Rachael Herron

(R.H. Herron)

Blog

Dreams of Sea Lions

Last night, when I took the dogs outside to pee, I smelled that gorgeous fall scent of wood smoke and damp, cool air, and instead of feeling nostalgia or that bittersweet ache, I felt something different. That smell always made me long for something, and I never knew what.

Now I know what I wanted. I wanted all of this. This life. This wife, these dogs, this house, these sisters close to me, these friends, this exact career, bumps at all. I’m not longing anymore. I’m not waiting for the someday I’ve yearned for since I was old enough to hope for my future. It’s an astonishing discovery, actually, and it puts me off balance.

Of course, I still have wants. I want to be the Tim Gunn of memoir someday (knowledgeable, warm, kind, very nattily dressed). More money would be nice. A decent retirement account in the bank sure would be welcome.

But I possess this glorious dream, and wood smoke now just smells beautiful, instead of bittersweet.

This does mean I need to start asking what’s the next big dream, the one that attaches to this one?

In literal dreams, this morning I dreamed I married a sea lion shapeshifter in New Zealand. She was really nice and I loved her, but I found her smell and her barking annoying, and after I married her, I suddenly remembered that I already had a wife I was in love with, but she and her family said they’d come along to our house in the States, and everything would be fine – they wouldn’t mind Lala being there. While neither of us is a jealous person, I wasn’t sure Lala would feel the same way.

So I’d like to state for the record that my next big dream involves no sea lions at all.

Clara’s Angst

ATT linemen are outside on ladders, hopefully fixing our internet connection which has been so spotty I routinely lose connection on Skype calls. Clara is losing her damn mind – finally, something going on in her line of sight above the camellia bushes. Poor old dog, I can tell she’s feeling her age. She’s moving slow, not peeing much, loath to leave the porch when it’s dark and raining. She used to run and leap and bound. She got the party started, always. The doctor says she’s okay, just old. She’s such a sweet girl. I worry I didn’t give her best life which would have included beach walks every day and rolls in sand and endless treats and extra Himalayan yak cheese and fish for dinner every night. I hope she’s happy. I know Clemmy and Dozy are. They love us and want to be with us. Everything else is just bonus. Clara, I think, has deeper existential needs. She’s a border collie – she knows that somewhere there are sheep that she’s not herding. Sometimes when she lies on the office and heaves a great sigh, I imagine she’s wondering what would have happened if she had been adopted by different people, ones with fields full of lambing ewes and rabbits to chase in her off time. Instead, she has this writer person who rarely moves from the desk and a small Morkie barking at her heels. She has angst. I have guilt. We are good pals.

How Can I Help After Someone Dies?

How to Help When Someone Has Died: What to Offer and What to Say - from Rachael HerronWhen my darling mother-in-law died a few weeks ago, it was awful. I say that lightly, as if such an inadequate word can possibly be appropriate.

A person I loved died, and worse, she was the mother of the woman I’ve chosen to share my life with. We made it to her bedside with just hours to spare before she died. All I could do was hold Lala afterward.

Watching a loved one grieve doesn’t hurt more than your own grief (it can’t, of course), but it hurts differently. When you’re in your own grief, you can’t do much more than lie down in it and pull up its grimy blanket around your chin. When you’re proximate to it, you want to help and you’re sad—it’s a terrible, difficult mix.

You know you can’t help the hurting.

So you want to help in any other way possible.

Last year, one of my best friends lost her only child in a freak accident. He was just 24 years old. All I wanted to do was help, but I didn’t know what to do. I googled then, and I googled last month, and I still came up with mostly-unhelpful checklists of legal things to do, of processes that needed to be taken care of, of forms you needed to get.

I’m not knowledgable enough to write that kind of article. Instead, this is for you, the friend or the partner of the bereaved. You’re the person who wants to help, who says, “Let me know if I can help in any way,” and you mean it, I know you do. But those grieving don’t even know yet what needs to be done, so consider offering to do something specific from the below list.

TL;DR: Just show up. Keep showing up. Next year, show up on the anniversary. Be there. Listen. If they’re huggers, hug. Help in small ways. They add up.

Some Things That Will Need Doing

1. Make Phone Calls.

In the best possible world, plans will be in place. In tragedies, though, they’re not. Help brainstorm what should be done with the remains. Cremation? Burial? Where? When? Organ donation? (Yes, it’s terrible that you need to think about this so quickly. But it has to be done.)

