That might be what a writer wants.

But that’s not always true. Having made room for these things precisely, a writer can find that they are absolutely not what she wants. She can find herself repulsed by the blank screen, even terrified. Given the space and time, she fails to write and instead examines her hair for split ends, the interwebs for distraction, or, with blindly searching fingers, the table’s undersides for abandoned gum.

Okay, maybe not that last bit.

No, the writer wants silence and space not for their yawning emptiness but for what might possibly, conceivably come of them–if silence and space result in something.

It’s the Something that the writer wants: that perfect word, that shining sentence. The paragraph that miraculously hits the mark.  And then scores more paragraphs, coming with ease or terrible labor, that somehow bring to light that thing that was in her head–the thing that was the reason she looked for silence and space in the first place.

But then, what of it?

Once–more than once–satisfied with a string of paragraphs, I sent them off to a dear friend. Here, I was saying. You know the story, or you know it well enough because I’ve told it to you. Read this, I was saying. This, I was saying, is good.

And she responded, in good faith, with something sensible along these lines: I see what you’re saying and I think it’s good, but I don’t really know how it fits, you know, within the structure of the whole, so I can’t really tell, in a way, how good it is.

It was true– and it wasn’t her fault. She couldn’t be expected to appreciate it. She couldn’t even understand it, really, perched isolated like that in the body of an email.

A writer doesn’t really want to write email, I think. Not really. This writer doesn’t, anyway.

So what, in the end, does a writer want?

I’ll tell you.

A writer wants what I had on Friday evening, sitting comfortably in a living room I had never seen before in a town I’d never visited. I was sitting with readers, all members of a book club, and their names and faces were brand new to me–but their love of books was not.

I can tell you that a writer wants readers like those souls sitting there, who had read my book and were considering it, who had opinions and ideas of things in the book that they liked or didn’t, were sold on or maybe were not sold on at all.

A writer wants readers like Melanie, who suddenly spoke up about some paragraphs of the book she especially liked. She said she read them and she read them again. She folded down the corner and marked them, and then she read them aloud to her husband. She told us all why she loved this part, how this part especially rang true for her. How she knows that sometimes faith and life are like this: not things you can plot out so specifically, but that somehow occur, are born, come to light nonetheless.

Melanie said she especially liked that part–and I said I liked it too. I said I loved it, in fact. That, in fact, it was one of my favorites, and I remembered silently that I sent that very part to a friend once who, through no fault of her own, couldn’t possibly appreciate it at the time.

A writer wants moments like this–when the sitting in silence and isolation result in paragraphs that result in a book that connects one like this with Melanie. I didn’t know her until Friday, but I will always know her now and will know, on the chance occasion I re-read that more-favorite-than-some-to-me passages in the book, that Melanie loves it too.

Thank you, Melanie, for loving that part of my book.

Every writer, I think, wants a Melanie.

Afterward, Frank walked back alone to campus, chilled with perspiration. The sky was invariably dull; his mind teemed. He could reconcile none of it. Belief was audacious at best, with repercussions he couldn’t conceive of. Maybe belief was even stupid. And it wasn’t a sudden revelation, in the end. It wasn’t a specific conversation that did it. He can’t remember which time it was–the day or the month–when the leaden sky was peeled back at the corners and Frank was able to see.                                                                                                     Healing Maddie Brees, p. 50

The post What Every Writer Wants appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

“Are you related to Robert Louis Stevenson?”

And the second from the mother, who is old enough to be a mother:

“(The Daughter) is reciting her most favorite tomorrow… ‘The Swing.’ I’ve been coaching her to try to recite it without the cadence because I think it loses meaning. Thoughts?”

Thoughts. Immediate: to swings, and how I love to go up in them.

How do you like to go up in a swing/Up in the air so blue? Oh, I do think it the loveliest thing/ever a child can do!

I’m thinking of the time I learned to pump the swing myself. We were visiting my grandmother in Florida, and my older sister and I were taken by the hand by our father and walked rapidly (my father always walks rapidly) down a sidewalk that had, to one side, a tall white fence. Over the top of the fence we could see lemon trees, and my father sang us a song about them as we went.

