1. As the girls from the 80s pop music group the Groovy Chicks, I fronted as the actual lead singer, and Sheri was not only a member of the backup (and the only one who could still actually fit into her authentic, vintage 80s clothes) but also served as the silent MC for an event, dressed in nothing but a pair of men’s long underwear and an orange tutu ballerina costume whilst whirling about to the “Fractured Fairy Tales” theme music.
2. Sheri taught me the magic of rubber cement where working with photos and art projects is concerned—long, long, long before scrapbooking was the concept it is now.
3. Together Sheri and I took our children out into the bay in Birch Bay, Washington, waded up to our bosoms in the water, and collected approximately 300 expired (meaning dead) sand dollars. Painstakingly, we soaked and cleaned them in bleach, dried them in the sun, divvied them up, and then wondered what in the world we were going to do with them.
4. Any kind of photographic devise (like a camera or photo booth) is always made more adventurous with Sheri in the mix. Props are also her forte. Give her one of those paper toilet seat covers, a cutout of Legolas in Barnes & Noble, or a giant rocking chair, and look out!
5. With Sheri, I’ve seen what happens when she yells, “Look at that!” while standing in a field of tulips surrounded by a busload of camera-toting tourists from Japan.
6. We have skipped through acres of blooming daffodils with our arms wide-spread while singing at the top of our lungs. And on that same adventure, we discovered that salmon jerky is disgusting, and therefore girls on girl trips should always bring their own snacks to eat while attending the Tulip Festival because otherwise salmon jerky is the only thing to be found at roadside stands!
7. With Sheri I have attended Neil Diamond concerts that, because of her company, were epic! At one such event, after we stood in our seats, arms raised and swaying while joining Neil in a chorus of “Sweet Caroline,” we walked back to our hotel in the Portland, Oregon, midnight rain as it drenched our matching Christmas sweaters and soaked us to the skin. Fabulous!
8. Traffic jams are never fun—unless one is traveling with Sheri, as my photograph of Sheri trying to hitchhike a ride from a passing ambulance during that famous traffic jam will prove. During that infamous hour-long traffic jam, Sheri and I gathered bouquets of wild sunflowers midst grass that grew higher than our waists. Ahhhh! Only Sheri can make such a frustrating situation one of the best memories of your life.
9. Then there was the time we went on a betta fish buying spree! Naturally we named them all. One betta in particular, who seemed to have a rather more active elimination system than most, we christened “Poopalotta.” And Poopalotta lived up to his name for years and years until he finally passed on to that great betta bowl in the sky.
Together Sheri and I have taken photos in bed and breakfast bathtubs and photographed old houses, gates, seals, giant rocking chairs, carousels, restaurant food, and fellow passengers on airplane flights. We’ve done the Twelve Days of Christmas for years and years for one another. We’ve held shadow puppet performances on the bathroom floors of restaurants, cracking up fellow bathroom attendees. We’ve had luncheons in Victorian tearooms where we wrapped ourselves in fox and mink furs and took pictures. Long before digital photography, Sheri was using her amazing graphic design talents to “crop and paste” us into photos with Elvis, Sergei Grinkov, and Antonio Banderas.
All this fun and frivolity doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface—nor does it even hint at all that Sheri has taught me, the tears and heartache we’ve helped each other bear, or the trials and tribulations we’ve weathered together. Sheri has been not only my friend but my teacher, guide, and personal healing clown for many, many years.
Thus, to a cherished friend who adores nature and plants and especially rain, I wrote this little novella, Sudden Storms. So you see, the dedications in a book do mean something to the author—or at least to this author they do.
Which leads me to my next topic of random rambling—kissing in the rain! What is it about kissing in the rain that intrigues not only my bosom friend Sheri but seemingly all romantic hearts, huh? I mean, think about it—movies are packed with kissing in the rain. Let’s just take a moment and list a few movies: The Quiet Man (a very famous kissing in the rain scene, and one of my favorites), Spiderman (of course), The Notebook (Hello? Totally famous!), and Australia—to name only a few that come to my mind. Kissing in the rain seems to be a favorite lyric thread for songs too.
