A Tribute to a Friend

My friend Jewel passed on Sunday. She was born with cataracts and spent much of her youth in a state school for the blind. She was teaching a rehab center when she met Donald, the love of her life. She could see only light and shadow. Don is completely blind.

Like Hansel and Gretel, these two very special individuals moved from place to place as work called, and raised three able and beautiful, sighted children. Jewel stayed home with the kids and worked with choirs wherever she happened to be. A beautiful voice and strong abilities as a pianist made her popular wherever she would go. Donald taught special and blind children for over 40 years.

I met the pair when they called me at Pleasant Day Medical Adult Day Care Center asking if they could come to entertain the clients. You can bet I accepted their offer immediately. You can hardly imagine my delight when Jewel asked me to sing with them and invited me to dredge up the words to the big stage plays of the fifties.

We rocked the Surrey With The Fringe On Top and torched Mack the Knife. What fun! I felt as if I had met a sister I did now know I had, and I believe Jewel felt the same way for we were drawn to each other like lovers, although that was not the pull - we both loved music and sharing it made the music better.

I made sure they were on the Pleasant Day calendar whenever they happened to come to Cambridge from their New Orleans home and the two of us were thick as thieves on those visits that were never long enough.

When I made my gospel CD, it would not do but that Jewel come and play piano for the event. What fun to make brand new music with a great piano player. We made great plans for Don's retirement when they would move to Cambridge.

When I think of Jewel, I think of shopping trips and reasons to sing. I think of the iris in my tiny front yard and how she loved big, showy flowers.

I didn't get to say goodbye when Don and Jewel went home after an April visit. I had no idea it was the last time we would see each other, and I don't even seem to have a photo of this sweet friend - although friends do and I hope that if they do, they will share, but I do not need a photo to see Jewel - plowing through life with verve and joy, trusting that her path will be clear.

What a privilege to have known her.

Keep on the sunny side. Terry

Country Store Remembered

When I was a youngster, LeRoy only had one business - a little general store that operated six days a week. Colton's store was closed on Sunday because Melvin Colton was the one who turned on the heat at the church, and read the Word.

During the week, Melvin Colton and his wife Marlita welcomed every child with a smile. They did not seem to mind the children who stood with nose pressed to glass, trying to decide what to purchase with their pennies. Melvin always seemed to have time to use the little wooden measure to scoop out a penny's worth of Boston Baked Beans - which were reddish brown, and resembled beans baked in molasses, although they did not taste of beans and made a penny go a long, long way. Mr. Colton always wore a striped shirt with a little leather bow tie at the throat.

The trick was to select the candies that filled the tiny, quarter-pound brown paper bags with an eye as to which variety of sweet would last the longest. Mr. Colton would even open a pack of gum to sell you a single stick of Beman's Pepsin or Black Jack, gum we could chew all day long if we kept it quiet. Mom had no patience with popping bubbles or open-mouthed chewing. It is true, the flavor did not last very long, but chewing gum was somehow cool, proof of one's potence in the world.

I liked the little chocolate bears, but they were not so many for a cent, and of Tootsie Rolls, you had but one piece, for chocolate did not figure largely in the varieties of sweets to be had for just one cent.

Marlita Colton was a pale redhead with hair combed exactly the same each day. She only came out into the store if there were more than two or three customers so that no one need to wait while Melvin carved wedges of pungent cheddar cheese from the wheel on the table beside the cash drawer. He wrapped each piece of cheese in white paper tied with red and white cord, which we carefully kept at home in case of need. His wife was a healer of sorts, always ready to fish out a splinter or advise on a poltice to draw out infection when the splinter was not pulled in time.

Collton's store was a marvel of economy, with each shelf stocked to best advantage, but I never quite understood why the Wolverine boots - the only sort of footwear the men wore in that part of the world, were displayed below the mirrored flats where oranges and bananas were arranged, waiting the children who picked up parts of their lunch on their way to school, which was just down the block by the Grange Hall. There were no women's clothing, but you could purchase thread and needles to make your own.