Who needs to be contacted and told? Can you help with those notifications? The immediate family can be overwhelmed by making those phone calls, by having to say the same, terrible thing, over and over.

2. Help With Decisions.

There are two parts to a funeral – the ceremony (and a reception/wake), and the placement of the remains. Does the family want a church service? A secular service? Nothing at all? All fine. Start making the calls to the right places to schedule what you need. Hear what the family needs, and make the phone calls.

Have a piece of paper with all the information you’ll need to give, over and over, so you don’t have to keep asking: Full name, date of birth, place of birth, date of death, social security number.

3. Help With Immediate Organization

If it’s been a long time coming, the house might be full of medical equipment. Find out if you can help clean some of this out. It meant a lot to my father-in-law that the hospital bed in which his wife had spent 20 months being very ill be donated to charity, immediately. We found a hospital supply charity in the next town who wanted the goods, but they couldn’t pick them up, so we hired a moving company to do a small move of the equipment for us.

If there’s a ton of medicine in the house, offer to get rid of it. Look up the local medical waste box (often in police department lobbies) and bring the pills, all dumped together into large ziplocks. Remove personal data from the bottles (a Sharpie is good enough) and toss them.

Some medical supplies like saline flushes are great to donate to the local SPCA – check with them. Other medical supplies that aren’t drugs can be donated to organizations that pass them out to the homeless, who really need this stuff. Again, get out your phone and make a few calls.

4. Offer to write the first draft of the obituary.

It can be wildly helpful for the bereaved to have something to edit rather than coming up with the obituary themselves. Be factual, but make it real and compelling, too. Find an obituary you like and copy the format. You won’t get busted by the plagiarism police. Here’s my mother-in-law’s.  

If the family would like donations in lieu of flowers, now is when to decide on the appropriate charity. Call them and find out what their best contact is. Once the obit is done and approved by everyone, send it to the local paper (it’s usually charged by the column inch). Consider sending it to their hometown paper, too, if that’s different.

5. Help Get the Death Certificates

Get ten. You will think this will be too many. It won’t be. Contact the mortuary or Vital Statistics in your state to start this. Later, when it quiets down, Social Security needs to be notified, phones deactivated, banks closed, credit cards deactivated, online accounts accessed. All of these things will need an original death certificate. A good list of what will need to be done later is here. These things are hard, by the way. Offer your friend/family member your assistance in doing them. Even going along with them to the DMV can help.

6. Help with Funeral planning.

There is so much to be done for a funeral, and this is where you can come in super handy. Pick one of these things, and offer to do it (and then do it well, and on time).

Speakers: Who will speak at the service? Make sure those people want to speak. Don’t make anyone talk who doesn’t want to, even those closest to the deceased (especially those). Can I offer my favorite funeral poem for this?  Is it weird that I have one? I read that first in a Rosamunde Pilcher book in which someone dies, and I thought, that. That’s what I’d want read. That’s what I believe.

Photographs: This is an enormous task, and I honestly think it’s the most wonderful job of all. Send requests to everyone you know to send you pictures of your loved one by a certain day and time. Ask them to look in their phones, their photo albums, and their social media. Accepting them digitally is great. Share the DropBox you create for the service with everyone.

Start sorting them early—you won’t be able to put them all into the slideshow, so put the best ones into a separate file.

PROTIP: If many of them are paper photographs, go to a big box store and buy an expensive, fast scanner (not a flatbed — you want a feed-through one built for scanning multiple photos at a time, trust me on this).

Don’t worry about what you pay for it, because you’re going to return it when you’re done (keep the receipt!). Is this morally wrong? Totally! Do we care, though, about screwing a big box store a little? Not right now, no, we sure don’t! Plus, you’re going to come back to this big box store and spend a million dollars on food and drink and other things for the service, so they’ll survive.

Slideshow: By no means a must, I have to say that I think the slideshow with music is a really, really beautiful moment in a funeral. Typically 5-7 minutes, set to one or two songs (their favorite songs or the favorite songs of the bereaved), you get to look at your loved one from birth to death. Include all the best photos. Include some funny, terrible shots, too. The audience needs that break, the laugh that comes when you see the bunny fingers, the flipped bird.

