I'm home again in Lloyd and it was a lovely weekend on Dog Island. The funny thing about Dog Island is that a lot of people who have homes there only come down a few times a year and the Fourth of July is one of them.
We who have the luxury of living nearby know that the best months on the island are the fall and winter months when there is no one about and the temperatures allow more than early-morning and late-evening walks.
But amazingly, this Fourth of July was temperate. It was not incredibly hot and although storms passed to every side of us, we didn't get one drop of rain, although I wished we had. I love storms on the island, the wind whipping the pine trees and sea oats into a frenzy, its voice as it wails through the dunes a high, keening thing, making my little house a cozy nest, a safe place to be to watch nature have its way with the world.
The house next door to us on the west is almost never occupied. The people who own it live down in central Florida, which is funny, because that's where I went to high school, where I lived for some very formative years. They own a restaurant which is a regional landmark and I can tell from the way they act on the island that they don't get nearly enough ya-ya's out in their real life.
Bless their hearts.
The house to the east of us on the island is the home of a really incredible artist name Roger Leonard. He, as do many of the island residents, spends a few months in the summer time in more gentle and less broiling climes. So he wasn't home and it was strange, to walk past his house on the bay and not see a light on, but I'm sure that wherever he is, he's painting and probably thinking about the island. I sometimes never see Roger on the island, even if he's there, but sometimes I do. We might run into each other down at the beach at sunset and it's strange how even though we hardly know each other, we always seem to fall into conversation about some deep and meaningful stuff, the two of us. It's like we have no reason not to and so we do. I have another neighbor on the island that I feel the same way about and maybe it's because if you live on the island, you don't get a chance to have what we would call a social life and every interaction you have is fraught with all the meaning you don't leak out with bullshit stuff that happens in normal life and jobs and so forth. Let's face it- if you live by choice on a barrier island where there is no bridge and no cable and no decent drinking water, you really have a great need to spend a lot of time by yourself.
I'm planning to spend a week down there by myself for my birthday and this whole weekend I was thinking about that. I've spent a few weeks there by myself and it's always been wonderful, although I did have ONE night where I got the anxiety so bad I thought I might die and it was such a scary time that it still makes me take pause at the thought of going down there by myself but dammit, I'm going to risk it.
I'm going to take myself and a bunch of library books and my computer and my Worst Novel Ever Written to rewrite and food that I think I might want to eat and maybe some new strings of light I have stashed away from Target and by God I'm going to walk and do yoga and write and read and eat whatever I want and sleep whenever I want and watch every damn sunset and pray for a storm or two.
That's my plan.
My birthday plan.
I'll let you know how it goes, I'm sure.

