The Scariest Night of the Year by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

 https://books2read.com/The-Art-of-Growing-Older

I am a writer who lives in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. I write fiction, non-fiction, and some poetry all set in Canada. My published fiction covers mystery, holiday romance, and Canadian historical novels for adults and young adults. My published non-fiction covers travel writing and a memoir. In my memoir, The Art of Growing Older, I talk about aging with attitude and how is it possible to live a good long life.

I don't send out my poetry to many magazines so have only had one poem published. The following is an example of my Hallowe'en poetry set in Edmonton.

It is Hallowe’en evening

The scariest night of the year.

My friends and I are trick or treating

When suddenly we hear.

 

A screech and a shriek

And out of the sky

A witch on a broom dives

At my friends and I.

 

We duck and we scatter

Consumed with great fear

For it is Hallowe’en evening

The scariest night of the year.

 

“Don’t be afraid” she cackles.

“I’ve only come to see

If you want to go flying

On my broom with me.”

 

We stare at the witch

Not sure what to do

Her hat is all black

And her dress is, too.

 

Her nose is hooked down

With a wart on the tip

But there’s a gleam in her eyes

And a smile on her lips.

 

“Don’t be afraid,” she says

When we hesitate

“My name is Kathy

And I don’t have time to wait.”

 

We look at each other

Then without any frowns

We nod and we grin

And jump up and down.

 

“How will we fit?”

I ask skeptically

For the broom is too short

To hold us all perfectly.

 

“Just hop aboard,” she crows.

“And you will see.

Climb one at a time.

Right up behind me.”

 

We all leap on easily

There is plenty of room

For the handle grows longer.

It is a magical broom.

 

When we are all settled

She gives a laugh and a hoot

And up into the sky

All of us swoop.

 

We zig through the buildings

Of the lighted downtown

We zoom up the Whitemud

And then back on down.

 

We stop at Fort Edmonton Park

An historic place so vast

The board sidewalks, the steam train

The covered wagons of the past.

 

There is a Ferris wheel

And a merry-go-round

With lots of horses

Going up and down.

 

Kathy calls out with delight

“On to West Edmonton Mall.”

And with cheers and shouts

We whizz through the halls.

 

The stores are all decorated

The children dressed in creepy gear

For it is Hallowe’en evening

The scariest night of the year.

 

We streak through the night

Down to the Edmonton zoo

To see the zebras and lemurs

And the pelicans, too.

 

But instead of the tigers

The camels and gibbons.

There are zombies and ghouls

And skeletons and goblins

 

They stretch and they reach

They lunge and they grasp

Trying to catch the broom

While my friends and I gasp.

 

But Kathy the Witch

Laughs with glee

As we dodge and we dart

And get ready to flee.

 

“Come back, come back,”

One of the ghouls bellows.

“Yes,” pleads a skeleton.

“We are really nice fellows.”

 

Kathy turns the broom

As we cringe in fear.

For it is Hallowe’en evening

The scariest night of the year.

 

“Ah, ha,” yells the goblin

And as we fly by

He scrambles to reach us

But Kathy stays too high.

 

“Nice try,” she chortles

As she waves goodbye

We fly away from the zoo

And we all give a sigh.

 

“Where are we going now?”

I ask, looking around.

Then I see we are arriving

At our favourite playground.

 

My friends and I laugh

As we dip and we glide

Through the net climbers

And go backwards up the slide.

 

We loop de loop

Holding on tight

Zagging through the swings

As we enjoy the night.

 

“On to your school,” Kathy calls

And we head on our way.

Flying to the building

Where we spend our days.

 

The doors swing open

Letting us in

We swoop down the hallway

Making a din.

 

The custodian jumps sideways

As we draw near

For it is Hallowe’en evening

The scariest night of the year.

 

The flight finally ends

Kathy the Witch slows her broom

We all climb off easily

For there is plenty of room.

 

“Good night, my dear children.

It sure has been fun.

But I have to go now

It’s time that I run.”

 

“Thank you,” we call

As she flies out of sight.

We look at each other.

Wow, what a flight!

 

But our bags are empty

So to a house we scurry

Yelling trick or treat

We have to hurry.

 

Someone opens the door

Their face full of fear

For it is Hallowe’en evening

The scariest night of the year. 