Lemon tree, very pretty and the lemon flower is sweet. But the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat.

And this was Very Funny, because my father loves lemons.

We arrived at a park, and my father pushed us on the swings, and then he explained how one leans on a swing and pushes one’s legs out and back again. Suddenly I had learned to pump the swing with my legs, and I could swing on my own.

How do you like to go up in a swing, up in the air so blue?

I pushed William on a swing when he was barely old enough to sit upright. Everett, too. And when Emma turned one, we bought her a baby swing for the swing-set in the back yard. I remember her blond hair, so fine and straight, swaying back and forth from its pigtail above her grinning face.

The mother: “I’ve been coaching her to try to recite it without the cadence.” Thoughts?

Yes, to the mornings my children and I sat around our kitchen table eating breakfast and reciting poetry. It was my way of packing in a few elements of school before they had a chance to realize it: a Bible story, a picture study, a poem over pancakes and in our pajamas.

Among the many, we learned Stevenson’s “My Shadow,” “The Wind,” and “The Swing.”

“Are you related to Robert Louis Stevenson?” I think my children wanted to know if they were, too.

Thoughts?

Yes, to grading papers at my desk when teaching high school, typing paragraphs of encouragement about supporting arguments and placing commas inside (INSIDE) the quotation marks, and wishing from time to time that these students had spent a small corner of their childhoods reciting poetry–and many of them had. Because you can teach a person how to shape an argument, how to develop said argument over a series of paragraphs, how to enfold supporting evidence via quote or paraphrase into one’s sentences. But by the time one is in high school, it might be too late or insupportable to teach the value of rhythm, the power of varied sentence length, the priceless weight of emphasis and inflection, the music of our spoken–or written–words.

The mother: “I think it loses its meaning.”

Can it?

Up in the air and over the wall/till I can see so wide/Rivers and trees and cattle and all/Over the countryside.

I can imagine the daughter standing at the corner of the sofa, reciting. Or seated at the table, head bent over her coloring, reciting. UP in the AIR and Over the WALL till I can SEE so WIDE.

What is the rhythm of this poem if not Stevenson swinging himself? Back and forth, back and forth. The daughter may be sitting at the table, colored pencil in hand, but the words she is saying are motion, and they are moving her back and forth with the poet himself, with all children anywhere ever who have sometime swung on a swing.

Till I look down on the garden green/Down on the roof so brown

Stevenson’s poem will lose its meaning only when there are no longer children outside because they’ve all turned to their iPhones, when all the swings sit idle, when the rushing breeze and flying force born of a child’s volition loses all power to answer.

Up in the air I go flying again/Up in the air and down!

“Thoughts?”

Yes. That surely some of the meaning is lost on the daughter, for whom swinging in this way is so close–for now–to her everyday experience. For her, for now, this mother is doing everything right: getting this poem in the child’s head. It’s Stevenson’s cadence that will keep it there, and so she’ll be saying it in her head for years to come.

And someday she‘ll be pushing her little one on the swing and admiring how the breeze pushes that one sweet curl back and forth, and she’ll mindlessly start saying the poem to her curly-headed cherub. And suddenly the poem’s meaning will bring happy tears to her eyes, just because the realization is so sweet, and she’ll know for the first time that her mother gave her that poem–a gift– years ago, and she’s only just opening it now.

“Are you related to Robert Louis Stevenson?”

Yes. We think so. Scotland is small enough. How many Stevensons can there be?

“Mom, are we related to Robert Louis Stevenson?”

Sure. Why not?

The post Two Questions appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

As if, left to its own devices in my desk drawer, in my laptop files, it might nonetheless continue to evolve toward completion.

And, in truth, it might be gaining life. In fact, I know it is–but not in the way one hopes. It is gaining life in the way of all creative projects when they are neglected: it is growing wild. When I do (today? tomorrow?) return again to the project, it will be scarcely recognizable to me, grown woolly and fierce. I will have to wrestle it to the ground, read and re-read its pages. I will have to remind myself of its identity and my intentions. I will have to, all over again, tame it.