Use iMovie or any other app that works. Let each photo show for 4 seconds. Any shorter is too short, any longer will leave you with fewer photos to look at. Divide the seconds of your song(s) by 4 to see how many pictures you’ll be able to fit, and then cull your awesome photos some more. Burn the slideshow onto whatever medium the funeral home/church requests, thumb drive, CD-ROM, or whatever, and then make backup copies, in case one doesn’t work. Bring your laptop the day of the funeral, also just in case. Make sure they test it once, and that you can see that it works.

PROTIP: Put ALL the photos, not just the great ones, onto another music-less slideshow and have that looping at the wake.

Photo on easel: Pick the best photo of all, the one that everyone agrees on, and send it online to your local CVS or Walmart. You’ll be able to get it blown up within an hour for a ridiculously low price. Get three or four copies, one for the framed one at the front of the church, and a couple to give away. Then go buy a frame at Michael’s or other craft store. Take the photo with you so you can decide what suits best. Double-check with the church/funeral home that they’ll have an easel to display it on (they will, but dude, double-check everything).

Memorial Fliers: Use that same best image, and make something simple. Full name, date of birth, and date of death. A favorite quote, perhaps, or a Bible verse if that’s appropriate. You can go as simple as 4.25/5.5 (8.5/11 cut in half, vertically) on good quality heavy paper. On the back, you can put the obituary for those who didn’t see it in the paper. Send to a local printer or FedEx (you can do it all online) and pick them up early to check to make sure it looks good. Arrange for a family friend to hand to them out at the service.

Guest Book: Finding a guest book that isn’t made for a wedding is difficult. If you have time, do it online and Amazon Prime it to the house. If no time, hit Michael’s again and look for something in a darker color.

Other Fancy Things to Do that the family might like (placing wishes in a jar, burning letters after the service, etc).  Buy the appropriate items with the family’s approval and be responsible for getting them where they need to go.

House Protection: Get someone (hopefully not closely related or a good friend) to stay at the house during the funeral. Unfortunately, houses are sometimes burglarized while the funeral is going on (the time of the service is usually in the paper, after all) — burglars can be pretty sure most people are at the service. I’ve loaned my dog Clara for this service, too — a good barker and someone to call the police if there’s any problem is added peace of mind.

7. After the Service

Cleaning: If people are coming to the house, don’t bother really cleaning that much. Do what you can to help tidy. No one will care, honestly.

Doing: That said, if you’re at the wake/reception, and things need doing, do them. Take liberties. Ask for forgiveness if you overstep. Wash the glasses by hand. Figure out where the paper towels are stored by looking through cupboards. Make tea without being asked. This goes double for when you’re just hanging out with the bereaved, before and after the funeral.

Drinks: Stock up on all the drinks. People will bring food, but have plenty of drinks of all kinds.

Food: People will bring cakes and cookies and casseroles, but when in doubt, bring over a shitton of wings. For people who’ve been grieving and forgetting to eat anything besides cookies, this straight-up delicious barbecued protein can save their lives.

To the same point, don’t send flowers, send an Edible Arrangement. I have no affiliation—I just know that we got two last month, and both times, the whole family stood around the kitchen eating that fruit right off their perfect little sticks. They’re expensive and delicious, and they’re appreciated.

Extra little things:

If you can’t do any of these things, that’s okay, too. Just show up. Hug. Listen. Don’t try to fix anything, and for the love of all that’s holy, don’t say something stupid like, “God picks the prettiest flowers first,” or you’ll get a well-deserved punch in the snoot. Show up the next day. And the next one, too.

Don’t forget to keep showing up.

Everything’s a blur up to the funeral itself, and then the wake is overwhelming, and then everyone is gone. Those first few weeks and months (and years) are the hardest. Keep texting. Keep emailing. Don’t feel hurt if you don’t hear back (this isn’t about you). Just keep letting them know you’re thinking about them. Drop off random gifts. Send cards out of the blue, or on holidays (which are always so much worse than projected, even the Hallmark ones). When you send a card, remember something specific about the person who died. Not so much, “I’m so sorry for what you’re going through,” but more of “Remember when he fell off his bike and didn’t cry even though his elbow was fractured? Wow, what a tough, amazing kid he was.”