A Different Island, Once My Own

Back in 1994, the year my friend Sue died, I was alerted to the fact that I could rent an apartment on St. George Island for something like $350 a month.
Now even fourteen years ago, this was a terrific bargain, even taking into account the fact that what we’re calling an apartment here was actually two rooms and a bathroom in a cement block four-plex. But what the hell? It was right across the road from the Gulf of Mexico on St. George, which had not been completely ruined yet.
My two oldest children were basically living their own lives by then but my two youngest were around the ages of eight and five and definitely still under my wing so they became my little roommates there for the summer in that block apartment with its yard of foot-torturing gravel and sandspurs.
I decorated the apartment with Dollar Store Christmas lights and colorful fish to hang on the wall made in China of reed and cloth (which I still have and which hang on the wall here in my bedroom on Dog Island) and every time we’d come back to the apartment after a trip home to Tallahassee, I’d burn sage for some reason. There were no particular evil spirits in that place as far as I knew but perhaps I burned it to purify something inside of me and if so, it did no harm, at least.
Mr. Moon came down on weekends to join us and to fish and it was my first and still most prolonged experience with living at the beach.
I was in a strange state of grief that summer and still feeling the effects of Sue’s death which had been such a profoundly holy experience that I was in some holy state myself it seemed, my heart opened by grief and the brief glimpse of the certainty that in this life we are only sandwiched between birth and death and the existence of other states of being on each side of those portals.
I do indeed think now that that summer I spent in my little concrete home by the Gulf was a time of holiness and if sage was one of the sacraments, so were beer and rum and limes and chips and salsa and Jimmy Buffett whose music (and say what you will about it) was exactly what I needed at that moment in my life.
At the time, the children were not as entranced with the beach life as I was, although they look back at it now with great affection. I had to force them to accompany me to the beach every morning, their brown little bodies slathered in sunscreen, with our thermos jug of Raspberry Crystal Lite, our towels, our beach toys, our books. They much preferred staying inside with the air conditioning and the TV to watch old reruns of Lucy and The Brady Bunch (we had cable!) but they would go with me, albeit grudgingly, and we would float in the gentle waves and sing Jimmy Buffett songs and in the evenings we would walk the beach after supper, watching the dolphins make their slow return from the cut, west to east, rising to breathe with noisy exhalations, then falling silently back into the water beside us, so close and yet in a different universe entirely and as all of the walls between the universes had become blurred to me when I accompanied Sue to that place she went, I was more than aware of what all that meant and the dolphins rising into the land of air and falling back into the land of water beside me was somehow comforting.
That summer was when I first learned how much I loved living out of doors as much as possible. We’d brought a cheap plastic table down and set it up right beside the apartment and that was where I sat to eat, to read, and to write while the children watched TV inside or played house under the fronds of the palm tree in front of the complex. I sat at that table even if it was hot or buggy or dark and at night I burned citronella candles and I read or wrote by those.
I began to write on yellow legal tablets: poems, short stories, and letters. This was a year before I got my first computer and I took up my pens, my paper and my thoughts and I wrote with a vengeance and a wonder.
It was all the beginning of something or some things, even as others had ended. It felt, at the time, as if I were doing so very little- playing with the children, cooking our meals, reading, dancing, spending hours by the Gulf, crying, laughing, sleeping, writing poems, watching the stars at night including the great blur of the Milky Way, visible then on the relatively still-unlit beach, but looking back I see how very much I was doing.
I want to say I was healing, but I don’t know if this is true. I think instead, it was more a time of integrating Sue’s passage than healing from her illness and death although I could be wrong.
We ended up renting an apartment in that little funky complex for three summers. The children were willing enough and they had come to love that island life, even if more for the ice cream shop they could walk to than the vast beauty of the ocean, the dunes, the sky, the birds. We journeyed to Apalachicola for shopping and adventures, to Jack Rudloe’s Marine Specimen’s Lab in Panacea to touch and learn about the sea creatures we saw on the beach, and we played bingo on Tuesday nights at the St. George fire station. One night Jessie won the jackpot and she used her winnings to buy herself her own pair of Panacea Nikes (rubber boots like the ones the workers in the seafood industry wore and which she coveted) at the store in East Point.
People came to visit us there in our little nest. My best friend from high school came and she and I (the kids stayed home with Dad that weekend) took ourselves skinny dipping late one night in the bath-water warm Gulf and we floated for hours under a full moon, talking about everything, sharing all the secrets we’d had no one to tell for all our years apart.
The older kids came with friends, my Liz of the West came and spent an enchanted weekend with us. We had adventures of one sort or another. We made friends with Wayne, who lived in another apartment, a sweet-hearted drunk who sat in front of the complex and drank beer all day and who watered my plants when I was away.
Our time there ended. Our view of the Gulf was obstructed by the construction of new tall skinny houses that tourists rented. The children developed friendships and interests in town they were loath to leave. The island became more crowded. I probably began to feel guilty “wasting” so much time doing nothing but hanging out on the beach, sleeping on a futon with my feet in the canned goods, sitting on the roof of the building next door, listening to the cicadas as they chorused their deafening song from one tree to the next until the song had encircled the entire island as the sun set, painting the sky and water with rosy gold and the moon rose, as my heart opened to a sort of joy it could never have been opened to if Sue’s death hadn’t broken it in two.
Looking back, I see that those summers, especially the first, had as much to do with who I am now as almost anything. And as I am writing this, on a yellow legal tablet, sitting beside the water, knowing that I am going to send these words out into the universe via a phone line and a computer, I am amazed.
Listen- there is nothing that is meaningless. There is nothing that involves water and air and children and words and sorrow and joy that is a waste of time.
And I still love Jimmy Buffett who managed to get me off my sorrowful ass and made me sing with my children in the warm green waters of the Gulf, our heads in the air universe, our bodies in the water universe, surrounded no doubt by the great fish and smiling dolphins. They were there. We couldn’t always see them.
But they were there.