Gardens in Bloom by Nancy M Bell

 

What is it about a garden? Sometimes it's like hockey and farming - There's always next year- but then sometimes it all comes together so wonderfully. Gardening and getting dirt under my fingernails goes back to when I was a kid and my grandfather would spend hours in the huge garden behind our house. I tagged along behind him and by osmosis learned so much with him having to speak a word. 

To this day I think of Grampa when I have my hands full of earth or my arms full of the autumn harvest. Just last night I spent an hour or so with my head and arms buried in a red current bushes and came home with stained hands, more than a few mosquito bites and an ice cream pail full of juicy currents. Today's job it to turn those currents into jelly.

Fruit and vegetables are always a joy but my real passion is flowers. Annuals, perennials, it's all good. Although I do have to say I have a secret love of the perennials, they show up every year like old friends come to stay for the summer. While I'm pulling out the never ending weeds I talk to the plants and I do believe it does make for more blooms and vigorous foliage. My husband thinks I'm just a bit wacky. Okay, more than a bit, but hey...life is too short to worry about what others think. Even one's husband LOL. 

This is my second spring and summer in the new house and it is taking a bit to get the gardens looking the way I would like, but one step at a time. It is coming along and there is a quiet satisfaction in starting from scratch again and then seeing the yard bloom with colour and hear the soft hum of bees in the hollyhocks and  other flowers.

I'm starting work on a new book set in an abandoned restaurant in my small town. It's going to be a time travel/romance/kinda historical. How's that for a confused genre? However, I do believe it will be fun to write. The working title it Jessie's Cafe and yes there really was a Jessie way back in the day. Stay tuned for more info as the work progresses.

I thought I would share some garden pictures to close. Happy gardening. Stay well, stay happy. Until next month...

Lavatera

Sweet Peas

Sweet William

Potato blossoms 

Coming October 1, 2023 - The Folklorist by Eileen O'Finlan

 

Click here for purchase information

I am excited to announce that my next historical novel, The Folklorist, will be released on October 1, 2023, by BWL Publishing just in time for Halloween! Charlotte Lajoie, a young professional folklorist, struggling to build her career in 1973, is given the 1839 diary of her ancestor Jerusha Kendall. Reading the diary leads her to believe that Jerusha and her family were involved in what would come to be known as the New England Vampire Panic. And it seems that at least one of Charlotte's ancestors is still angry about it. 

Jerusha Kendall was only nine years old in 1832 when something awful happened in her family, but she has no idea what. She has grown up knowing that not only her family, but the entire village of Birch Falls, Vermont is keeping it a secret from her. By 1839, when she begins keeping a diary, she's determined to learn what happened that caused her mother to stop speaking to her dearest friend, isolate Jerusha from all but her own family, and withdraw from their close-knit community.

As Charlotte studies Jerusha's diary, she starts to believe that she knows what happened even if Jerusha never figured it out. Meanwhile, Charlotte has her hands full trying to juggle work for an insecure, infuriatingly sexist boss at the New England Folklife Museum, decide on the way forward in her own career, and find a way to bring peace to an aggrieved ghost.

If you're interested in finding out what folklore, ghosts, and vampires have in common, check out The Folklorist in October.

The Things We No Longer Do by Nancy M Bell

 

To learn more about Nancy's books please click on the cover.

I was contemplating the wintry weather outside my window while snuggled under a blanket and somehow started to think about how things have changed. There are so many things that as a society we don't do anymore. These changes have happened in my own lifetime. But when you think about how much has changed in just the last hundred years, it is mind boggling.

In the 1920's, only the rich had cars, horses still pulled plows and wagons. Tractors and farm equipment was starting to evolve, but when compared to the giant machines that can now plow, manage and harvest millions of acres complete with air conditioned cabs, wifi and satalite radio it is hard to comprehend how things have changed so much in so short a time.  

In just the average household, washing machines and dryers spin and whirl on their own. I remember using a wringer washer to wash cloth diapers when my kids were young in the 1980's, I still hang my laundry out on the line in the warm weather, but also remember bringing in frozen clothes off the line in my younger days. Central heat is a wonder in our cold Canadian winters, I love the smell of a wood stove but the chore of keeping it stoked and minded can be overwhelming when it is the only heat source. 

