Quick update on Mama

This photo was not taken at my mother's house, but it could have been.* The dry-and-clean people got to her house last night (Saturday) and set up nine blowers to start drying everything out. She had trouble getting to sleep with all the noise, but once she did,  she slept fine. 

When I called her today, she didn't realize the ringing noise she heard was the phone, because the fans are so loud and have been running so long. At any rate, the process has begun and she is okay. She told me she doesn't need me (or any of the other family members who have generously offered) to come down right now. I was already scheduled to visit in two weeks. It will be interesting to see what shape the house is in by then.

She never lost electrical power, which was a blessing. Besides the floors getting ruined by water, it sounds like the only other loss was an empty and battered storage shed in her back yard. It was on the property line with a neighbor, who had a shed of his own right up against hers. Both sheds washed away in the storm, into a creek bed at the back of the properties. There was nothing in my mother's shed, which she thinks is the reason that it washed away. She had not been able to find out anything from the neighbors about what they may have lost.

*The photo was taken at a house in Tyler, about nine miles from my mother.

Conundrum

W.F. has added another voice to the chorus advocating for the publication of memoirs. I will take this, as they say, under advisement.

I am reminded of a novice who pointed out to me that when he asked permission to do something of an ambiguous nature, I usually said, "We can talk about that."

"Your point being ...?"

"That always means you are going to say no"

"No, it means we can talk about it. When we do, however, I admit that the odds are heavily on the side of me saying no. And you know why."

He did.

My own novice master, a man I still admire deeply and from whom I learned a great deal, would immediately say no to requests from novices and students. The other novices and/or students started getting me to do the asking, claiming that he always said yes to me. He didn't; he always said no. But I discovered that if I waited a day or two and came back with the same request, he often agreed to it. Whether he needed the time to think it over or what, I have no idea.

To borrow a few lines from the wearisome Wacky in WhoVille's opening pages, 

As I glance back at what I have said so far, I realize that I seem to have fallen into the Bertie Wooster-esque trap of beginning at the wrong place and confusing the potential reader. Let me backtrack, start at the beginning, as someone wisely suggested, go until I come to the end and then stop.

If I can.

 The version of my autobiography/memoirs that I wrote over the course of November 2013 exists now in a version of some 319 pages, formatted for a volume the size of the WhoVille books. Wicca in WhoVille is 396 pages, far and away the wordiest of my fiction. Obviously I could make major cuts to the memoirs and still have a book.

I am giving this serious consideration. My problem is that at two or three places in my story, events transpire -- you know, as they say in those dreadful pharmaceutical commercials, "Events, sometimes fatal, have happened." -- that I think are too important for the story to omit entirely but that I cannot  see my way to telling in any detail. And yes, sometimes this involves a level of confidentiality that is recognized generally even in civil law.

I feel like the characters in these cartoons:

Telling little or nothing might make it even worse.  The reader, left to wander in the dark, might assume something bad happened when it was more in the nature of a miracle. Or vice versa.

What to do? What to do?

Continue taking it under advisement. The practical thing I am doing is going back and editing (yet again!!!) those parts of what I have written that create no such conflict. Perhaps along the way, a happy solution to my problem will happen.