Remember that some people Will Not Help. They will be there in body but not in spirit. Or worse, they just won’t show up at all. This doesn’t mean they’re not grieving. It means that they just can’t deal with what’s going on inside themselves. They can’t do it. Try to forgive them, I guess? I have a hard time with that, but that’s because I grieve by doing, not by evacuating.

The people who help won’t be the ones you think will. The ones who do will surprise you. This is part of grief. Lala always says that after her first wife died of cancer, she was completely astonished by who showed up and who didn’t. Be the person who shows up.

Book recommendation: Buy How to Survive the Loss of a Love for a surviving spouse.

Don’t blame anyone for anything. Don’t argue about anything, either. If the person you’re helping wants to yell at you, let them (this is the rare time I’ll tell you this – letting them roar harmlessly is a gift you give them – they might need to roar). For the love of God, don’t fight over divvying up possessions. Who cares what your cousin wants? Is it worth a fight, to have what you didn’t have last week? Nah. Be the proverbial duck, let it all run off.

On the same note, though, so take care of yourself. Talk to your lovies. Get hugs when you need them. I’m a huge advocate for watching reality TV. When my mom was dying, I watched America’s Next Top Model. While in Idaho, I watched The Bachelorette (got all the way to the last episode and don’t even care enough now to finish watching). There’s something powerful about being swept up in problems that simply do not matter at all. Reality TV is kind of magical for grief.

Indulge in vices if they’re not too unhealthy and you’re not maintaining sobriety. If you are, get to more meetings than normal. You’re holding weight on your shoulders — find people who can help you bear a little of that.

Bonus list: Here’s a good PDF checklist I found while cruising around online if you need more help – this one is a little overwhelming, but just printing it out and offering to help fill it in could be a huge help.

Overall: Be the person who shows up. Who sticks around.

You’ve got this.

I Found My Mother ❤️😭❤️

Cross-posted from my reader email because I want to be able to find this easily in the future.

I found my mother in an old journal we never knew she kept. Here's why you should keep the same kind of journal.

I made the most astonishing discovery yesterday. It’s like a dream come true, and literally, it was a dream come true. I’d dreamed very vividly the night before about my mother. She was with my friend Sophie’s mother, and they told us they loved us. It was so startlingly vibrant and intense that I emailed Sophie about it as soon as I woke up. It wasn’t a normal I-was-eating-pickles-at-the-carnival-then-I-was-in-a-garden-with-my-high-school-english-teacher kind of dream. It felt real.

Sophie and I had lunch a few hours later. We talked more about the dream.

Then I went home and in a full-blown fit of writing procrastination, I started mucking out the front porch which routinely becomes our dumping ground for boxes of clothes and books to donate, packages we haven’t bothered to open yet (new kayak paddles, the cable box the internet company sent us that we’ve never hooked up), dog food bags, and all the stuff we just don’t know what to do with.

It’s embarrassing. It’s our “garage” as we have no garage and very few and tiny closets. Guests have to walk through the hell of it to get inside our nice house. It smells like cats (they sleep there at night and every once in while they decide they hate the cat box – gah.) Once a year or so I spring clean it, and yesterday was the day.

Now, a couple of years ago, I cleaned out my office. I KonMarie’d it, getting rid of SO MUCH crap. I also put all the stuff I mean to digitize into cardboard boxes and put them on the porch. The boxes held old photographs, all my old writings, and my mother’s photos and writings.

Yep, my mother was a writer, too.

If you’ve followed my work at all, you already know that she was pivotal to me and who I am now.

In Western Samoa where she was a diplomatic something-something for New Zealand, where she met my Peace Corps father.

My mom and I were really, really close. I considered her one of my very best friends and biggest champions. One of the biggest regrets of my life is not sharing my first completed novel (which went on to be my first published book) with her, but honestly, she was too sick then, and pushing it on her would have been the wrong thing to do. I just really wish she had read it, that’s all.

But as a writer herself, my mother remained as carefully in control of her emotions as she did in every other part of her life. One of her friends once told me, “You know, your mom is my best friend. But I don’t know her at all.”

Oh, yeah. That was my mom. She could deflect attention like she was wearing conversational armor. A primary goal of my whole life was to get her to tell me things about her past. She never wanted to speak of any of it, and not because she’d had a bad youth – she hadn’t. She’d had a delightful one, for the most part. She was just so private. (The apple fell REALLY far from the tree on this one.)

