Twenty-two months have passed since I last contributed to this blog. I lived in Pocatello, Idaho then. Now I live in Salt Lake City Utah, Let me catch you up, and you will understand why.
During the Spring and early Summer of 2020, I worked hard every day editing a novel I wrote rather quickly, stimulated by seeing a man wearing a back pack and pulling a suitcase as he strode along old US-30, now a frontage road paralleling I-80 in Western Wyoming. There was no town, not even a house, let alone any old, broken-down cabin in sight, nothing but scrubby, scanty sage brush on flat land except for the tail-end of a small mountain range, which both we and he would soon pass into more of the same flat countryside. Then and for weeks following, the same question played continuously in my mind: Why would anyone be walking pulling a suitcase in such a place? The question festered until I succumbed, and I began writing about a disabled man who walked for therapy before setting off on a walk across the United States to a destination on the opposite coast.
At the start, I was in the throes of editing a serious novel I had worked on for several years. It could rest a while longer, but the walking man could not. There was a great deal of research to be done and writing to churn out. Then, impatient to have a novel published, I decided to send this new, less serious work off to Amazon and see how it went. This meant I had to learn how to format my work, first for a Kindle edition, then differently for a paperback book. Many decisions were required, such as how much it would cost one of my friends to buy my book.
Meanwhile, my husband Wendell's health was deteriorating, one problem after another. In one way, this gave me more time to write and edit, as he didn't want to go anywhere or do much and began sleeping a lot. Also, we were not leaving our property because of the Covid-19 pandemic. A kind nephew was seeing to that. He bought our groceries and did anything we needed that would have taken us into proximity with Covid. But with problems piling up, Wendell began losing weight because of a swallowing problem. As his caregiver, I kept busy finding food he could get down other than bread and milk with peanut butter, his favorite emergency supper. I worried about how to otherwise best care for him. Through all this, in late July I was able to submit my manuscript for the Kindle version of my book, now titled The Suitcase, off to Amazon a few days before the deadline and begin work on formatting for the paperback, deadline 1 October. I considered that a piece of cake with two months to complete the work.
However, I couldn't find a pre-made cover for my book. All the available choices seemed to portray violence or sex. This book was neither. I sketched out what I envisioned, went to the grocery store, and bought a plastic water color kit with 8 colors and a brush, the same kind we each purchased in my seventh grade class when the teacher decided to teach us something about water color art. I also bought a tablet of drawing paper because the store had no art paper. After I completed the cover, I was up a creek because I didn't have the advanced apps of the program I needed to send the cover to Amazon. A grand-niece who uses that program in her work rescued me. I couldn't believe she did it in little more than fifteen minutes! As published, my artwork looks pretty washed out, but it suits the novel, maybe in more ways than I would like.
Mid-August, came. Just walking through the living room, Wendell took the tumble he had long feared. He forgot his cane, fell, and could not get up, although he tried heroically. I tried to help him, but I'm very small, and getting him up was a futile effort, so I turned to my neighbors, one of them enlisting the other, who was a recently retired EMT. They got Wendell into a chair. That's when the EMT discovered his knee had swollen to the size of a soccer ball and was quickly turning black. "Call the ambulance, Alice. He must get to the hospital."
Hospital stay, blistering of the knee because of internal bleeding, draining of the blister, release to home and home health, infection, hospital stay, release to rehab with no visitors except me, and that through the window because of Covid, another fall, another hospital stay, and after many weeks, at lat sent home, only to slip away the next day, 25 September 2020. At least all of our six children got to say goodbye, and we buried him with a small, commendable funeral they planned and carried out in spite of the restraints of Covid.
Then they all went home. So, what happens to their grieving Mother? I work like fury formatting my paperback version and submit it before the deadline. The Suitcase becomes available on Amazon 6 October 2020, two days before the release date. It hasn't been a best seller, but I've received a small royalty every month since. For reasons I don't know, the Kindle version was on the site but never available for purchase. The book was on its own. Amazon prints and sells these author submitted books, but they do not advertise them. That is up to the author. I had no opportunity to do more than send an email to the 100 people I had previously listed.
Once the novel was off my plate, my situation became clear: What can I do with a large yard and thirteen-room house to care for alone? I'd been doing as much as I could during Wendell's decline with hired help, but how could I continue to afford that? Should I continue to rely on my husband's nephew to see to my needs? On kind neighbors to bail me out when things got bad? No. We have six grown, successful children. They felt their responsibility. Three of them live in somewhat close proximity in the Salt Lake City vicinity. I decide to sell our home, the first new house we ever owned, where we had lived for almost twenty-eight years after nine previous residences, and move to Utah and rely on those three. With their help, I spent the rest of October house-hunting and bought a large apartment in a condominium on 29 October 2020.
On the way back to Pocatello, my son, who was driving me, noticed something not right with me. Instead of home, he took me to immediate care, where I was tested and found to have Covid. Twenty-two days followed flat in bed not caring whether I lived or died with each of two daughters taking leave from their jobs to fly in and nurse me for two weeks each. The same son, recovered from his mild case of Covid, cared for me for a fifth week before I was finally back on my feet and able to put my Pocatello home up for sale. Blessings came in the form of a hot market, and it sold over Thanksgiving weekend. I was able to pay for the Utah condo and became a Utah resident just before Christmas.
(Incidentally, my other son was probably exposed to Covid by the same Covid victim who exposed me, and although not so ill as I, he was more ill than the first son, who no doubt caught it from me. With gowning up, masking and shielding, wearing rubber gloves, and following extremely careful sanitation protocols, my daughters did not become infected.)
I will probably never be as strong and healthy as I was before Covid, but I am able to live alone, write, and could enjoy my Ninetieth birthday at a party hosted by the Utah contingent of the Dunn family with a few more nearby relatives and new friends from the condominium celebrating with us in the fresh air of its patio. One of these days, the editing of my first novel will be complete. Let's hope that with what I learned about cutting the length of a novel to reasonable word count while editing The Suitcase, I'll be able to sell this first novel to what I have come to joking call a "legitimate" book publisher. One hundred thousand words or less is difficult to achieve for a "wordy" soul like this old woman, but I know more folks will buy and read it if I do.
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