Even our clothing has changed. There are not many people who make their own anymore. I used to work for a company called Reader Mail. They were a mail order company dealing solely in dress and embroidery patterns. A huge warehouse lined with banks of shelves filled with patterns. The centre part held tables for sorting the envelopes which were then put on trolley and wheeled between the shelves while we picked the correct patterns that were ordered. Another part was taken up by the desks of the women who opened the mail, and in those days women still sent money including coin in the envelopes. Labels were stuck on the aforementioned envelopes by two girls using an antiquated machine and if you had long hair you had to be careful it didn't get caught in the mechanism that drove the glue wheel. The company went out of business in the 1990's as the demand for dress and embroidery patterns dried up. 

Now we buy items made in far away countries by underpaid, often underage workers. The world is much smaller now with the advent of the world wide web as we used to call it in the early days. Now internet or wifi is used. Now we have 5G speed, but how many of us remember the squeal of the dial up connections? It was not so long ago. Makes a person wonder where we are headed as a society and a species.

Anyway, enough of that. Just food for thought. 

Wishing everyone Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Solstice, Happy/Merry whatever holiday you celebrate at this time of year.

Until next month, stay well, stay happy    

Libraries at Christmas

 

Find my BWL page here!

Here in Bellows Falls, Vermont, we're getting ready for our annual Holiday Party, the first one in a couple of years. We are so excited. Some local musicians are going to come and play old-time music. My fellow Friend of the Library Leslie and I will be leading a Christmas music sing along. We'll have treats and a pick your own present raffle. 

Lots of great choices!

My son-in-law Teddy make cute tags for the raffle gifts

My donation is two of my BWL YA novels and a bead ornament made by a local Abenaki craftsperson.

Do you have a favorite library story?

I grew up in a house without books, so the library was where the stories lived. I couldn't wait to get my library card. To achieve this passport to wonder, I had to be able to write my full name. I had a long last name, and like many young children, I was slightly dyslectic. I practiced and practiced, but as the librarian watched, I had a crisis in confidence over which direction the "b" in Charbonneau went. I hesitated. This prim, kind lady gave me a hand signal that opened up my world! Big thanks to her.

Happy Season of Light from Patience and Fortitude welcming all to the NYC Public Library!

Santa's Reindeer by J. S. Marlo

 

Wounded Hearts

"Love & Sacrifice #2"

is now available  

click here 

 

 

  

J. S. Marlo's BWL Books

‘Male reindeers lose their antlers in winter and females don’t, so Santa’s sleigh is actually pulled by a team of women…’

When I saw that quote on Facebook, it caught my attention. First, reindeer, like deer, don’t have an “s” in their plural forms. Second, it struck me as odd that the females didn’t lose their antlers, so I did some research.

Female reindeer can grow antlers, making them unique in the deer world. However, not all females have antlers since growing them costs lots of energy. In habitats where food is scarce or of poor quality, antlerless females dominate.

The female reindeer use their antlers to dig through the snow in search of food and to defend themselves. Those with the largest antlers tend to be socially dominant and in the best overall physical condition, but they still shed their antlers every year. Unlike male reindeer who lose them late autumn after the rut, female reindeer retain their antlers until spring because access to food is critical during their winter pregnancy.

Does that mean female reindeer are pulling Santa’s sleigh?  Not necessarily. Most of the reindeer used to pull sleds are castrated males because they are easier to handle than “full” males. Castrated reindeer have antler cycles similar to those of the females, only losing them in the spring.

Conclusion: Santa’s reindeer are either female or castrated male.

101100508 © Publicdomainphotos | Dreamstime.com

Other interesting facts:

– There are more than 15 subspecies of reindeer, some of which are extinct. 

– Reindeer are domesticated or semi-domesticated caribou.

– They live primarily in the Arctic, where winter is drastically colder and darker than summer.

– Their hooves are soft during warmer months, but in winter, they become hard and sharp for breaking through the ice to forage vegetation.

– To adapt to seasonal changes in light levels, the part of their eye behind the iris changes color from gold in the summer to blue in the winter.

– They travel up to 3,000 miles and swim long distances.

– They have two layers of hair to keep warm: a dense woolly undercoat, and a top layer of hollow air-filled hairs which float. Their hair have been used to fill life jackets.

– The Finnish Forest Reindeer is one of the rarest subspecies of Reindeer.

In my 2021 Christmas mystery The Red Quilt, Grandpa Eli is marooned on a potato farm with his five-year-old granddaughter. On Christmas Eve, Eli ventures outside to draw reindeer hoof prints in the snow. Here’s an excerpt:

The two forward toes made prints resembling curly teardrops with the tip pointing ahead, toward the carrot underneath the branch. He added a dot behind each teardrop design to account for the two back toes.