Outside, there was a bench in the shade by the front door to sit upon when it got hot in the summer and had a popsicle of red or blue to paint your tongue and lips with frosty cold. On school days, the bigger boys showed off by pouring salted peanuts into their cola bottles on the theory such a mixture could make you drunk. Girls gossipped about school and friends in town - and who had a bra already.

Colton's store had the only gas pumps in the village, and everyone pumped his own gas and went inside to report the amount and settle up. There was rarely a line, for the farmers had their own tanks and pumps to fuel pick-ups and tractors. They had one at the big house, but Dad got his gas at Colton's store.

One thing about Colton's store. Those people extended credit to people waiting on their milk checks or factory pay to settle up on Friday night. Just about everyone in the village charged things at Colton's store, and sometimes it was a blessing for some hungry child who might not have had anything to eat otherwise.

They don't make places like Colton's store any more. Today businessmen are too busy to wait on children, to learn their names, and be patient while they spend their birthday pennies. You might have a credit card, but you will probably never have the sort of loving, Christian relationship Melvin and Marlita Colton offered to an entire community. Bless their hearts, and bless this memory of a gentler time.

I hope you have a great day and keep on the sunny side, Terry

Terry L White -Author of the Chesapeake Heritage Series
"Travel Through Time With Terry"
http://www.terrylwhitesblog.blogspot.com

Is It Spring Yet?

How do you tell when it is spring? I'll be darned if I know because I am usually trapped indoors as far away from the pollen as I can get. I realize that plants have to reproduce, but there seems as if there could be a way that wasn't so hard on the human population. I have had problems with pollen for years, in its worst manifestation, I end up with a killer headache. Other times I feel as if someone beat me with a baseball bat. Apparently my body plans to show its displeasure with the vegetative air pollution any way it can. Mostly, I just live with it and try not to be too cranky.

Pollen aside, I think spring is the very best season. I love to watch the way the world changes minute by minute as the various species of trees and flowers produce bloom after bloom. The lilacs are out right now. I wish there was one where I had permission to clip a blossom so I could breathe its perfume while I slept. You can't beat the perfume of lilacs.

The back yard was carpeted with violets last week and I ventured to mow part of the lawn yesterday. I hate to decapitate these lovely blooms. My yard seems to love the violets, of which there are light purple and purple and white strains. I think it would be a sin to mow the grass before the violets start to fade, don't you?

Spring means the neighbors are preparing to sit on their porches, and while I have no family in the areas, there are at least four cats who stop to pass the time of day. I don't feed them. I would sure hate to be accused of cat-napping.

I don't mind putting away the warm clothing, although it is not yet time for summer garb. At least spring brings a change. I get tired of long underwear after a while, don't you?

Spring is a season we must take seriously, because it can slip by without our notice if we are not careful. I feel blessed every time I walk down my street and notice how beautiful the world is because today it is surely spring..

Keep on the sunny side! Terry

The Green Show

This month the Main Street Gallery in Cambridge is honoring the environment with a 'green show'. This exciting display features upcycled and recycled materials in projects that span the green spectrum.

Green paintings take center stage. Jewelry made of nails is selling like hotcakes and a wonderfully glittery mermaid presides over a unique selection of art done by talented artists with the environment in mind.

My 'Material Girl' (above) is made of newsprint, house paint, broken jewelry and some pot scrubbers from under the sink. I liked the project because it used a lot of leftovers from my crafts stash. My fond hope is that someone will take her home, because I can't quite think where she would fit in my collection! As if...

I do hope that the show, which is open Wednesday through Saturday, will make people think. So much of what we 'consume' here in America constitutes waste - materials that could well be recycled into something beautiful and useful.

It is, after all, what art is all about.

