Mary Kay Andrews

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Sweet Home Alabama

Come help me celebrate fall Thursday night, Oct. 22, in Mountain Brook, Alabama at the Emmet O'Neal Library in beautiful Crestline village. We'll start off with a wine reception at 6:30 pm, followed by a booksigning and talk--by me. Get the details here. And oh yeah, I'm open to junking suggestions for the vicinity!

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Falling for Autumn

When we were at Tybee for Pirate's Fest at the beginning of October, the temperatures were in the high '80s. Hot and unbelievably muggy. But lately here in Atlanta, the weather finally turned from just plain wet and sloggy to fall-ish. It was so cold we had our first fire in the fireplace while watching Saturday college football recently. (Go Dawgs!) So I got the yen to decorate. Out came the Halloween bin. Or to be truthful, bins. Two of 'em. I don't do a lot of interior decorating for Halloween, but I do like to acknowledge the changing of the seasons. And it was time to put away all my summer seashells anyway. I love reading blogs and magazines to see all the creativity others pour into their seasonal decorating, but while I have the crafty instincts, I am seriously craft-deficient. So my efforts are pretty uh, minimal. Also cheap. For the past few years I've picked up these fake crows--or ravens--at Tar-zhay and Dollar Tree, and some fake gourds and pumpkins picked up on sale at Michaels. I string 'em along the mantel in the living room, wire 'em to the dining room chandeliers, and prop 'em on top of lamps in the living room.

Living room mantel--still life with crows

Mantel--fake crows and fake gourds

I've got a fake owl too. I thought he looked pretty good on the console table behind the living room sofa. Beside him, I filled a big silverplate punchbowl with some real acorn and butternut squash, some real gourds, and a fake pumpkin. I saw a photo on the Cote de Texas blog of a similar arrangement, with deer antlers, and I thought, hey--I can do that. So I plopped in a pair of antlers brought home from the woods by our deer hunting son Andrew. And then, I was in Antiques and Beyond, a great antique mall on Cheshire Bridge Road here in Atlanta, and I saw a fall arrangement with some pheasant feathers, and I thought--hey, I can do that. Mr. Mary Kay is a bird hunter, and kindly saved me some feathers from a hunt a couple years ago. So I stuck in a few of them.

Punch bowl--with gourds, found antlers, pheasant feathers-plus Tar-zhay owl

For the mirror and chest in the living room, I strung up a feathered wreath I bought on sale--another Tar-zhay find, on top of the mirror. I stuck a crow on there. I had this little chalk bust I bought at a yard sale, or maybe Ballard's Back Room. She got a little black construction paper carnival mask and a feathered boa courtesy of last year's Halloween finery. I collect silver trophies, so I put some estate sale candles (a true old lady estate sale always has at least one box of candles stashed somewhere) in some of 'em, and put some eyeball candies in the porcelain hand dishes. And that's my Halloween decor.

Living room chest with bust, silver trophies and fake crows

We've been watching Eddie Ross's Halloween Block Party special on HGTV too, to see how the pros do it. Eddie I'm not, but we've got a little sumthin' cooking up for the exterior Halloween decor, so stay tuned.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

The Lost Day

Molly, at about six weeks, in my office

After being out of town for more or less two weeks, I had big plans for Monday. I was going to get back to writing. I managed to bang out fifty pages of the new book while I was holed up at Nags Head, NC the week before, so why couldn't I just manage a page or two once I was home? Sunday night, I set up my laptop beside my bed. The plan was to replicate my Nags Head experience. Go to bed with the book in my head, wake up with the book in my head. Lean over, grab the laptop and start writing. Simple, yes? But there's this saying; "Man plans, God laughs."

That night, around midnight, the phone rang. My heart stopped. Midnight phone calls are rarely good news, and this one was no exception. It was our son-in-law, Mark, telling us that he was taking our daughter Katie to the emergency room. They'd had dinner at our house a few hours earlier, and before leaving, she was complaining of stomach pains that she'd been having off and on for the past two days. We joked about the possibility that she was pregnant--NOT!--because our Molly is only three months old. Could they drop the baby off at our house? Of course. Molly was delivered to our doorstep, sound asleep, wrapped burrito-style in her pink Sleepopatomus thingy. We popped her into her crib here, and I waited, anxiously, for news from Mark. He called sometime after 1 a.m. to report that the doctors thought Katie had a bad case of food poisoning. We drifted off to sleep, and Molly, the angel, slept until 7 a.m. A couple hours later, Mark dropped Katie off so that I could tend her and Molly, and he dragged his very tired butt off to work. So....no writing got done on Monday. Molly seemed to sense that her mama was sick, so she wasn't cranky, but she definitely wanted to be held and cuddled. And that's what we did. I fed her, burped her, changed her and held her. In between, I fetched Katie's meds and ginger ale. We lounged around the house and watched HGTV. The bed never got made, the laundry never got started, dinner became leftovers. I tried to remember how I managed to work as a freelance newspaper reporter when Katie was that age, and my own mother lived five hours away. I recalled attending a press conference with Katie in her infant carrier the same week I brought her home from the hospital. I remembered packing a breast pump in my purse when I was on out-of-town assignment, and sitting in gas station restrooms expressing milk to be stowed in a cooler in the trunk of my car. I remember juggling her on my lap as I typed away on my second-hand electric typewriter--this was WAAAYYY before the days of laptop computers or the internet. I'd call the newspaper office in Atlanta and dictate my stories to a typist, hopefully while Katie was napping.