*sigh*

But that is for another post.

This post, this very one here, is all about the reason why I am letting my fourth child grow feral in the unsupervised wilds of my laptop. The reason is my other children, the two-legged ones, the three quasi-adults who inhabit the rooms of this house.

How is your book doing? It is neglected, sorry to say, because my other children are not. What have the last weeks–no, months–been if not tending to these Busy-nesses? These persons who must come and go with their own agendas, not necessarily needing me and then suddenly Needing Me Very Much?

In a way, I suppose, things have always been like this. Children–no matter their ages–don’t need us and then suddenly do. Think, for instance, of the skinned knee, the erupting quarrel, the sudden and bracing trip to the emergency room. But for the most part, when they are younger, the needs are quiet and unsurprising. He needs a nap. She needs a bath. Now they (clearly) need to be read to. Those daily things were predictable and completely under my control. I had things well in hand.

I don’t necessarily feel that this is any longer the case.

We have, as I have alluded to, more coming and going, for starters. I do a lot in the way of ferrying–trotting people to lessons and appointments, picking up Everett from school so that he can drive home again. I’m out more than I’m in, and for a homebody, for a writer, that has its limitations. At the same time, it’s a situation that has been mounting. It has been like this for awhile–and now, perhaps, more so. It’s normal, I know. It is the way of things.

And then there are the Events, the things that simply take More. Our latest and biggest was Will’s graduation from high school, joyous and wonderful and carrying also that quiet nostalgia. It meant, of course, preparations, which also meant stemming the activities of our home-school for a time. It mean out-of-town guests, and a Really Splendid Party, and getting ready for those things, and, since then, the recovery (vital) afterward.

Now, of course, things have slowed down, haven’t they? Will is graduated, Everett has finished his finals. Emma and I (mostly Emma) have a few things to wrap up, and then things will grow quieter, won’t they? Now, a friend encouraged me, this summer, she said, is the time for your book.

Predictability, ease of pace. The (perhaps) imposition of a schedule such that I have predictable time to myself each day, compulsory quiet, and a string of several hours together.

Right?

And then there was last Monday and the unanticipated 1.5 hours I spent in the DMV. He needed a parent (who knew?) to apply and receive his “after-nines.” Here was an errand I hadn’t anticipated. I had anticipated catching up on homeschool stuff that morning, sitting quietly with a history text and making notes, deciding what Emma needed yet to do. I had planned on doing laundry. On wrapping languishing packages. On making (and saving) room in my afternoon to work on that book of mine.

Instead, I did some very little planning in the DMV, perched on a chair with a desk attached like they have in high school, and coaching Will (again) in the art of the thank-you note. Yes, it was productive, and yes, it was time with Will. But it wasn’t (at all) what I had anticipated. And I never did get to the book that afternoon.

Which was fine.

Last night we held a sleepover, unexpected and last minute, the way my kids do things these days. They were quiet and respectful. They kept to themselves. When they left the house at 11 p.m. on an errand to buy some Cheerwine, Everett was thoughtful enough to text me. Everyone slept soundly, so far as I could tell, and this morning I made them muffins for breakfast.

I shouldn’t have been surprised by my later encounter with the family room: empty Sprite cans on the end table, empty glasses and chip bags on the floor. And, inexplicably wedged between the wall and sofa, the empty 2-liter bottle that had so recently been full of Cheerwine. The boys, oblivious (is it possible?), had begun to hold a band practice–and I made them stop immediately and take care of it all, which they did with no audible complaint.

Now those two dear sleeping-over boys have left. Like my children’s mother, theirs has necessary plans for the day. But at our house we are enjoying the unexpected visit of our youth group’s summer interns. A game of Settlers of Catan is in full swing on the dining room table, and I am letting Emma (who has a grammar test to take and some history to read) enjoy this fun with them.