A vehicle turning into Lana’s driveway diverted his attention from the second print he was drawing. When blue and red lights began to flash, Eli dropped the carrot and the branch, and raised his hands as he straightened to his full height beside the bush.

The door of the patrol car opened and a silhouette stood behind it. “Mr. Sterling?”

“Yes.” The female voice jogged his memory. “Fancy meeting you here tonight, Constable Davidson. May I lower my arms?”

“Yes, please. I didn’t mean to scare you.” The lights stopped flashing, but the door remained opened as she walked toward him. “The lights were on so I thought you might be up, but then I saw someone hunched by the bush, so I overreacted.”

“I’d rather you overreact than ignore a suspicious guy making reindeer hoof prints in the snow in the wee hours of the morning,” he teased.

A smile enlivened her face as she shone the beam of her flashlight in the snow. “It’s small for a reindeer, but otherwise, it’s pretty accurate.”

Stumped by the remark, he squatted the snow. “What do you mean by small? Do you masquerade as a biologist in your spare time?”

Her laughter rose in the crisp air. “No, but I have an older sister who’s a conservation officer in the north. She spent years following the caribou herd’s migration. I know more about caribou than I ever wanted to know. For accuracy’s sake, you want them to be about four inches long.”

Click here to buy The Red Quilt, and give it to someone you love for Christmas.

Happy Holiday 2022!

J. S.

 

 

J. S. Marlo's Website

 

The Beauty of Book Covers by Eileen O'Finlan

                    

                        Click here for purchase information     Click here to visit Eileen O'Finlan's webiste

As I write this blog post, it is less than a week since our celebration of Thanksgiving here in the U.S. That holiday always brings with it a time for reflection on the people and things for which we are thankful.

As I thought about my own debts of gratitude, I could not help but include the extraordinary art director who creates the amazing covers for BWL's books, Michelle Lee. Not only do I love the covers Michelle has created for me, I have yet to see a single BWL book that doesn't have an outstanding cover. Click here to check them out for yourself.

Whether it's rational or not, book covers are widely considered to be the most important factor, or at least the first one, in whether or not a reader decides to consider a book. That makes covers extremely important.

One of the most exciting moments for an author with a new book about to be released is his or her first look at the cover. So when I knew the cover for my next release, All the Furs and Feathers Book 1 in the Cat Tales series was on the way I could hardly contain myself as I waited to see what Michelle would create. Just as I expected, I was not disappointed. The cover is fantastic!

I am not quite ready to do a complete cover reveal yet. That will come when the pre-order is available and I have it to link the cover to. But meanwhile, here is a sneak peek at what everyone will see when All the Furs and Feathers is released on February 1, 2023.

Mound Builders--New Discoveries, New Speculations

 

I am originally from south west Ohio, close to the big river which gave the State it's name. One of my happiest childhood memories is going on picnics to the many mounds built by that lost -- and until fairly recently -- mysterious, ancient people. I consider those early visits to the little museums that  sprung up in their vicinity, a major inspiration for my love of history.

Fly Away Snow Goose

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When I was small, we often visited Fort Ancient and the justly famous Serpent Mound, going there for family picnics. I remember one visit to Fort Ancient when I was disappointed not to see the skeletons that had been there before. My father - or perhaps my grandfather - read all the careful labelling to me, as the bones fascinated me. Together, we studied the worn teeth, the signs of arthrithis and injuries on the bones, caused, my elders explained, by hard work and chewing cornmeal full of stone ground grit. 

Serpent Mound

I'd spent a lot of time with these skeletons, lost in imagining what their lives had been like, so hard and so short. Most had died in the thirties, and I pictured them hauling the materials from which the mound had been so carefully constructed, or growing corn and hunting deer in the valley below. With the help of museum imagery, I imagined mothers in their bark houses, grinding corn, or tending to babies, and children learning from their elders and sometimes playing too. 

A docent explained that it would have taken 19 generations of workers to create that great "fort." Even in the fifties, it was shown in the dioramas that this massive construction was not a simple heap of earth, but had been constructed carefully, to some unknown plan, and begun with a strong, stable foundation of stone and timber. My father, an engineer, remarked on the skill involved and on how much earth had been moved by a people without draft animals, all of it carried in baskets on their backs, and steadied by a tump line wrapped around the forehead. 