In the articles that she sold to magazines and newspapers, she always wrote about other things. An old-school journalist, she kept her personality out of her work.

When I inherited her writings, I combed through them, looking for something more personal. I found an essay about her being pregnant with me. It was short, but lovely. That was it. Everything else was impersonal and left me craving more.

Yesterday, as I was finally taking back the porch, I found the boxes I’d piled there. Time to move them to new digs! (Not to digitize them yet, oh, no. That would be too much work. Time to move them out of cardboard boxes and into more protective plastic ones which could then be stored in our bedroom closet! More procrastination, ahoy!)

So I paged through Mom’s writing again, for at least the third or fourth time. I found book review after boring book review. Articles on gardening. Birds.

I dropped them all in the clear plastic bin. I lifted the sharpie to write on the outside: Jan’s papers.

And I looked through the bin, to the top folder. It said clearly, The Morning Pages.

My brain stalled.

My mother. And Morning Pages?

Impossible.

Now, any of you who were pursuing creativity in the 1990s remember the Morning Pages. They were a tool in Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way. Basically, whether you’re a writer or not, you start your day with 3 handwritten pages, and you do this for 12 weeks. You don’t think about what you’re writing; you just blab. The words come from the bottom of your soul and the top of your mind. You don’t worry about grammar or spelling. You don’t reread. You can write “I don’t know what to write” for three pages, and that totally counts. (I HIGHLY recommend the book. Grab it if you’ve never done it.)

[Important point: They are not meant to be read by others. Morning pages are private, and personally, I’ve never even read my old ones. But Mom expressly left them to me in her will. She put them in the box with my name marked on it. If YOU do the morning pages, make sure you’ve thought about what you want done with them. I don’t care who reads mine because no one would ever get five pages in. I’m BORING on the morning-pages page.]

I popped open the box and yanked out the file folder. It was orange and had black printing on front: THERE IS NO ANTIDOTE FOR TERROR.

Inside were 217 pages of morning pages in my mother’s hand.

I flipped forward. I read a few lines. Yes. These were hers. Really, really hers.

They were from 1996.

I was still living at home then, finishing college and about to leave home for grad school (I was a mama’s girl and never really wanted to leave). I know that I’d started morning pages the year before (and kept them going for years), and I have a vague memory of encouraging her to do the Artist’s Way. I also remember hearing her complain she had nothing to write about, and I remember saying, “No one does. Just write anyway.”

So yesterday, I set the folder to the side. (I’m one of those people who always save the best for last.)

I finished my five-hour clean out. I scrubbed the front porch. I drove to the thrift store with my SmartCar full-to-bulging. I bought some wine and some salt and vinegar potato chips.

I went home and took the chips, the folder, and a glass of wine onto the back porch.

Then I read.

And I found my mother.

I found her. This voice – the one on the page – was the one I heard when she’d had two glasses of wine (one past her giggle limit). This voice was the one I heard in a little osteria in Venice as she told me just the barest bit about her childhood home. This voice was the one I heard on a dark road in New Zealand, lit only by glowworms, as she talked a tiny bit about an old boyfriend.

At Hot Water Beach in her native New Zealand

It was the voice I’d always wanted to hear.

She wrote about her childhood bedroom. About her first attempts at making art (age 7: she diverted a creek to make islands, and covered them with flowers). About her subsequent attempts, tracking them through her life.

She wrote about us. About my sister Beth and her baths. About Christy and her artistic talents. About going to a writer’s reading with me (oooh, she did not like that one poet).

She wrote about her cats. She wrote about her garden and where her love of each scent came from. I learned amaryllis would always remind her of her father’s funeral. That violet was the best scent of all (I actually already knew that one though my knowledge of it wouldn’t come until that trip to Italy.)

And this: I learned that she felt she was locked down by inertia. Her most-frequently used affirmation in the pages (affirmations are strongly encouraged by Julia Cameron) is “I can overcome inertia.”

This is wild. My mother was like me – we never, ever stop moving. We’re always, always doing something, every minute of the day. But she really felt that her creativity was stuck and that it was inertia that held her there.

She would never have said this to anyone. This was a deep feeling, and (as she confesses in the pages), she couldn’t speak these kinds of things. She went mum when it came to emotions or relationship issues, her tongue tied.

