It’s not that he has too much time on his hands: Staying home with four young kids and two old ones (and coping with periodic bouts of weirdness from the college kid who lives away from home) keeps him more than occupied. He’s great at it.
But also, he majored it art, which gives him the illusion that, if unleashed, he could create an environment that would have photographers from Coastal Living outside the door, clamoring for a peek. It is sort of like my belief that with a few lessons, I could sing like Kristin Chenoweth. But people need dreams the way they need champagne – not every day but once in a while to add a little sparkle to their days. Neither of us wants to disabuse the other of that dream. My husband puts up with my yowling along with the radio and I put up with the fact that he once tried 13 different paint colors on a wall before choosing the first one he fancied.
Generally.
The redecoration was necessary.
Chris had built us a beautiful house but the living room is as big as a full-sized basketball court. People actually use a room in the basement, the size of a bedroom in a New York apartment, to enjoy games and TV. In part, this has been because being in our “great room” wasn’t so great. It felt like being in entry hall of the Field Museum without the dinosaur. What I’d done was to buy little bitty Euro type couches and chairs that, in this room, looked as inviting and stable as doll furniture. When our family gathered at holidays, we got out ten folding chairs to supplement out things. And then people sat on the floor. It echoed because the rugs were too small and its focal point was a flat-panel TV, which is a really terrific TV except for being the only thing on the wall. The paint (which I chose in a fit of decisiveness after the walls had remained white for a full year) was too light for the size of the room, so what we had was a sort of hollow, uninhabited gourd.
We decided together to buy some substantial, although inexpensive, couches and chairs and make that room a place to gather.
And that was the last thing we decided together.
My husband maintains that he does not change his mind very often. He says it’s more a matter of taking so long to make up his mind that people have the mistaken impression that he’s indecisive. He had not fully committed to those couches when we bought them – so it was not indecision that made him call back and change the order from two couches to a couch and two chairs and then, three days later, back to two couches. It was part of a process of making a decision. Although even the storeowner suggested that my husband repine for a while before making another part of his choice. The designer who had shown us 400 fabric samples before my husband picked out one he thought he could probably live with quit the business and decided to go into health care. Chris was almost sure he could live with the couches and with the two end tables he had ordered, although the thought of the end tables was a constant stressor.
But the crisis was yet to come.
The falling out came when I fell in love with the red chair.
It was on sale, and it looked just the like chair in Blue’s Clues or the seating version of the teapot in Beauty and the Beast. In fact, the designer once worked as an artist for Disney. It was really, really red, with a black stripe, and I decided that I loved it. I bought it. I brought it home and my husband smiled and asked, “What is that?”
“It is a chair,” I said. “Isn’t it funny and different?”
“Did you buy it used?”
“No, but on sale!”
“You aren’t going to keep it, are you?”
I sank down into its huge recesses and said, “I am.”
He said, “It doesn’t work. It throws everything off.”
By then, we’d sold all the little bitty matchstick Euro furniture and I was able to answer, honestly, “But there’s nothing else here.”
“It throws off the idea of what should be here,” Chris said.
“I am going upstairs,” I said.
“We need to discuss this,” Chris said. It’s a family rule. You discuss everything before you go to bed or make an appointment.
I explained, “No.”
Chris ranted about the chair in the way a quiet man does. He appealed to my better nature. He pointed out to the kids, in vague terms, how ego could get in the way of human harmony. When I tired of hearing him and went upstairs, I could hear the ominous sound of Chris’ measuring tape – which he uses to express frustration. He was measuring everything --- the distance from the front door to the chair, the distance from the chair to the fireplace, the theoretical distance between the chair and two theoretical couches. Finally, he could take no more of my silence. He appeared in the doorway and said, “Ego! This is all about ego. You’ve ruined a whole room over ego!”
I said, “I just like that chair and I’m drawing the line. I’m keeping it.”
Chris said, “That’s so regressive.”
I said, “You’re probably right. I’m still keeping it.”
Finally, Chris said, “I actually have figured out a place where it would work.”
Heartened, I looked at his kindly face and asked, “Where?”
He said, “The laundry room. You could sit in there and read.”
“And watch the laundry go around like a dog,” I said.
“No, I thought I could make a nice reading space for you in there.”
“I don’t want to read in the laundry room.”
“I can’t live with that chair in the living room,” Chris finally said. Our son appeared in the doorway of our room.
“You’ve really talked enough about the chair,” he said.
We said, simultaneously, “You don’t understand.”
Our son said, “But I do. And Mom, Pop, it’s not a kidney transplant. It’s a chair. And you’ve talked about it way, way too much. You’re starting to worry me.”
But the cold war continued until I had to go out of town. During phone calls home, we softened. After all, we are a loving couple. Chris said, “I’m trying to make the chair work for you. It’s really not fair, and it is a kind of nice, unusual chair.” I murmured my joy at his kindly consideration. He told me about other ideas he had had – about an antique altar from an old church he’d seen that had been bulldozed he thought might be a nice thing to put under the TV. I wondered aloud, but gently, if he had thought about the ramifications of the TV being on an altar. He chuckled. Chris actually chuckled about a matter of decorating and pronounced me cored. We parted with a sweet signoff. Two nights later, I struggled through the door with my suitcases. Everyone was asleep. Happily, I noticed the chair was still near the fireplace, not in the laundry room. I considered how tolerant and kind my husband really was, how very red that chair, how blatant that big black stripe. I really had pushed his buttons.
Then I noticed something else.
The end tables that Chris ordered, sight unseen, trusting in the designer, had arrived. There they sat, casually tucked into corners.
They were shiny black, with a thin red stripe.