I’m thinking there is yet time in the day for homeschool, and also (I think so) for the book. But these three children of mine have a mobility that, for all its wildness, my novel decidedly lacks. Feral or otherwise (and oh, I hope for mostly “otherwise”), they will take on lives of their own.

The book, when necessary (and thank you for asking), can wait.

The post At Our House appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Here’s news– or is it?:  I did not make my Thanksgiving deadline.

There are lots of reasons for this, one of them being that, while Thanksgiving is on a Thursday, preparations and their busy-ness for it begin Well In Advance of that, which meant that I was doing nothing like writing those days.

And then there were the days of Thanksgiving itself: those three beautiful days on eastern Long Island, with my parents and my aunt and some cousins and my sister and her family. Nothing could induce me over those three brief days to steal away– even if only for an hour– to work (by myself) on a book.

So, no, I didn’t make my Thanksgiving deadline to finish my novel. And that’s fine. It really is. The entire goal was, to be honest, probably somewhat foolish, or bold, or both. Aren’t they often the same thing?

*sigh*

I made myself a new goal, which was Christmas, and which Lynne wisely pointed out was likely unlikely due to all the Everything. She’s right about that.

“It takes years to write a book– somewhere between two and ten years. Less is so rare as to be statistically insignificant. One American writer has written a dozen major books over six decades. He wrote one of those books, a perfect novel, in three months. He speaks of it, still, with awe, almost whispering. Who wants to offend the spirit that hands out suchbooks?”– Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Still, I am plugging away, sitting down for an hour or two (or more, if I can manage it) to churn out the words, making my incremental progress, telling this bit, discovering that, uncovering for my own self what the means of this story are. Sometimes it’s dreadful (the silence, the idealessness, the yawning blankness of my laptop screen). And sometimes it’s like holding to the end of a firehose while it’s letting loose with full force in my hands. Then it’s allIcando to seize an idea and jet out a paragraph, full of fear lest the next realization escape me.

It’s good work and hard work, and I’m getting used to it– to its claims on my energies and brain, to its constant insistence.

What’s troublesome about it much of the time is its lack of beauty. There. I said it. It’s not the novel’s fault, and repairs– I tell myself– are on the way. But for now I am just telling it, getting it down, doing what I imagine those wonderful NaNoWriMo people do: spitting it out. The edits (I tell myself, I comfort myself) will come later. I can’t wait for that– but I have to.

My brilliant advisor in grad school said as much about my thesis: if you can’t say it the way you want to now, just write the idea down badly. You can always go back and fix it.

Of course, he was Far More Eloquent than that, and his was excellent advice.

So for now I am being obedient to my craft and I am writing it down badly– but at least I am writing it down. I try not to wish for Something Else, like a sudden giftedness in writing poetry, say, which is ohsoefficient a medium. No. What I’ve got to work with is sentences and paragraphs, chapters and even (gasp!) the occasional dialogue. Thomas Mann comforts me:

Each separate unit of a work requires its special bulk, a certain mass of reequisite significance for the whole.  — Doctor Faustus

It is taking a Very Long Time.

As my friend Rachel said to me recently, “You are writing a novel.”

Indeed.

The post The Reason Why appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

I haven’t owned a pair of sunglasses in over two weeks, because as I climbed out of the car at the airport, the glasses slipped from the top of my head and broke on the concrete. Thus began my journey to China: I forgot my shampoo, I forgot my coat, and I broke my sunglasses at the Raleigh-Durham airport. A small trifecta of disappointment, easily resolved: I bought some shampoo, Lynne loaned me a coat (of course), and I never needed the sunglasses: it was grey skies and some rain for the Entire Week we were in Shanghai.

Which brings me to the traffic light– in Durham– and the sun in my eyes.

“Will,” I say to my son, who is next to me in the front seat and headed to his soccer practice, “I tried to buy some sunglasses this afternoon.” And then I tell him why I still don’t have some: “Target had no sunglasses that didn’t make me look weird, and even for those they wanted fifteen dollars, which is about ten dollars more than I want to pay for a pair of sunglasses that I am going to lose or break within three months.”

“Ah,” he says, with the wisdom of the world traveler, “you should have bought sunglasses at the Farket.”