Keep on the sunny side, Spring is here! Terry

Steamboat's Comin'

Good Saturday Morning,

I just finished the galleys for Chesapeake Visions, the fourth in my series of historical novels set on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. (The covers were done by Snow Hill artist Dawn M. Tarr) I chose the steamboat theme because steamboats were the major form of transportation during the Civil War era - right up until the Bay Bridge was built to span the Chesapeake Bay and make travel to the Eastern Shore a bit easier than it had been for the past couple of centuries.

Writing is the best thing in the world to me. I just love sitting down and seeing what the universe has to say through me. I look back at my work at times and can't help but wonder where it all came from. In the case of Chesapeake Visions, I will tell you the inspiration came from a wonderful friend who is blind.

Thinking about my friend and the difficulties she gallantly copes with every day of her life, I was prompted to write the story of a woman who was blind from birth, a child of the planter's gentry found in the agricultural history of the Eastern Shore.

Imagining Jewel LeCompte and her fate as emancipation freed her slaves paved the way for a story that might be even more compelling of that posed by the other farm families who had to pay their slaves to do the same work they did before the Civil War. Jewel had to learn to work, and she had to work without the benefit of sight. I thought it was a great story and I hope my readers do as well.

The histories behind the history books always hold a great charm for me. What did the farmer do without slaves? How does a blind woman work in her kitchen? Can she learn to read, and how? Will she find love - or will it find her?

I am looking forward to seeing this last book in the Chesapeake Heritage series in print and that it will one day be recognized for the history behind the history it illuminates.

Happy reading! Terry

To E-Book or...

One of the first things I did when I got online for the first time was to find people to talk with from around the world. That first year I had pen pals in Australia, Japan, Indonesia, England, Turkey, Canada, all over the States, and in various other places in the world.

I thought it was great! You can still do that, but a lot of sites that were free back then have deteriorated into matching sites that charge for their services. Seems like we are going backward in that respect and that the matching sites are standing in the way of progress.

I believe it is a good thing to try to get to know people who live in different places. I know when I did, the biggest thing I noticed was that people are more alike than they are different.

One of the nifty people I met was this fellow from Canada who used to be a newspaperman. We had a lot to talk about, and I enjoyed his company. Our conversation often drifted to the art of writing and he suggested I write a mystery - these being more salable than the historical novels I loved to write.

Challenged, I wrote every night, every morning before going to work, and all weekend. It took me 28 days to pen Imagine, a whodunit in which the mystery revolved around the introduction of computer technology in a small-town police department. It wasn't very good, but my publisher liked it and it remains an e-book to this day, even though it is woefully dated. She even suggested I continue the tale as a series, but I didn't much like the genre and I went back to my beloved historical fiction.

Still, Imagine is out there for anyone to download into their Kindle or other reading device. I guess a copy sells every now and then, but it is darned hard to sign a download, so I don't get many requests for my signature.

I am still not convinced e-books are the wave of the future, but if anyone knows how to get noticed as the author of e-books, I hope you will let me know.

Have a great day and keep on the sunny side! Terry

Hey! I'm Over Here!!!

Nearly 50 years ago I made the decision to be a writer when I grew up.

I began by writing a story about my past - editing the hard parts until I had a happy ending. Goodness, that story was written in pencil, on a legal pad, while I was living in a tent. I was the hippie's hippie, living on dreams.My decision to become a famous author was less a pipe dream than a vow 'til the death.

From today's perspective, it seems clear, death will come first!

I knew, from my Sunday School teachers that faith without works is nothing, so I wrote another book - this one about an ancestor who was in the patent medicine business after the Civil War. This one was written on a portable typewriter - it wasn't even electric and getting a clean copy was a nightmare. But erasers and holes in my manuscript from fixing my typos did not deter me. Something awesome, however, happened.

My story bumbled along following my hero (ancestor Levi Terk) who joined the circus to sell more product. There came, after many months of work, an odd revelation: I wrote a dream sequence about the fall of Atlantis and my death there. I had discovered the way to see my past lives - and I did it all by myself!