Island Mysteries

I am sitting on a porch with a slight breeze coming from the west, the water in front of me blue, but also green where the sandbar lies close to the surface, not unlike the colors on a globe, approximating what the earth looks like from space. I love sitting on this porch, watching the changes in the bay as the day goes from morning to afternoon, to evening, to night.
It seemed to take forever yesterday to get here. First one small crisis, then another, before we could leave. Finally we were packed and on the way but we had to stop in Medart for gas and coffee and then we stopped in Panacea for shrimp, right down the road from where I lived a long, long time ago with other crazy hippies in a falling-down house which was where I was living when I realized I was pregnant with my first child. That was a strange time in my life and one where I was as mystified and in despair as I have ever been, not knowing what steps I could possibly take to go from that sort of a life to a life where I could be a good mother.
That house had been at the beginning of a path and here I was, not a half mile away, so much further down it.

When we pulled up to the seafood place, another car pulled up at the same time and a woman got out of her car wearing a long skirt, a black shirt that showed friendly cleavage, and cute little sandals with tiny kitten heels.
“I think that’s Connie May Fowler,” I told my husband and he said, “Really?”
“I do,” I said.
When we all got up to the porch of the seafood place, the seafood people greeted her, “Miss Connie! How are you?” and I knew it was her for sure.
My husband stuck his hand out and said, “Hey. We live in your old house.”
And we do. My beloved house in Lloyd was hers before her divorce and we bought it from her ex-husband. She and I have spoken a tiny bit via e-mail and I introduced myself to her and she was charming and said, “So nice to meet, not in cyberspace.”
We chatted for a moment about how her next book has that house as a character in it. She’d told me this in an e-mail about a year ago, and since then, I've had curiosity about how this book will turn out and also a small and unworthy bit of resentment because it's my house now, that beautiful old place beneath the oaks.
But listen- I know that a writer will use any damn thing she wants in her work because every thing and every one is part of the stuff of the art she makes.
In fact, her telling me about using the house in a book last year is what prompted me to start my own book about a frustrated wanna-be writer who is living in a house that a “real” writer used to live in and who is writing about it.
Fiction upon fiction, dancing with truth, all living in the same house- these things get crowded and complicated.
The book’ll be done by fall,” she said and what I didn’t tell her is that with any luck, the first draft of my book (Worst Novel Ever Written) will be done this weekend. No threat to the success of her book, anyway.
We got our shrimp and left, saying good-bye, and I said to stop by any time she wanted, in Lloyd, but I doubt she ever will. The house has become part of her past in essence of reality and part of her future in essence of fiction and it takes a long time to get from one place to another and it hardly ever pays in circumstances like that to backtrack, or so it seems to me.
It had been nice to meet her, finally, after reading her books, after living in her house. She looked exactly the way I thought she would, exactly the way an author should- pretty and smart and a little bit Bohemian. A woman with her own style, a woman with charm and perfectly painted toenails.
I wonder, though, if she looked at me and thought, “What is this woman doing, living in that house, under those oak trees?”
I was wearing overalls, and not the cute linen kind but blue denim ones that I’d put on that morning to pick the garden in and had never taken off. The kind that prompted a man at the dock on the island to ask me in a deep Georgia accent, “You a farm girl?”
“Yes,” I answered him, after some consideration. “Yes I am.”
It seemed as true as anything I know.
But then again, I’m on an island where it’s hard sometimes to distinguish between what is land, what is air, what is sea, and even if you can, it's changing all the time as the tide rises and falls, all under the mysterious pull of the moon as it travels around us, as the water is pulled into the air by the sun as we move around it.
It’s all so mysterious, this pulling and tugging, this constant changing from one thing to another, our very essence being transformed all the time.
I feel it now, this mysterious process, and I use words to try and define it like the sea uses waves to define the shore, one of us far more successful than the other in its task.
Can people change their essence the way water can change into air? Can mothers become writers, can writers become mothers? What sun is it that pulls us from one form to another, one path to another?
I have no idea and I hear thunder now, rolling from the west, and I will probably sit here and think about it all, watching the bay change, watching the day change, and I will be changing too, but I am not sure how.

