Family History and Carolyn

9:32am                         Writing Practice                               55°  Boise

I went to bed an hour early last night and woke up at a little after 8am, just in time to stretch and breathe and plan my day. This is day 3 of actually gathering up words toward a book and I'm not sure where I am except that I've written for two days and then saved it in a document titled Beginning in a folder titled Learning to Live Far From Home. I thought I would start off with a little family history and I dug for and found the story I was looking for but it's not as fleshed out on the page as it is in my mind and so I'm a tad stalled about that. But you know, who cares! I'm going to write it as it is in my mind's eye and tell the reader that this is what I saw as I read the actual history put down by some cousin or other many years ago, as told to him by his grandmother Nellie. There is no first hand account, no one alive knows what happened or what it was really like and so who's to say that my version is far from the truth? All I really want to do is establish the idea that the people I came from were always on the move, never satisfied to stay and settle down. They had wanderlust in their genes and that's how they got from Scotland to the New World, that's how they got to Virginia, and then Ohio and then Indiana and then Rachael Riley McDaniel gathered her belongings and two of her children and hopped a train for the wild west ... Spokane, Washington. She wasn't a McDaniel in blood and I don't know how her people got to America but it was her intrepid spirit that brought the family to the west where they all spread out and many still remain.

Hardman, Oregon is a ghost town now and if it had been settled by people who could stick, it would not be. Perhaps. Who knows, there's really nothing out there. I want to take a trip and go see the area for myself. There's a motel in Heppner I could stay at for a quick overnight. I just wish Carolyn wasn't mad at me. She knows where everything is, although I could find the cemetery on my own, I'll bet. But I don't know where the Burton Valley is or McDaniel Canyon. I don't know where Kinzua was or Camp 5, although those places really have no bearing on this project. And do I really need to see any of it in order to write my stories? I've been there before many times, just not recently. I know that landscape, the high desert, the over-logged mountains that still haven't recovered from the logging activity of 70 years ago. At least that's what I remember, maybe it's no longer true. I should go see.

About Carolyn:  I really don't care if she's mad at me. She attacked me out of the blue a few months ago with stuff she created in her own mind by distorting and adding meaning to a conversation that had no basis in my reality. She made up stuff and then got mad at me, which is almost as bad as having a bad dream and waking up mad at the dream offender. Plus she threw in a list of things she found offensive about me and I could tell that she had been keeping a list on the side of things she could use against me in the future. John did that throughout our marriage and instead of dealing with issues as they came up and sticking to the subject, he would bring in his list and hurl it at me so that I could be defeated and the fight could be won. He had no interest in communicating and solving the issue, he only cared about winning the fight, being right and then forgetting about the whole thing and moving on. Which, of course, never happened. Carolyn doesn't respond to any of my e-mails and she's touchy as hell when she does.

Well, I don't care. I don't think I could last a day in the car with her anyway, she has the very worst bad breath I'd ever smelled because of her rotten teeth. Now there, how's that for stashing away an offensive bit of information to use at a later date? I'm just as bad as her in so many ways. Plus she's mean about my mother and I'm not going to be around that if I can help it. I knew my mother better than anyone except my dad and now that she's gone, I've forgiven it all and only the love is left. I'm not going to rehash her faults and weaknesses with Carolyn or anyone else.

OK, I got off track with that but I'm glad I wrote it down. Now I can move on. If I need to make a trip to explore Hardman and the area over there, I'll do it without her.

So far today, I have nothing toward my words for the book. I know what I'll do! I'll plug in the headgear and read in an entry from my journal about home that I wrote a few weeks ago. Yes, that has to be done anyway. So off I go to do that now.