The Farket. Yes, the Farket. The Farket is our name for the “Fake Market,” that amazing maze of shopping possibility that hides in the basement of the natural history museum in Shanghai. That brightly lit system of store fronts selling identical varieties of Uggs and shoes, scarves and sweaters, t-shirts and watches, jewelry and luggage, where shopkeepers are so positive they have what you want that they actually beckon to you– call, even, in their broken and thickly accented English– to come see what they have for sale. And what they have for sale is beautiful, and plenteous, and (fake) copies of Far More Expensive varieties of above-named items that you might purchase elsewhere.

We were in the Farket a time or two over the course of our visit to Shanghai– a visit from which we are still recovering, because jet-lag shows no mercy, not even to a mother-teacher who must get out of bed “in the fives.” Yes, we descended into the Farket a time or two and made our way through that maze, listening or not to the calls of the sales people, practicing our limited Mandarin: “Boo-yow!” Boo-yow!” (“I don’t want! I don’t want!”) while trying to make it to wherever it was we wanted to go.

Which isn’t to say we didn’t go shopping.

We did.

Shopping in the developing world is far different from shopping in a place like one’s local mall, if for no other reason than that harrowing business of bargaining, which some people seem to be born for, and others seem to acquire a skill for, and others (me) have a really hard time with. Because I am not in the market, when I do go shopping, for an argument; I am rarely in the mood for a confrontation. When I do go shopping, when I make the time for shopping, I want to get in and get it and get out. I have no interest in haggling over prices.

And so the labyrinth of store fronts and jewelry counters had a second hazard: it wasn’t only about finding one’s way out again. It was about knowing how to manage the sales people who so clearly knew how to manage you, who were sure of the price they were hoping to get, and also fairly sure that you’d be willing to spend it. I was their perfect target: the naive American who wasn’t (even yet) entirely sure of the exchange rate, who needed more than once to grasp that kwai and ru-an and RMB are the same thing, and (the trifecta, again) who felt Very Unsure of Herself When Bargaining.

It would seem that shopping in Shanghai is a psychological experience.

Enter Lynne, dearest and oldest friend, resident of Shanghai these five years, and — who knew???– resident expert at Bargaining.

On the one hand, this shouldn’t be surprising. She has been living in Shanghai for five years. Five Years. This is a Respectable Amount of Time. And over the course of those years, she has brought many, many of her visitors (all?) to the very same Farket and has done, I am sure, an admirable job of showing them around. She is practiced, by now, in this bargaining business.

But on the other hand, you have to know Lynne, you have to meet her. Because really, on meeting Lynne, what you know in all immediacy is her kindness. She is smooth edges, this one, gentle listening and understanding paired with an excellent sense of humor. She is a homemaker and a bread-baker; she prefers the coziness of carpet to the gleam of wood floors. She croons songs of Jesus over orphans in the healing houses; she tucks her children in. Her gentled spirit is unwilling to take in a scary or suspenseful movie: the images, she explains, stay with her forever; she can’t get them out of her mind. She is quietly committed to her husband, her family. She home-schooled her children for years. I’ve never heard a foul word cross her lips; her graciousness and tact have shamed me. There is, in short, no sign of the calculating or head-strong about her.

One might assume, on meeting her, that she is one to take care of, to maybe protect in the kindest of ways.

And then there she was, driving a hard bargain over scarves, over boots, quibbling in Mandarin about numbers I couldn’t understand. I stood helpless, smiling. I was frank admiration. The sales girl wouldn’t come down in price and Lynne was off, tossing a few words over her shoulder to the protesting woman that maybe we’d come back, but surely we’d find a better deal elsewhere. She laughed at the sales girl at the jewelry counter; she argued my totals down by tens of dollars. I had one good deal. I had another. I came away with more than I had intended on buying but very glad I had done so and all at an excellent price.

All thanks to Lynne.