So why is everyone (including Sheri) intrigued with rain kissing? Well, my theory is this: rain is refreshing, liberating, and dreamy somehow. Have you ever been caught in an unexpected rainstorm? It sort of throws your emotions and physical senses for a loop. At first, you might be like, “Oh no! I’m going to get soaked!” But then, once you realized you’re going to get soaked and there’s nothing you can do about it, you’re kind of like, “Oh well. There’s nothing I can do, so why not just jump in a puddle or play with some tadpoles?” Do you know what I mean? I think that “oh well” moment is the moment of liberation—the moment where we realize (at least for girls) that our hair is going to be ruined, our mascara is going to run, and, if we’re wearing a white shirt, everyone is going to know what color of bra we’re wearing, so what the heck—we might as well jump in a puddle or kiss a guy we’ve always wanted to! Do you know what I mean? There’s just something liberating about being caught in the rain; something is let loose inside us—care, worry, previous plans.
In truth, rain is a therapeutic thing in so many ways. Think about it—how delicious is it to sit in the house curled up on the sofa, all cuddled in a soft fleece blanket, listening to the rain outside while eating chocolate and reading a good book? It’s wonderful! Now admittedly, having lived in Washington state, too much rain can be somewhat depressing—at least to me. But I’m talking about summer thunderstorms kind of rain—maybe some far off echoing lightning mingled with huge, refreshing raindrops. It just frees the soul somehow, tears away inhibition.
Furthermore, there’s something about the idea of being wet when kissing, right? It’s like—I don’t know—wildly exhilarating or something. So combine exhilaration, refreshment, inhibition, liberation, and the human tendency toward romance, and there you have it! That’s why we all love the idea of kissing in the rain. That’s why we all love to kiss in the rain. Of course, that’s my short “kissing-in-the-rain-for-novices” version. Hmmm. I think I could maybe write a nonfiction book on that subject.
Anyway—onward. Lane. Yep. While sitting there beginning to write Sudden Storms all those years ago, I glanced over my cedar chest (most likely piled with clothes needing to be folded or something) and saw the name Lane. Yep. A Lane cedar chest—that’s what I have.
“What does this have to do with the price of tuna?” you might be thinking. Well, nothing—but Lane is the name I “plugged in” to Sudden Storms at that moment, the original name for the hero. Yes, Paxton Gray was originally Lane Martin. Totally not a name I would normally stick with. But this was back in the day (as I’ve explained before) when I used to plug in any old name and then forget to go back and change it later. So there you have it—Paxton Gray once went by the alias Lane Martin. Crazy, huh?
Just as crazy is that Rivers’s name was originally Tamara! I know, huh? So not me! (Though I like the name and know some great Tamaras.) Jolee Gray was originally Joella Martin, her boyfriend Weston having gone simply by Steve. Sometimes I get a real kick out of my past self because I wanted to change the names right when I’d finished the book. But a then-friend of mine literally threw a tantrum and was so upset that I was going to change the names that I knuckled to peer pressure and didn’t. What a wiener I was back then. And where does that saying come from anyway? When someone is weak and spineless, we call them a wiener. Hmmm. Interesting.
And yet onward still. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but I do believe that this was the first book I wrote that included the subconscious revelation of one of my greatest phobias:
arachnophobia, to be precise. Yes, it’s true. Before poor Cassidy had her morbid spider experience in Shackles of Honor, Rivers and Jolee had theirs in Sudden Storms. Spiders completely wig me out! They don’t wig me out as much as they used to because I’ve worked on being braver—more courageous and self-reliant when it comes to dealing with them. But they still wig me out! For the first thirteen years or so of our married life, it was quite common for Kevin to come home from work and find a quart Mason jar or two (or perhaps a Ball jar, depending on which brand was close at hand during my time of need) sitting upside down in the middle of the kitchen or living room floor. Why? Because I couldn’t squash a spider! They freaked me out so badly that it took every ounce of bravery I could muster just to reach down (usually from my perch on my knees on a kitchen chair) and put a Mason jar over one. I just couldn’t squash them, and I certainly didn’t want them running off to prowl around my house, so I’d just gather every thread of guts I could, and I’d put a Mason jar (or a Ball jar) over them and let Kevin kill them when he got home. Ahhhh! Yuck! Yickee! Goose bumps (the bad kind)! And fear and trembling! I hate spiders! And I especially hated them years ago. (To be intentionally redundant, I’ve worked on handling my arachnophobia over the years so that I’m pretty good at squashing them now—if they aren’t too big, that is.)
