Hollyworld: helen hoover

Thursday, February 02, 2023

My Place in the Woods

~Louise Dickinson Rich

I fell in love with Helen Hoover's The Gift of the Deer when I was a kid. It was in one of my mom's Reader Digest books. I read the rest of her books over the years. I stumbled on Louise Dickinson Rich about a decade ago. I loved her We Took to the Woods. I'm reading a biography of her right now. I love the pictures she paints with her words and I find myself longing to disappear in the Maine woods.

Since I found out that Emily Dickinson is a shirttail cousin and Louise is her cousin, then that makes her my cousin, too. I love that.

I'll confess, I feel a connection to both of these writer cousins. They saw the world differently than those around them. But I'll confess, I feel a greater connection to Louise. The biography (She Took to the Woods) shows Louise had her problems, but her love of nature...I get that.

I grew up in the county. Not quite country to be honest. But I was country adjacent. I had a creek and woods behind the house. I roamed those woods with my neighbors and snuck to my favorite spots with a book as often as possible. I was an almost-country girl. My friends Tina and Mel had the most fantastic rope swings at their house. We would wind them until the ropes creaked and groaned and when they let them go...well, these days I'd be sick, but back then, it was so much fun. We built almost annual treehouses. As an adult I'm horrified that one of them was burned down by a rival group of friends. At the time, I was just mad. I caught crayfish in the creek. Sometimes I went fishing...I don't think I ever caught anything. And if I did, I blacked it out. I'm sure one of my friends had to take it off the hook for me because there's no way I'd do it then...or now.

I married a city boy. And here's how you know your partner gets you...he bought me eighteen acres of woodland at a time that we couldn't afford it. Then he built me a cottage out there. Now, for over twenty years, we referred to it as a wooden tent because that's all it was. The frame of what could be. But as our kids got older, we started improvements. A well, insulation, a shed (no more lawnmowers in the cottage!), a barn (with my pottery studio in the back!) and just this last summer, we added a bedroom/bathroom addition and septic. Yep, I'm all fancy...indoor plumbing.

But back to Louise and Helen. with heat and indoor plumbing, we've been spending more time out there. And it reaffirms what I always known, out there I'm truly home. Last spring on a hike, we found my hawk's nest. I got to watch the babies (well, just bits of their heads over the top of the sticks) all spring. I've eaten dinners watching the deer creep out of the woods into the yard. I've caught pics of a fisher and my foxes. I've seen so many fungi and mosses. I've walked a couple miles in every direction on the road. I've spent hours hiking the woods. And every moment of that, I've felt such kinship to Helen and Louise...because I am home. I'm not as deep in the woods as they were, but it's enough for me.

I've written about the cottage in Just One Thing. It's not a memoir of my time in the woods, but I think it reflects my cottage as much as their books reflected theirs..

I feel lucky that I have a family who gets me. From Himself who bought me...HollysWoods, if you will! LOL To my kids. They keep me grounded. They keep me busy. They keep from becoming a total hermit. But there's a bit of a hermit there. They all respect that. They allow me those moments of solitude in the woods. And when I had to lose one of my shagbark hickories, Himself understood my morning. (It's now my counter in the bathroom.) Louise understood it as well...

“A house you can rebuild; a bridge you can restring; a washed-out road you can fill in. But there is nothing you can do about a tree but mourn.”
― Louise Dickinson Rich,

We Took to the Woods

My "cousin" Emily also said...

“Beauty is not caused. It is.”
― Emily Dickinson

That's how I feel about my woods. It simply is. And every walk, I discover something new. Some new footprint, some new tree. Nature. Sun. I love every stone in my creeks. I love my trees. I mourned the ones we had to cut down. We started replanting last fall and will continue in the spring.

If I could have a wish for all of you, I'd wish that you'd find your place. The place that soothes your soul. The place where you walk and say, I'm home. And more than that, I'd wish you the people who get you and who enjoy when you're with them and understand when you need a moment or two of hermitude.

Holly

On sale this month:

Carry Her Heart

Everything but a Groom.

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And check out...

Surprises in All Sizes anthology.
One of my Hometown Hearts stories is included!

Signs of the Times
Available for Kindle and Kindle Unlimited
Book #2 comes out in February 7th!
By Design takes a the marriage of convenience trope and...well, has a bit of fun with it.

Chances
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Apple Books

A View to a Kiln: A Harry's Pottery Mystery
Kindle
iBooks
Kobo
Nook

Sunday, January 03, 2021

Louisa

I just watched PBS's American Masters about Louise May Alcott. It was a lovely reminder of a writer I admire. I grew up with her books. As the only girl surrounded by brothers, I found the thought of sisters and that sisterly bond fascinating. I loved the connection of the entire family. They were bound together through hardships and triumphs. My childhood extended family was more disjointed than LMA's and I found her fictional March family a an inspiration. When Himself and I had our own family, I wanted that March sense of connection. And since my kids have grown up to be my best friends, I'm happy to think we've managed it.

I was so lucky that Himself and my kids supported my writing. I will confess, like LMA I worked to help support the family. And I told stories that were commercial, but also from my heart. One of my first critiques came from a professor I was studying with. I'd just sold a story and he was dismayed it was a romance. Rather than congratulating the sale, he sniffed made a derogatory remark about romance books. I've heard other remarks in the years since. People who feel that writing about family and love is somehow a lesser form of writing. I've always felt that writing about family and love is one of the truest, most real forms writing. At least for me, family is the center of my life. And family is the center of my writing.

Listening to LMA's story, I realized that there's a sense of the March family in my Hometown Hearts series. The Hometown Hearts Wedding trilogy starts this month with Something Borrowed followed by Something Blue in March and Something Perfect in May. Three women come together because of the death of a friend. That death binds them and they become more than friends, they become sisters. In Something Borrowed, a restless spirit finds herself settling uneasily into surrogate motherhood. Four women...sisters of the heart. They face life as it comes, overcome loss and find love. Doing all that with sisters at your side...well there's a connection to LMA and the March family in Hometown Hearts. I don't know that I realized it until I was watching American Masters this morning. But then all fiction is based on life. It's based on the writer's experiences. And since I grew up with the March family, it makes sense that it inspired my writing. I talk about Heinlein and Tolkien a lot, but writers like Alcott and LM Montgomery, Grace Livingston Hill (I have my grandmother's well-loved collection of her books), Louise Dickenson Rich and Helen Hoover... They've all influenced not only my writing, but my life.

Those are connections I'm proud of. My stories are stories of the heart that I'm proud of. And writing romance is something I'm proud of. I can't think of anything more central to life than family and love. At least not for me.

I hope you'll check out Hometown Hearts and any of my backlist books.

Holly

Hometown Hearts: