Jean Marie's Domain

Originally published at Jean Marie Ward. You can comment here or there.

Yeah, I know it’s usually cheating to post about how you’re not going to post for a while, but this is important. Thanks to so many reasons I refuse to rant about here, our personal privacy is being constantly eroded. I happen to think our Fourth Amendment rights are just as important as all the rest. So like many folks, I’m stepping away from the Internet on April 22. Just wanted everyone to know, and to say there will be pictures when I return–RavenCon photos and your first peek at Hellfire Lounge 4. Meanwhile, good luck on #StopCISPA Monday.

Originally published at Jean Marie Ward. You can comment here or there.

You just can’t make this stuff up.
Last week, Diane Whiteside received a letter from a fan of her novel, The Shadow Guard. The fan was seeking the grave of Col. John Fitzgerald, aide-de-camp to George Washington at Valley Forge and prominent Alexandria cit mentioned in Diane’s book. When the usual sources (Wiki, Google, etc.) came up empty, Diane asked me if any of my friends at Alexandria’s historic Carlyle House might know. I promised to ask the next time I volunteer (sometime after Dragon*Con). In the meantime, I started rooting around in my local library.
Fitzgerald was the driving force behind Old Town Alexandria’s first Catholic Church, St. Mary’s, so I started with the records for St. Mary’s Cemetery, copies which are conveniently located in every Alexandria branch library. From there I went to compilations of The Alexandria Gazette obituaries and the records of the Hustings Court. (Fitzgerald was a big wheeler dealer on the local real estate front.) I confirmed his town home was located on the corner of King and Fairfax Streets, where the main branch of Burke and Herbert Bank now stands, but hey, that’s a no brainer. They’ve even got a plaque to that effect on the bank.
Today Diane and I met for lunch. By some odd quirk of timing, we drove into the Market Square parking garage in Old Town at the same time. We planned to lunch at O’Connell’s but power was off on that side of the street, so I asked, “Would you like to eat Italian? There’s Landini Brothers and Il Porto across the street. Which one would you prefer?”
“Landini Brothers–you mentioned it first.”
After lunch we headed for the Queen Street branch of the Alexandria library, home of the local history collection. Julia, the librarian on duty, wasn’t quite sure where to look. I’d already searched the St. Mary’s records. So we rooted around in the transcriptions of Alexandria tombstones. Nada.
Then Julia pulled out Ethelyn Cox’s Historic Alexandria Virginia Street by Street. It contained a page on Fitzgerald’s King Street warehouse which noted his burial site as Warburton Plantation, the present site of Fort Washington.
Oh, and the warehouse? It’s the same building where we ate lunch.
I love Alexandria.

Originally published at Jean Marie Ward. You can comment here or there.

Let’s see if I can squeak in under the Six Sentence Sunday wire with the first six sentences of my ongoing WIP, Highway From Hell–the story of Orpheus from Eurydice’s POV. Enjoy!

Snakes. Why did Orpheus have to collect snakes?

“It slithered right past me. It’s a miracle I’m not dead!” Our housekeeper was screeching so loud my phone couldn’t handle it. Her distorted voice hooted in my ear like she’d pushed it through a wah-wah pedal.

Originally published at Jean Marie Ward. You can comment here or there.

Cat-assisted writer. (Photo by Greg Uchrin)

The iconic Duzell, born we don’t know, entered our lives in September 2006 and left as considerately as he did everything sometime around eleven this morning. He got me through some of the worst times of my life, always gentle, always the gentleman. I wasn’t ready for him to go. I don’t think I would’ve ever been ready. Sometimes you are blessed with a friend, human or animal, too good for just one life. I wish my sweet boy many such lives, all of them filled with the love he deserves.

Originally published at Jean Marie Ward. You can comment here or there.

This will be my last Six Sentence Sunday excerpt from “Hoodoo Cupid”–at least until next year. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading the excerpts as much as I’ve enjoyed revisiting the story.