It wasn’t until later in the car, Shanghai rushing past me, my bags pooled at my ankles, that I realized this wasn’t so surprising. Not really. Lynne is the friend– had I forgotten?– who had talked me down when parenting a newborn was more than I thought I could handle, who had birthed all three of her born-to-her babies without pain medication or pain, who had the strength to return to the cleft-palate orphan babies and sing and sing over them, trusting them to Jesus on her way home. And she– had I forgotten?– had moved with her family halfway around the world five years ago, loving her husband through his hours away and his days and weeks of travel, helping her family do more than adjust in this foreign context, helping her family Thrive.

Bargaining over a pair of boots, I know now, is nothing to my friend Lynne. This is just a new vision for me of the intrepid, the dauntless that I’ve always known to be her.

I don’t remember seeing sunglasses for sale at the Farket, but I’m sure they had them. Ray-bans, probably, or some other expensive– and fake– variety. But sitting at the traffic light in Durham, the afternoon sun in my eyes, it’s Lynne I find I’m missing, and not a pair of sunglasses.

Although I bet she could get me a good deal on some– even at Target.

The post Farket appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Perhaps we love the shore
because the debris here could not be ours
no matter how hard our lives.

Or because the long shelf of land
continues on under the water
so even here at the edge

of the world the edge is uncertain.
Perhaps we love that the water rises
to uncertain levels leaving

and returning. We may love
the shore as we love the madwoman
who repeats the same phrase

endlessly, as we love the dying
who go on living, the traveller
who promises return.

Here, just here, we leave
no mark. Spume renders footprints,
castle, cry the same.

It’s all the same
what we say to the traveller,
the dying, the madwoman:

Come back, I love you, come back.

-Penelope Austin

The post Yes, That’s Why appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Yes, here I am with My Dear Lynne, back in early July at Duke Gardens. She sent the photo to me yesterday and with it a little text, reminding me of the Day We Were Having: “It was the fateful day of the heat, and trees that cannot be climbed, and waiting for tacos, and complaining!”

But I don’t think we were complaining, not she and I. We were together, after all– a brief thing, a rare thing, a very very Good Thing.

Don’t you think it’s funny (I do) that we are sitting Almost Very Nearly Exactly the same way? Even with our heads tilted. And our sunglasses.

We didn’t plan that. Honest.

The post Ta-Da! appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

I don’t mind any of this. I really don’t. I am eager to teach my students to write well, and the only way they can learn is to do the writing and get the feedback. They’ve done their writing, and now it’s my turn. So I spend a good long time with each paper, and I correct the syntax, and I think about their words, their lines of logic, their depth of insight, their effort. It’s an important process, and a good one. But I will say, for the record, that Not One of my students is an Annie Dillard. Not One.

Yes, it’s a long day ahead, and I really need to get down to work. But before I do, I just thought I’d take a few minutes to post something to my blog. But what? Most of the things I have brewing will take Some Time, and Time is what I need to give to my students today, not to my blog.

Then I thought, I know! I’ll post the photos that dear Lynne sent to me in an e-mail– was it?– yesterday! So I went back to gmail and I found the photos, and I saved them to My Pictures. Then I logged on to this page and opened the little photos window and proceeded to browse to find the picture of me and Lynne.

It wasn’t there.

I went back to gmail and saved the photo again (at which time it asked me if I’d like to overwrite with this photo the one I had just saved a few moments before by the same title), and then I tried again to post it to my blog. This will be great, I thought. A photo (a real photo), which excited me because, due to technical difficulties at my house, I haven’t been able to post photos in Forever. And it would be one of Lynne and me, which would make me happy, because she is So Far Away now in China. And it would only take a Few Seconds.

But of course it didn’t work. It wouldn’t work. Apparently it isn’t “configured” properly because it was sent through e-mail or some such nonsense, and so my plans are laid waste.

*sigh*

And this probably doesn’t disappoint Lynne too much, because she doesn’t think it’s such a great picture, anyway. And she’s probably right. It isn’t spectacular of either one of us. But it’s the latest we’ve got, for now.

I’m sorry, O Reader, that you haven’t got it at all.