So, in case you hadn’t picked up on it already, I hate spiders. I used to have nightmares about them quite often—especially black widows! Which is kind of odd when you think about it, because black widows kind of run in my family. Not the murdering-human-ladies-who-want-money kind you see on made-for-TV movies—just the real kind, the spider kind.
One of my first memories as a child is a little vision of my mom standing on our front porch with a glass quart jar in hand (could’ve been a Mason jar—could’ve been a Ball) catching black widows and popping them into the jar. I’m serious! She’d catch as many as she could in one jar and just set the jar out on the front porch. After a day or two, you’d go out there and there’d only be one black widow left alive in the jar—one big, plump, shiny, red-hourglass-abdomined champion. Ewww! Mom always said she didn’t want them hanging around the porch because they were dangerous, and she didn’t want to be mean and squish them. What? So she left them in the jar and let them duke it out to the death? Oh yeah, that’s humane! She’s so funny sometimes.
My mom was always intrigued with black widow spiders. I think it stemmed from the fact that she is so very scientifically minded—interested in everything. Couple that with the fact she had a teacher in high school who would pick a black widow spider up by the body with his thumb and forefinger to allow his students a closer look at her legs, spinners, hourglass, and other features, and you have black widow spider intrigue at its finest. (As a side note, that crazy teacher never was bitten—at least not in my mom’s experience—and she was always amazed at his bravery.)
While thinking about all this spider stuff, I called my mom today and asked her why she was so intrigued with black widows and why in the world she used to catch them in quart jars.
“I was always intrigued with them, and I think I just caught them for the fun of it, I guess,” she answered matter-of-factly.
“For the fun of it?” I exclaimed.
She laughed and said, “Well, yeah.”
Knowing my mom as I do—knowing her adventurous character and insatiable curiosity about all things in nature—I said, “And you probably liked the risk.”
She laughed again and said, “Yeah. Probably for the risk too.”
She also told me this little story about when she was growing up—and I quote: “One of their (black widows’) favorite places was the old outdoor toilets...down under the seat in the hole. We kids were always afraid to go out there, especially Sharon (her younger sister) and I, and my mom would say, ‘Oh, just go out there and wet on ’em! They’re not gonna bother you.’ But sometimes we’d sneak out behind a weed or something anyway…or out in the barn or behind a tree or something.” Ah! Life in the sticks—you gotta love it! And miss it too.
As for me, I remember our “laundry room” at home. It was actually outside the house in a separate building out in back. Every summer, there were black widows lurking all over in there. (Consequently, I hated doing laundry.) Well, one day, my mom came in from doing laundry. She was reaching over her shoulder to her back and was sort of loosely fisting some fabric at the back of her shirt.
“Come here, Skeeter,” she said all calm and rational-like. (Skeeter is my nickname, of course.)
“Yeah?” I innocently asked as I approached.
“I think a spider dropped down the back of my shirt while I was in the laundry room,” she casually explained.
“What?” I probably screamed.
“I think it’s a black widow. I saw one on the ceiling out there when I went in,” she added.
“What?” I screeched. “Mom!”
Well, sure enough—once my mom and I had managed to unbutton the front of her shirt and remove it from the arm that wasn’t clutching the fabric at her back, she let go of the fabric, and there she was—a big ol’ black widow spider! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh! (I’m all itchy right now just remembering it!)