But lord, she gets it on the page.

And funny! I’d almost forgotten how funny she was. She was literally the smartest person I’ve ever known, and I knew that, but I’d forgotten her sharp wit, always ready to tease, sometimes a tiny bit too hard (something I can also be prone to doing).

I do, I promise, have a point in telling you this.

Leave something behind.

Oh, god, Rachael, you had to go to the macabre, didn’t you?

Yes, I did.

This is one of the biggest gifts I will ever, ever receive. Last night, on the solstice (which she always loved and honored), I read on the porch until the light faded from the sky and the frogs in the creek became deafening.

I sat with my mother and heard her for the first time since she died almost exactly nine years ago.

I was with her. I was much too happy to be sad.

If you have a writing bone in your body, do this: Leave something behind. Write in a journal, even if it’s only every once in a while. Don’t write about the Things You Got Done; no one cares about a list. Write about how they made you feel. Be honest. I’m only 55 pages in to my mother’s pages, and I’m hoping desperately she says something agonizing about me (she hasn’t yet). Oh, to hear her despair of me ever doing anything with my life (I showed very little promise for a very long time).

I’m only a quarter of the way through, and I’m going to try to take my time with them. Then I’m going to transcribe them so I can share them with family (her handwriting is easy for me to read and very hard for most people including other family members).

I just can’t believe I’d never found them before. I’d looked.

I have a very strong feeling she saved them for me, for now. For the solstice of the year that I would be strong enough to have nothing but joy in my heart as I read. She sent me the dream. (I KNOW, it’s woo-woo, yes, but the only truly prophetic dreams I’ve ever had were about her – twice I dreamed her various cancers before they were diagnosed. And there were more dreams I won’t get into here. It runs in our family – her mother had had the same talent).

Leave something behind for the ones who love you so they can truly commune with you later, so they can hear your specific and wonderful voice. Tell them what you think. Be you. Be true. Be broken and fallible and honest and you.

You’re amazing. I know you’re (probably) not planning on leaving the earth anytime soon, but even if you are, first: you are loved, and second: there’s still time.

Put your heart in a bottle and throw it in the ocean of time. Someone you love wants to find you someday. I promise.

Thanks for reading.

love,

Rachael

 

PS – On a really fun business note, The Darling Songbirds just released in audio, and it’s read by the amazing Xe Sands, who I’ve been a fan of for years. I can’t believe she’s my narrator! The other two in the series will be out this summer.

Links: Amazon | iTunes | Audible

Sailing, On and Off the Page

I’ve mentioned before my penchant for doing things that scare me.

It’s really not ideal. What it means is that I get a wild hair to do something new, something that deep down I desperately want to do and at the same time wish I would never have to face. It leads to some misery and upset stomach and me muttering wildly at myself in the car, “What am I doing? WHY am I doing this? I hate this idea so much! I want to go home!”

Then I do the scary thing and most of the time, I love it (not always, truly–I will regret my one day of Krav Maga for the rest of my life).

I don’t always do things quickly (this is more surprising to me than anyone else). I got a yen to learn to sail 5 years ago, as proven in this post. I planned to learn to sail during my fortieth year, and now I’m forty-four, and I only learned this last weekend.

I grew up in and around boats. We were always near the water. Dad always had small sailboats, the kind you could strap to the roof of a car. I distinctly remember one made of styrofoam which I would pick away at with my fingers, unable to resist the lure of the snap-crunch of the foam crumbling away. I also distinctly remember the time that boat sank off the Marin coast. Mom and my sisters watched as three burly youths barreled into the water to save him—all four came in laughing, dragging pieces of the boat with them. My poor water-phobic mother was not pleased. I tried not to think about all the styrofoam I’d pulled off.

But even though I spent time in his hand-hewn boats (bailing, or watching for rocks), I never caught the bug. I was content to sit on the side of the bigger sailboats I’ve been on as an adult. I steered a sailboat under the Golden Gate Bridge once because the captain dared me to (and it was cool, I’ll admit that). But apart from that mild yearning, I ignored the pull to the water.

This last trip to Venice cemented this in me: I am happy when on the water. My sister Bethany (who is on her trip, by the way!) is happy driving. I just want to be bobbing up and down. My brain loves the feeling.

