A Lovely Thing

I had a lovely thing happen today that’s just got me floating a bit. We’ll set aside the fact that the amazing people who work in my local medical lab thing (as I say, the vampire’s office) see me so often they know me by name and like me enough to support me. Today, my favorite of the women who work there (because she’s the only one who can get all my blood without having to stick me 8 to 10 times) asked me a question about one of my books. A really good question at that.

Generally speaking, I don’t really run into people who have read my books that didn’t buy it directly from me at any number of my local events and I don’t think anyone has ever really asked me where a particular element came from. I love questions like that and I thought maybe someone else might be interested in the response also.

The question was about Hunter’s Crossing – where did the gray road come from?

To my knowledge, there isn’t such an artifact in the real world mythology but the basis of it is sort of there, in a way. The foundation of it comes from Greek mythology. The River Styx forms the boundary between Earth and the Underworld. It seems to me, if there was a third plane, the Otherworld, a similar boundary would exist and thus, the Gray Road was born. It is not a place without cost or without danger. Because it was an artificial boundary, designed when magic stepped away from the regular world, it had to have rules. Because it was designed to keep the planes separate and humans are insatiably curious, it had to be hidden. It is a dead space between worlds but the things that lived there when it was created were accidentally granted immortality in the process. Being a dead space, there is no color, time is a bit weird, and death is ever-present. Not the sort of place where you want to vacation but an important place in the story (and later stories too).

Hunter’s Crossing can be found on Amazon, your local bookseller, or direct from the publisher.

Hunter’s Crossing by Sarah Wagner from Boroughs Publishing Group

The History of Things – Newel Post Cap

Grief is an interesting thing – it’s an emotion and an energy that clings to us for far longer than we sometimes even recognize. It lurks in corners, waiting to take us by surprise. It gives certain words a different weight. I firmly believe that grief can linger in places. Where there is true grief, there is love. Where there is love, there is power.

As a little girl, in the moments when my grandparents’ funeral home was not hosting someone else’s loved ones, it was my playground. I remember being as crafty and sneaky as I could to slide down the banister of the biggest most beautiful staircase I’d ever seen. I had a little help from people who should have probably known better. When I had to leave that place to go to the place I lived, I’d pat the newel post with tiny hands and be on my way, knowing she’d be there when I got back. As a bigger girl, I leaned there, against the post, stalling as long as I could before I had to say goodbye to my mother, held up and bolstered by that same newel post. As an adult, each time I’ve said goodbye to that place, I’ve patted the newel post and hoped she’d remember me fondly and know she was as loved as a building could be before they tore her down.

A touchstone and a gift

Today, I was given a great gift. The cap of that newel post, that touchstone of my life where I can mark the important moments in pats like some mark height in a doorway. I know it might seem silly to some but it means the world to me.

How many thousands of people took strength from that post? Touched it to keep themselves standing in the face of great loss? I like knowing that it will continue to be loved, to be something that matters, at least as long as I’m still living. I like knowing that it’s always going to be where I can touch in and remember.

The Start of a School Year

It’s that time of year again – the stores fill up with blank notebooks, reams upon reams of blank paper, full pens, and unlimited potential. Kids shuffling back to the routine, dragging their feet a bit, clinging to the last tiny shreds of summer. And then there’s me – thrilled to have my own space, my own time again, but sad to get one more first day closer to an empty nest, and, this year, doubly sad for completely selfish, non-kid related reasons.

I’m pretty sure I’ve posted about the funeral home my grandparents owned multiple times and will post more about it in the future – it was a very special place. Was. I’m struggling with the idea of putting it in the past tense. It’s always been there – even when it stopped being ours, I was sure it would always be there – a touchstone to the past I could visit if I needed or wanted. A monument, a headstone marking my childhood. But it’s going to be torn down. Right now, there are people in it, around it, pulling pieces out to put in other houses. My husband being one of them and my house being one of those other houses.

I’m home, not feeling so great, watching the new pup who is determined not to be more than 2 inches from me at any given time, and waiting on my youngest to be done with his first day of school.

Usually, the first day of school is a cause of great celebration and horror movies. Today, not so much. I’ll get my horror movies next week. Today is for wallowing.

The Histories of Things #1: The Teak Ladies

I collect old stuff. This might be an understatement maybe. I do love it – I love these things and all the stories that they may or may not have to tell. Some of them, I love how they’ve come into my life or where they were before I got them. Some of them I fell in love with in a shop or on a screen.

I thought I’d told the story of my two ladies and I went to link it only to discover that I did not. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned my grandfather’s funeral home a time or three. A good number of the interesting old stuff that I have came from there, either my grandparents time there or from the woman who owned it prior to them.

Many years ago now, my grandparents sold the business and my husband and I went to help them pack up a whole lifetime of stuff. While we were packing up, my grandparents gave us a whole bunch of amazing things including a teak bust of a woman which I dusted off and put in my curio cabinet to sit for about a decade. She’s really pretty and it felt like a nice goodbye to the funeral home that was my only consistent home in my childhood.

Last year, we found out that the funeral home’s building was up for sale and likely going to be demolished and were given the opportunity to go in and purchase a few things (oddly enough, I don’t think the sale has actually gone through as no one has called us to let us know that we can get our fireplaces). I did a lot of reminiscing on that trip through the building. It still feels like home to me, even if parts of it have been rearranged or redone. I brought home some slate from the basement, some tools from what had been the embalming room, and my fabulous husband found something in the garage, just sitting on a shelf all by her lonesome as if no one else had ever noticed her. A very nearly but not quite matching teak lady.

• 

  The Teak Ladies Together

• 

  The first goodbye

• 

  The second goodbye

Teak Ladies from my favorite old house.

I know for sure that they came from the many adventures of the woman who owned the funeral home before my Pap. She traveled the whole world and brought home so many interesting things, these lovely ladies among them. And now they’re both mine. Two goodbyes from my favorite place. My oldest kid used to think it was weird, to talk about places like they have any sort of intelligence (fortunately, they’ve met a few interesting places since then and now at least pretend to understand what I mean). I loved that house and I swear that house loved me right back. To me, these ladies prove it.

Someday she (the house) will make it into a book or star in one but I haven’t quite found the right story for her yet.

I might just make this a series – I have so many neat old things – some of them the stories I know are amazing but for some, it’s the story I don’t know that makes them interesting. I’ll likely write a good bit about the lady who owned the funeral home before my Pap: what I know of her is interesting, what I remember of her is very little, but she remains the only actual ghost I’ve ever seen (and apparently, the only instance of any paranormal anything going on in that funeral home after being a funeral home for some 50 years), and I know she collected some of the most interesting things.

Next time though, it’ll be something different. Next time, I’ll show you one of the things my father brought back with him from the USSR in the late 1980s.

New Baby in the House

And he is TINY. Our Fred has been a little sad and lonely since RedDog’s passing and we’d been talking about a little friend for him for a while. The baby we got is so small right now it makes me nervous. It’s going to be a long month or so but then I think he’ll be solid enough that all my maternal instincts aren’t screaming FRAGILE.

Sleeping Bruce

I’m a bit of a hovermom at the moment – the Fred is a giant by comparison (for now, Bruce will probably be bigger down the road) – but for the most part, Fred might be the most excited of us all. It does mean that getting stuff done might get a little more difficult for a couple of months while we go through all the puppy phases but, in the long run, it’ll be well worth it.