The post What We Have Not Got appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

We joined with other pilgrims on the journey home. They came from London town, and how it warmed the heart to hear our native tongue again! An onion is an onion still no matter what you call it. A man’s a man, a tree’s a tree, and God is God, but when a Norman names them or a Dane or Roman, there’s something lost. The ear takes comfort from the sounds of home, and the outlandish speech of foreign folk makes all the world seem strange.

— from Frederich Buechner’s Godric, don’t you know.

Read it, do.

The post For Lynne… appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Lynne called me this evening, at 9:30 my time and, coincidentally, 9:30 her time (which would be convenient and even better than the one hour’s time difference we’ve endured for the past several years while she lived in Chicago– except that it was 9:30 Tomorrow Morning for Lynne). And this is– despite my understanding of the rotation of the earth on its axis and the sunrise and sunset and the dividing of the earth into time zones– Somewhat Surprising for me.

Anyway, Lynne called me this evening and it was So Good to hear from her, as this is the first phone conversation we’ve had since she called me from the tarmac in Chicago. And I was especially glad to talk with her because, while she is Not Quite Languishing in China, she is having a Hard Time.

This is to be expected, and I told her so. A move is a huge stress in anyone’s life, and this is true whether you are moving across the country or across town, but if you are moving to the Other Side Of The World, then it has to be Particularly Difficult. And it’s not as though the move itself is the issue– the move with its fourteen-odd hours on an airplane with a toddler and its subsequent twelve-hour jet-leg– no, what’s more at issue is the packing and packing and packing one did before one left. And the obtaining of visas for the children and the passports and the sorting and the taking of things to the give-away and the general mayhem that accompanies a move of this magnitude.

It is No Small Thing to move to China for three years.

And then, when they arrived, they learned that the air shipment (which included, among other things, all of Lynne’s cooking gear) would be arriving in another week instead of Right Away. Which means that most of the comforting things that would be coming from home wouldn’t be coming just yet. (Lynne shared a Most Endearing note about the family dinner the other night: she made chicken soup for the six of them in one tiny sauce pan and so had to do it in stages, transferring items as they cooked into a bowl on the countertop. I Love That.) (Let me just say for the record that the Stevensons–had they been in this situation– would have ordered Chinese. Ha!)

And then last Saturday little Gwen broke her clavicle when she fell out of bed. That’s not exactly what one hopes for when one has been in a new country for, say, a week.

And so of course she’s having a Hard Time. Of course she is.

You can imagine the solace one would find, in this situation, in having contact with the world one left behind. The pleasure one would take, wouldn’t one?, in continuing to have contact via the worldwide web, visiting and enjoying the blogs of friends, sharing one’s blog with others, getting and receiving e-mail. You can imagine that would be comforting. I know you can.

But here’s the kicker: Lynne can’t read blogs while she’s in China. There’s some sort of block that is preventing her access. Somehow she is able to post things to her own blog, but then she can’t see them, can’t check them, and can’t even read the comments people are making on there.

This is So Sad.

So Lynne called me tonight to find out how to program her blog to automatically e-mail her all the comments people make (she can get to the blog dashboard to do this, but all the characters are Chinese, so she doesn’t know what she’s seeing). We went on-line together and I guided her to the right place, and now all comments to her blog will end up in her e-mail account.

This is a Very Good Thing.

But we also discovered something else– something we didn’t know blogger had to offer: I can have all of the things I post on my blog sent to her e-mail, too. And that’s the meaning of the last post. I set up my blog to e-mail her the posts, and then I posted something real quick (“Are You There?”) just to see if it worked.

And it DID.

So here’s what you do. Find out if your blog system can e-mail posts to Lynne, and then do it (six_liptaks@yahoo.com) . It will make her So Happy to find out what’s going on. And also head over to her blog, where you can read all about making chicken soup in a little saucepan or Gwen falling out of bed or see photos of the really spectacular view they enjoy from their Shanghai apartment. And then make a comment which will, as of about 9:45 tomorrow morning (hee!) arrive in Lynne’s e-mail box.

Yes, please do. It just might make her day.

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