The next year I wrote a story about my adventures as a musician in upstate New York called The Picker. I played in a dance band, bassist for dance music and bluegrass standards. I was in hog heaven, playing music on nights and weekends, writing until the next gig.

Did the world care? Not one bit! I was convinced I was going to do what it takes to be a famous author. A look at my resume told me that I might need to change my stars, so I sold my kitchen table and chairs to the girl moving in the next apartment and sent my application to the nearest community college. I graduated with honors, and raised my sights to the next degree. I approached Skidmore College's University Without Walls and earned my degree in American Studies. I was thrilled to learn that Lena Spencer, of Cafe Lena in Saratoga Springs, was given an honorary doctorate for her support of musicians like Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger that year. Talk about being in the company of saints!

About that time I sold my first story and received $125 for a tale called Harvest Dance for a magazine called American Square Dance. This was a huge amount of payment for a story back in the early 80s, encouraging my dream and putting my bottom in the chair daily. I wasn't famous yet, but I could see that hard work could indeed pay off.

I went back to waitressing (a perennial source of income) and wrote a couple of dozen short stories the summer I got my first Epson computer - which cost as much as a new car at the time. Freed of constant re-typing and messy manuscripts, my work took off like a shot! I even sold some stories to little and literary magazines, which mostly paid in bragging rights and free copies.

The novels followed, year after year. Hell or High Water told the story of a rural electrification project and the people who were displaced in the flooding of the Sacandaga River Valley in upstate New York.

Hang Your Head Over bared a family secret of incest in a remote coal mining town.

The Last Priestess came in at over 100,000 words, telling the story of the last priestess of the Goddess and the emergence of the bloody sun worship. (Now available as an e-book series)

Mystick Moon told the story of an abused orphan who is accused of witchcraft, not once but twice, and survives in colonial days.

Crazy Quilt is a collection of short stories, including the title story Crazy Quilt, which was first published in Prophetic Voices - a magazine that published many famous authors early in their careers!

Imagine was my try at writing a mystery on a dare from a chat friend - it took me 28 days!

I kept working, and even taught storytelling at a writer's conference for several years. I pored over Writer's Market and submitted hundreds of manuscripts - in fact, at one point I burned a three-inch stack of rejection letters.

After a migration to Maryland, I penned Ancient Memories, a story that follows the soul's journey to true love.

Cleaving to a friend's advice, next I wrote a book about planning community events. Eh... Even after five years as a reporter writing for a small-town daily newspaper, I still did not get a thrill from writing non-fiction, but it is out there if you might need some advice about how to put together a big event. (The experience behind this book came from seven years of work with local not-for-profit organizations as a fund-raiser.)

Working for the newspaper, by the way, was wonderful. I covered everything from triathlons to municipal meetings, reports on environmental issues and muskrat cooking contests. I even had to take my own photos, and I loved every moment of it... but it wasn't being a famous author. Every reporter knows people wrap fish guts in your story the following day. But the job has merit. It teaches you that writer's block is a fiction, and that no matter how good the story, you should never get a swelled head.

My next volume was a departure from both fiction and fact. Runaway Hearts told the stories of Dorchester County, MD in verse. It includes stories about colonial days, trappers, watermen and the slave Harriet Tubman who stole her people away on the Underground Railroad.

Fifteen years of life on the Eastern Shore of Maryland triggered my four-volume Chesapeake Heritage Series - fictional tales of strong women who lived on the peninsula from first the first colony until the end of the Civil War.

Most of these books are available either in print or as e-books, and I know in my heart I have answered the call that came so many years ago. I worked hard, learned the rules, supported the dream, and continued to pursue that dream for all these years. There are a couple of new books finished and waiting for the next step.

I need to get noticed.

So, here I am hollering "Hey! I'm over here. I wrote books! I am an author!! I am, after all these years, still a starving artist!


Terry
Terry L White -Author of the Chesapeake Heritage Series
"Travel Through Time With Terry"
http://www.terrylwhitesblog.blogspot.com

tlwhite@verizon.net