Spacer

No matter how hard or how loud her inner paranoid told her he couldn’t be trusted, the rest of her wasn’t listening. Her respiration slowed, lulled by hints of scents which had no place in a sickroom—sandalwood and ginger and the faintest trace of sweat. The longer she stood there and watched him breathe, waiting for her to act, accepting it…

Something fluttered, soft as feathered wings, inside her belly.

“Maggie?” he whispered.

Why did he have to say her name like it mattered?

#

Originally published at Jean Marie Ward. You can comment here or there.

In honor of February’s big day, I plan three Six Sentence Sunday excerpts from my Valentine’s Day romance, “Hoodoo Cupid”, a short romance published by Red Rose and available wherever fine ebooks are sold. As the blurb says:

Maggie Scanlan’s voodoo was a bust until she took her scissors to a poppet on Valentine’s Day. She never expected professional rival—and voodoo victim—Dan Constantine to break his leg, much less sweep the rug out from under her in an Emergency Room. Her brain says, “Run!” Her heart…

“Hoodoo Cupid”

The tattered rag doll flopped on the brushed metal table as Maggie Scanlan wrapped a thread thrice around its stubby legs.

“Let’s see how you like being cut off at the knees, Daniel Curtiss Constantine!” she shouted into the doll’s expressionless face.

A raw, exhaust-scented wind skittered under her hair, raising goose bumps across the back of her neck. She paid the goose bumps no mind. She wasn’t scared. It was just the cold.

#

More next week!

Originally published at Jean Marie Ward. You can comment here or there.

Since I was evil enough to post a picture of Annette’s Apple Pie, it seems only fair that I provide the recipe. This is taken from an old Samhain fantasy blog that’s still out there, somewhere… Consider it my little holiday present. May Christmas find you warm, happy and healthy with all your loved ones around you.

Apple Magic

Forbidden fruit and food of the gods, the apple has a hell of a rep to live up to.
I can see why the Greeks and the Norse made golden apples part of the minimum daily requirement for immortality. People have been talking about the health benefits of apples ever since there have been people talking. Plus, in a climate cold enough to grow them, properly stored apples will last longer than almost any other fruit. Dried apples last even longer.
The whole forbidden fruit gig, however, seemed way off-base. The Bible never specified the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Why decided it was an apple? Apples are hard. Why not something fleshy and sensual like a peach or a nectarine? Or that eternal naughty, the cherry?
Some scholars think the Romans are to blame. The Latin word for apple (malus) is very close to the Latin word for evil (malum). The sources for the two words are completely different. But medieval and Renaissance painters of the Garden of Eden didn’t know malus came from the Hittite word for branch and malum from someplace else entirely. The mythological connections probably didn’t help either. If a Greek nymph used it to keep her girlish figure, it had to be bad for your soul. Look what Eris did with her golden apple. One little beauty contest later and Troy was history. From there it was only a little step to wicked stepmothers and Disney dwarves.
Much as I’d like to think an apple a day would keep me young forever, I can’t see it happening. But I do think the fruit is magical, especially at this time of the year when farmers markets and roadside stands offer them by the bushel. Especially in a pie.
With that in mind, I offer Mom’s Apple Pie. No really. This recipe comes from my husband’s mother, and it’s the surest way I know to make bushels of apples vanish. The rectangular pan specified in the recipe became a family tradition because the standard-sized, round version of the pie never lasted long enough for leftovers.

Annette’s Slovak Apple Pie

Ingredients:
(Recipe amounts based on a rectangular pan, roughly 12 by 8 by 2 inches.)

Crust

3 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
¼ tsp cinnamon
½ tsp salt
2 tbsp sugar
½ lb butter
1/3 – ½ cup cold milk (or more, as needed)
Additional flour for rolling dough

Filling

6 cups apples, peeled, cored and sliced (or enough to fill the pan with a little mound in the center)
½ cup unseasoned cracker or bread crumbs
1 – 1 ¼ cup sugar (depending on the sweetness of the apples)
2 tbsp butter
Cinnamon
1 – 2 tbsp flour (only if the apples are very juicy)

Directions:

Start the crust by sifting the measured flour, baking powder, cinnamon, salt and sugar together. Add the butter. Mix together with a pastry cutter or two knives (one held in each hand) until the mixture is reduced to even bits of dough about the size of peas. Sprinkle the milk over the dough until you can pat the dough into a large ball. (This part can be done with your hands if you work fast.) Wrap the dough in wax paper or plastic wrap and chill for at least a half hour before rolling the crust on a generously floured surface. Use about 5/8 of the dough for the bottom crust, and don’t be afraid of pushing and patching it in the corners. Return the rolled top crust to the refrigerator while you prepare the filling.
Begin filling the pie by sprinkling the breadcrumbs on the bottom of the crust. Starting with a layer of apples, fill the crust with alternate layers of apples, sugar and cinnamon. Add a light dusting of flour if the apples are very juicy. Dot the final layer of sugar and cinnamon with butter. Cover with the top crust and seal the edges. Vent the crust by slashing or pricking it in a decorative pattern. Bake at 350 degrees until the apples are tender and the crust is brown, usually between 45 minutes and an hour. Let cool as long as you can stand it before cutting. Enjoy!

Originally published at Jean Marie Ward. You can comment here or there.

I had to shoot through glass (they close off that entrance after 11 p.m.–go figure!) so you can’t read it, but the shield with “Harris Teeter salutes the Wounded Warrior Project” is on the front to the lower left.

Originally published at Jean Marie Ward. You can comment here or there.

I flatter myself to think some of you wondered where I disappeared to after announcing my return from New York. I planned to spread my usual nonsense on Facebook and Twitter after I finished my docent shift at Alexandria’s Carlyle House yesterday. Instead, Greg and I attended the after hours viewing of a friend who shouldn’t have died.

We say that a lot when someone dies, especially if we don’t want them to leave us behind. In this case it was the bald truth. Brian was healthy and happy, a top stagehand with a wife who loved him and a teenaged daughter who, by her own description, didn’t know the sun didn’t rise and set on him until she was somewhere around thirteen. But last Thursday, when he was heading home on his motorcycle after an evening show, he was struck and killed by a drunk driver.

His family, his wife’s family, the extended family of his union local and all the people like Greg who’d been his friends from college made the viewing a crowded, loving affair. It would’ve been even livelier if we could’ve lifted our glasses as befitted his Irish heritage. Unfortunately, U.S. funeral homes don’t have liquor licenses–a terrible, terrible oversight on their part.

As a stagehand, Brian wore black nearly every day of his life, and he hated it. So black was banned from the proceedings. His daughter and I wore pink. Greg donned peacock blue. The dress code for the packed funeral mass was Hawaiian shirts. I never thought I’d wear a Hawaiian shirt to a funeral. Yet it fit on so many levels. There was a great band–playing liturgical music, but you can’t have everything. Even better, the soloist “didn’t step on the cat” during “Ave Maria”. The priest and the folks delivering the eulogies made us laugh and cry in equal measure. The priest, in particular, seemed determined to talk about “the life of Brian”. He must’ve been a Monty Python fan, too.

After it was over, Brian’s daughter gathered friends and family to sing “Piano Man”, because he’d turned her on to Billy Joel when she was seven. His college buds lined up beside the hearse to give him a Benny Hill salute and vowed, whichever one of them was next, to make sure “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” was played at the ceremony.

It was as good a send-off as it gets. But that doesn’t change the fact that he shouldn’t have been in that box. It doesn’t change the fact that his wife has lost her best friend, or that his daughter will never have him applauding at her high school graduation, moaning about college costs or giving her away at her wedding. They were robbed of his presence and his love for no reason at all.

I try not to inject too much of the personal into my posts. I keep politics off my Fan page and the inevitable writer whining to a minimum. But this needs to be said, and I don’t think anybody will disagree when I say it. When you’re driving in your car, your truck or whatever kind of wheeled carton you take on the highway, look out for motorcyclists and bicyclists and pedestrians. There’s nothing between them and the pavement except you.

And for the sake of Whomever or Whatever you consider holy in DON’T. DRIVE. DRUNK.