Mom and her brood, that's me in the middle back

And if I happened to mention to my mother that I was over-worked and exhausted, she'd helpfully remind me that she'd had five babies in six years, starting when she was 19, and, oh yes, this was in the 1950s, and that she'd managed this feat without disposable diapers, a car of her own, and most of the time, without a clothes dryer. And during a lot of that time, she was working too, as a waitress, manicurist, or secretary. When I fell into bed Monday night, exhausted, and Molly was still fussing, I thought about my mom, and how often these days, I wish she were here to see my granddaughter. I thought about how glad I am that Katie and Mark and Molly live only a mile away, and that when those midnight phone calls come, I can take delivery of a drowsy pink burrito baby. And suddenly those lost hours, cuddling a baby, don't seem so lost after all.

Thursday, October 1, 2009

A Week at The Beach

Sunrise, Nags Head

I'm in lockdown. At the beach. Nag's Head, NC, to be exact. My antiquey buddy Beth and I came here right after Labor Day to scout out locations for my next book. I'd never been to the Outer Banks, Beth hadn't been in many years. We stayed in a way cool inn I found online, First Colony Inn. Very reasonably priced, nice room with television and an in-room fridge for those all-important morning Diet Cokes, and lovely full free breakfasts, not to mention afternoon cocktails. We drove up and down the beach, looking for just the right little hidey-hole for me to write in. At first, I despaired. It looked like Nags Head and all the other towns along the Outer Banks had fallen victim to the heinous "ginormous mega-mansion by the sea" virus that has infected every other spot on the East Coast of the U.S. I'd seen this at our beloved Florida Gulf Coast, where cute little Grayton Beach has been squinched on all sides by expensive developments of tasteful? second homes. And I was disappointed to see all the huge houses shouldering out the little cottages here at Nags Head. But we started cruising up and down the Beach Road. We slowed down, took a closer look. And we found some throw-backs, modest, homely little beach shacks. I found a sign at one little string of three cottages, called the number on the sign, and Bobbie, the owner, agreed to meet us to let me take a look. I fell in love. Windswept, my cottage, is just a nothing wood-frame house. But it's got character. The kitchen cabinets have been painted white a gazillion times. There's a chippy enamel-top work table for a counter. I've got a little front porch where I can go out and sit in the sun after I've been typing away for a while, and there's a wonderful dune-top deck where I can sit in the late afternoon and scribble on my yellow legal pad.

Windswept, scene of the crime

The weather is spectacular; cold in the mornings, sunny and mild in the afternoons. There's a rusty fat-tired beach bike I took for a ride after lunch. I rode it past the line of hundred-year-old original Nags Head cottages, the ones they call "the unpainted aristocracy." I'm angling to get a peek inside one, for research for the new book.

Original Nag's Head Unpainted Aristocracy Cottage

It's delightfully quiet at the beach this time of year. I can empty my head here, shut out the familiar voices and noises of family and home--welcome as they are--and just live in the world of my book. This afternoon, I got so absorbed, I began to wonder what the mechanical noise was outside. I walked out to the driveway and discovered that the little beach cottage across the road was being gobbled up by a bulldozer and dumpster. When most of the rubble had been scraped up and hauled away, I walked over to talk to a man who was busy tinkering with something beside the old wood-frame garage, which had mercifully been spared. He cheerfully reported that he was the owner of the cottage, which his wife's family had bought back in the forties. He said the house was probably built way before that, maybe in the twenties. It had fallen into such disrepair that it was no longer practical to keep fixing it up, so they had it taken down, and they'll build a fine new house in its place. He seemed like a nice man. I walked back to my side of the road and crawled back inside the world of my book. I think I like it better here.