Black widows are aggressive, you know. They’re not as easy to scare off as other spiders. I remember my dad trying to stomp on one out in the garage one day. Did it run away at the sound of his stomping, at the sight of his big, old boot coming at it? I say unto thee, nay! It ran right at him, up onto the toe of his boot, and started up the rest of his boot toward his leg before he finally reached down and squashed it!
Right now you’re thinking, “Well, surely that’s the end of the black widow spiders in the family story.” But no! Among the many, many, many black widow stories in my family—several of them having to do with jars, in fact—is the one my Uncle Wayne tells about my Aunt Sharon (my mom’s little sister who was afraid of the black widows in the outhouse, remember?). Well, apparently my auntie (my Aunt Sharon and my mom and Uncle Wayne’s sister) had spent an undetermined amount of time collecting black widows in a jar of her own, one day way back when. Hmm. Let me begin again.
So (curious again to get the story right from the horse’s mouth as it were) I paused a moment in my pointless spider rambling here and called my auntie.
“Auntie? What’s that story about you and the black widow spiders in the jar again?” I asked.
“Oh,” she began as casually as if she were preparing to share a recipe. “I just went out all day long one day and collected black widow spiders and put them in a jar, punched holes in the lid, balanced the jar lid (no ring) on the jar, and slid it under my bed. During the night they must’ve all bunched up at the top and pushed the lid off because when I woke up in the morning, the lid was off and all the spiders were gone.”
I know—the women in my family are crazy! Keep in mind Auntie said she was probably about ten years old when she did this. My Uncle Wayne tells the story because he is a fellow arachnophobic—which is actually kind of ironic being that he’s the one who recently taught me how to kill rattlesnakes and skin them. He always tells the story of Auntie’s escaped spiders like it’s the worst horror movie a guy could ever watch. He’s three years younger than Auntie and was old enough to know that an entire Mason jar (or more likely a Ball jar, being that it was back in the early fifties) full of black widow spiders was loose in the house.
Auntie’s final casual remark on the matter was this: “Hmm…that’s probably why the house was crawling with black widows for a while that year.”
So you see, black widows run in my family—as does arachnophobia. Just a little trivial insight in to the inspiration for Jolee’s black widow experience in Sudden Storms.
I would feel as if I’d really failed—miserably failed—if I didn’t mention to you the good ol’ Sudden Storms Party of 1996. Yep—I’d just finished writing Sudden Storms and was getting ready to have surgery to remove a huge ovarian cyst, so naturally I decided to have a party! Oh, the preparations I m
ade were quite detailed. And it was so much fun.
First of all, the handwritten invitations were embossed (I was into embossing then). The night of the party (the night before I ended up in the hospital a day early for my surgery), each guest was handed an envelope as they arrived. In each envelope, there was a Sudden Storms bookmark, a raffle ticket, a bunch of play money, and some other stuff I can’t remember right now. As the evening launched, each guest could go to the “general store” and buy things such as a shred of Jackson McCall’s shirt, a toothpick that Michael McCall had chewed on, or a rock that Paxton Gray had put in his pocket to use for skipping on the pond later. One could also purchase things to eat, like bacon or homemade bread. Guests could also have their photo taken with “Paxton Gray,” who arrived in the middle of the party with a cowboy hat full of Hershey’s Kisses that he handed out to all the ladies. Yep! This young man, who was my friend’s son and a friend of our family, dressed up like the Sudden Storms hero, arrived to a soundtrack of a thunderstorm, and said, “There’s a sudden storm a-brewin’!” as he entered the house. All the guests then spent their time standing in line to pay their twenty dollars of toy money to have their picture taken with the hero. He’d even swoop you up in his arms if you’d let him. It was hysterical—totally fun! There are many more details that I can’t remember right now. But I do remember how fun it was. I wish we could do that same thing now. But I guess we kind of do, don’t we? Each summer at the Meet and Greets? How fun! (P.S. No black widows were involved at the party. Thank heaven!)
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