The bones were gone, though, and I was disappointed. My family reminded me that the skeletons belonged to someone's family, and that it had been decided, after Indigenous complaints, to hide them away. "You wouldn't want your family dug up and displayed in a museum, would you?" (I don't know if these bones were re-buried as they often are today, but, back then, probably not.) Although I accepted this, the museum somehow seemed empty to me, as if people I had come to know were absent.

At that time, Mound Builders were considered a "mystery." Even the local Tribes - Miami and Seneca -had had no stories to tell curious settlers about who had built these mounds or what their fate had been. Over time, I learned that these ancient people built their mounds, not just in Ohio and Indiana, but all over the Mississippi drainage basin, from Louisiana to Georgia. Some are as far north as Canada! We are now learning that these mounds were great ceremonial centers, many used only seasonally, as centers for trading and religious festivals in honor of the Sun, Moon, and the Circle of the Year. In some places, actual cities formed in places like Cahokia, near St. Louis, Mo. and Poverty Point in Mississippi. These contained thousands of inhabitants, their numbers rivaling and often exceeding the size of the greatest European cities in existence at the same time. 

About twenty years ago, scientists began to see the mounds in new ways. As time had progressed, and ever more ancient sites were explored, it became apparent just how many people had been in the Americas before the Spanish arrived. The extent of the deaths caused by European "Guns, Germs & Steel,"* was at first estimated at a quarter of the native population, then at fifty percent, and now, the latest studies show that almost 95% of the original population of the Americas may have died!

Hernando DeSoto's two year travels searching for gold, spanned 1540-1542. He traveled from Florida's west coast through today's Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and back over the Appalachians again into North Georgia, then on to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. He left a record of all the numerous cities he saw, and of all the battles he fought along the way, as the Indians had swiftly learned to fear and resist him. The worst consequence of his visit was to spread smallpox and all the other European diseases, to which the Indians had no resistence, all along the way. 

By the 1600's, when English and French settlers began to enter these same areas, they found these once bustling cities standing empty.  The tribes who remained claimed to know nothing about the mounds, nor about those built them. Perhaps this was a kind of social amnesia after what had been, after all, a cultural apocalypse. Perhaps it was simply a refusal to share anything sacred with these invaders, who stole, murdered and enslaved whereever they went.

Since the early 2000's, more research has been conducted at various mound sites, including my childhood happy places, Fort Ancient and The Serpent Mound. Some of this research has been accepted by mainstream archeology, though much is still under review.  (As history teaches, new theories and discoveries often find difficulty in being accepted by the establishment.) Another new thread has been scientists discovering that the "old tales" that are still told by the few remaining Shamen to be found among modern American tribes are surprisingly synchronous with the stories and "myths" connected to European standing stones and mounds. It has begun to appear that ancient people alike, all over the world, carefully watched the skies for the same stars and the same seasonal changes.  

Now, Fort Ancient has many gaps in what have been for all these years assumed to be walls, but the new field of archeoastronomy has begun to demonstrate that these openings were set where they are in order to observe the rising and setting of certain stars and star groups, ones associated with death rituals and the safe passage of the soul into the Other World. At the Serpent Mound, these same sightlines are set at the apex of each curve the great snake, himself a symbol of the underworld. 

Astonishingly similar to many ancient Egyptian beliefs, these same stars guide the soul into the land of the ancestors, using the Milky Way and the same stars which were so important to the Egyptians, such as Sirius and Deneb. A glowing circle where the cloudy shine of another galaxy is visible to the naked eye, was, to those ancestral people, the goal of each and every traveling soul.  

Juliet Waldron

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Indian Mounds of the Middle Ohio Valley, A guide to the Mounds and Earthworks of the Adena, Hopewell, Cole, & Fort Ancient People, Published 2002, by Susan Woodward and Jerry N. McDonald

Guns, Germs & Steel, Pulitzer Prize Winner 2002, by Jared Diamond

https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies-ebook/dp/B06X1CT33R/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2I4CR3L33JWN9&keywords=jared+diamond+books&qid=1669681681&sprefix=Jared+Diamond%2Caps%2C76&sr=8-1

And for some convincing speculation:

The Path of Souls, Gregory Little 

https://www.amazon.com/Path-Souls-American-Skeletons-Smithsonian/dp/0965539253/ref=asc_df_0965539253/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312174369544&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=6480905854475676947&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9006604&hvtargid=pla-567617217296&psc=1