This past weekend, I spent the weekend on the water at Lake Merritt in Oakland, a great place to learn to sail because the winds are strong and capricious. I took a cheap 3-day class through Oakland Parks and Rec and while I’m only 2 days into it, I’ve finally caught the bug, my father will be happy to know.

First we learned in a classroom setting. Nothing (not one thing) made sense to me. I was concerned about the outhaul and the boomvang and cunningham because if a boat was outfitted with such important yet silly-sounding things, how could I be trusted to remember to install/tighten/hitch them properly? My hands, so clever with string and yarn, rebelled at learning to make a bowline (pronounced BOW-lun because these people don’t talk right. Leeward is pronounced loo-erd. I’m capsizing is pronounced holy-fucking-shit-help).

But then we got out on the 8-foot one-person El Toros. We rigged them and sailed on the lake on a long line so that when we got into trouble, the instructor could tow us back. I was NOT the first person to capsize.

The second day, yesterday, we rigged our 14-foot Catalinas. They seemed huge compared to the El Toros, but the thing was: everything was the same.

The mainsail worked the same way.

The tiller worked the same way.

The principles were all the same.

 

I realized I’d learned the basics of sailing in a day and a half, and this was brought home to me when I saw a Moana GIF—I understood what she was doing on the boat.

 

Boats, with all their lines and rigging and flappety-flaps and eccentric wobbles, had always been mysterious to me.

But after breaking it into bite-sized, manageable pieces of knowledge, I get how it works.

I’m by no means good at it. In winds of 30mph (28 knots, officially small-craft advisory weather), I sailed the boat into a place I couldn’t come back from and the instructor had to tow me out (tow of shame). I fell off the boat leaping for the dock, catching myself on the edge of the dock with a yoga-like barrel roll that kept me out of the water but has me covered in livid purple bruises today. I still don’t have any idea what to do when I’m stuck in irons (it’s called patience, and I’m not sure where to buy more of that).

I know the basics, though. And those don’t change. Practice and lessons and more practice will help me become better and more accomplished and less anxious. But I know the how and the why and I know I can do the thing to make the boat fly (it is flying, with lift and drag and all – I had no idea!).

It’s the same with writing.

It’s terrifying. You want to do it, but you’re afraid you’ll capsize, or get lost, or hurt yourself.

But you keep getting drawn back to it.

Your whole life, you’ve been drawn to blank notebooks and new pens, looking for the way in.

Here’s the thing: You already have the way in.

  • In sailing, you steer with a rudder while you manipulate the shape of the mainsail. Those are the basics of sailing.
  • In knitting, you knit and you purl. Those are the basics for garments.
  • In writing, you think of words and set them on paper/screen. Those are the basics for books.

You think of words.

You set them down.

That’s it.

Sure, that’s easy. And yes, it’s also incredible complicated and so much more than that. But you, my friend, have cracked the basic code. SO many people look at writers longingly and say, “I have a story. I wish I could do that.”

It comes down to this: It’s simple. It’s not rocket science. Boats sail by catching wind. Words are written one at a time, as the author thinks of them.

That’s all.

It takes bravery, though, I know that.

And you have that.

Onward!

 

What sailing and writing have in common - The basics seem hard, but in reality, they're not! More at the blog, rachaelherron.com

Help My Sister Investigate Weird America

 

More than a dozen years ago, I was in New York City for the first time with my little sister Bethany, who was on a Big Grand Adventure. She’d saved up money after college, and instead of buying a Eurail pass like the other kids were doing, she bought an old Nissan pickup and got on the road to see America.

She drove through 47 states, staying mostly on the backroads, keeping off interstates. She got lost every day, intentionally. She drove to see roadside America—she stalked the great dinosaurs made from tin cans, and the Museum of Porridge (I made that one up, but I bet it exists somewhere out there, probably in North Dakota, where all sorts of weird and awesome things are said to reside).

Bethany would drive until she ran out of money and then she’d get a job (waitressing, hotel front desking, selling stuffed animals in the Great Mall of America which sounds like hell) until she’d made enough money to get herself and her truck back on the road.

She slept in the back of the pickup in Walmart parking lots (they let you do that, did you know that? That’s why all those RVs are parked in Walmart lots overnight!) and truck stops or sometimes out in the woods on side roads (my heart beats faster just thinking of all the times she wasn’t killed by a guy with a hook for a hand).

She saw the country. She literally met the country, taking more than a year to do it.

I blogged about her trip, and I flew east to NYC meet her for a little bit of it (okay, and to go to Maryland Sheep & Wool).

Map in hand. God, I hated that haircut.

While we were in NYC, out of the blue, I got an email from someone I didn’t know. The woman introduced herself as M.J.

“I read your blog. I’m a seventh-generation Nantucketer (my husband is 13th generation), and if you could get to the island, we’d love to put you up.”

I read it to Bethany with a laugh in my voice. As if we’d go stay with someone who seemed to be unsearchable on Google.

“Let’s do it,” she said.

“But…”

“Is she a knitter?”

“Well, yeah. She says she is.”

“So she won’t kill us. Let’s go.”

We went. We took the ferry, leaving Bethany’s trusty-sidekick pickup in a parking garage. We made our way to the cafe where M.J. said she’d meet us. It was off-season, so the streets were empty. It seemed like we were the only tourists in town. I remember the coffee was good, but my stomach churned.

Then M.J. darted into the cafe. She was radiant, all smiles and hugs. “I’m so glad you’re here. I got caught in a meeting, and I have to get back to work. Come, drive me back and then you can have the car for the afternoon. I’ll tell you where to explore. My husband will pick me up—here’s our address—” she pressed a slip of paper in my hand “—just be at the house by six. Fresh scallops tonight!”

Astonished, we drove her to her workplace and dropped her off.

She grinned. “Have fun! See you later!” She disappeared into the building.

We sat there inside her car. Stunned.

Then, because we could, we drove around the island. Because we were in M.J.’s car, and because everyone knows everyone on Nantucket, we got the one-finger-lifted-from-the-wheel country wave every time we saw another vehicle, which wasn’t often. We were thrilled. We explored. We got a little lost, in the good way.

We took a nap on the beach.

We made faces at the camera (okay, she did).

Bethany on a Nantucket swing

This woman, who didn’t know us except online, trusted us. With her car, and with her island.

We showed up at six at the house. M.J. was in the kitchen, scallops simmering on the stove. Her husband Steve bounded in, and said, “Sunset! Want to go to the beach?”

M.J. whooped and took off her apron. “To the jeep!”

We 4×4’d on the beach, racing through the sand, the wind in our hair, as the sun set but not over the water because we were on the eastern side of the island. (As a west coast girl, this blew my mind.)

Windblown Bethany

We went back and ate dinner. I’ve always hated scallops, rubbery bits of plastic and grit. But M.J.’s scallops? Those scallops were some of the best things I’ve ever eaten, bar none. I still dream about the taste of them, creamy and rich and melty.

After dinner we went into the living room. M.J., Bethany and I knitted, and we all watched Eddie Izzard (including their kid Jake, who was as delightful as they were). We roared with laughter.

Then M.J. put us in our beds. She tucked us up, making sure we were comfy under the eaves of the old house.

We’re still friends to this day.

From this, I learned that Bethany knows how to navigate the world in a way I’m privileged to witness. I’m proud to be her sister.

And while I don’t usually shill anything to this mailing list except books, my own and those I love by other authors, I did want to tell you that she’s doing it again.

She’s going back into weird America to chronicle not only the roadside art and how it changes, but to get a read on how we, as a country, have changed. She’s got interviews lined up with the most fascinating people. She’s going to take the temperature of America and see how it’s feeling, in this day and age of political divide. She’s going to see if we’re still connected.

She’s writing a book about it!

But she needs gas money for the sabbatical she’s taking from work to make this go. Her Kickstarter is half-funded but she won’t be able to go until it’s fully funded, with only 8 days to go!

Go watch her video? CLICK HERE.

Give her a little love? Every single tiny bit helps, I can assure you (and then you’ll get the book when it’s done! She’s a wonderful writer, which you can sample at her site if you’d like). If you can’t spare the change, she’d appreciate whatever you’ve got, even if that’s a simple bed (she’s in a small, old station wagon this time, not the more spacious truck) or a hot shower if she comes through your town (see her map).

Thanks, friends, for considering and for being awesome.

xo, Rachael

PS – if you give her a bed, please don’t be a serial killer with a hook for a hand. If you do have a hook for a hand and use it instead for crocheting or other delightful activities, she’d love to meet you. Click here to go to her Kickstarter.