Island, Ahoy!

All righty then. After we pack up everything we're going to need to eat, wear, drink, read and write on/with for the next four days and load it into the truck and the man gets the boat ready and we drive to Lanark and we load the boat and we make the small voyage to the island and unload the boat and load the Jeep and drive to the house and unload the stuff and put it all away and open up the house and open a beer, this is what I'll be looking at.
Phew!
Makes me tired just thinking about it, but that's okay because once we're there, it's all good.
Unless someone gets a rash or steps on a sting-ray or a piece of glass or something but I'm hoping none of that happens.
I plan to spend a lot of time reading, a fair amount of time napping, do some early-morning walks and watch a bunch of sunsets, weather permitting.
And I'm about to finish up writing what I can only describe as the World's Worst Novel but it will be DONE and then perhaps I'll start rewriting it or else I'll just take a deep breath and delete the entire motherfucking thing, but either way I'll have finished another book and that's something.
And we'll eat. In fact, I should be out there in that garden right this red hot second, picking lettuces and tomatoes and okra to take with us because I passed right through that produce section at Publix yesterday. We'll stop for shrimp in Panacea on the way down and I'm thinking the man will definitely catch us some fish and if not, I have canned beans.
I believe I have this dial-up modem thing figured out. We'll see.
And if I do, I'll post from the island, which will be really cool and if I don't, I'll catch up on Sunday.
Happy 4th, y'all. Have fun. Be safe and don't forget your sunscreen.

Another Miracle!

Hi. My name is Ms. Moon and I'm a hypochondriac. In fact probably one of the world's BIGGEST hypochondriacs.

This may come as a surprise to those who know me because I NEVER, EVER talk about all the various illnesses I am certain, at any given time, that I'm dying of.

Now the reason I don't discuss my many and varied terminal (and they're ALL terminal-believe me, I'm a nurse) illnesses is twofold:
1. If I talk about them, they may become real.
2. If I talk about them, someone might say, "Yeah. You should see a doctor about that."
And the problem with that is, my mental illness concerning doctors and the medical profession is even more extreme than the one where I think I have horrible diseases. I've had THAT neurosis my entire life and I have no idea why because I have no memory of ever being mistreated by a doctor in my childhood, although I do remember having to be held down by a nurse and my mother so that the doctor could give me a flu shot, and even two grown women had a difficult time keeping me still enough for the doctor to find his mark with the syringe.

Perhaps it's all related to needle terror but I don't think so because I'm not especially scared of needles any more. Perhaps it has more to do with the fact that as a child my mother occasionally had to go to the hospital (where they have doctors in white coats who give people shots!) for pneumonia, leaving me and my brother in the care of people we didn't know in the slightest and didn't trust in the least and oh yeah, there was that time she was in the hospital and my dad was off on a drunk and there was no food in the house except potatoes and the poor lady who'd been hired to stay with us pleaded with me (a child of what? five? four?) to let her take me and my brother to her house where there was actual food but I refused because WHAT IF MY MOTHER COULDN'T FIND US WHEN SHE GOT OUT OF THE HOSPITAL!? NO, JUST COOK SOME MORE POTATOES!

But you know, I still love potatoes so I don't know if that's a valid theory.

And probably, my hypochondria is somehow related to that, too, but really, you're not being paid as a therapist so I'll stop talking about it.

Except to say that when I start obsessing about all the deadly tumors I'm sure are growing in my body, I know that I'm not mentally quite well. I do have enough self-awareness to realize that the hypochondria is a symptom, not a disease in and of itself.

And it's all part of this generalized anxiety I get sometimes which I've talked about before, which I hate because it's such a buzzy, busy, never-ending, no rest-in-sight sort of mind warp.

I'd been suffering this anxiety/dying-of-at-least-three-diseases thing for days now and nothing was helping. Not the St. John's Wort, not the walks, not the yoga, nothing. Yesterday I thought I might explode from it, it was so bad.

And then...
Mr. Moon, who had been out of town on business, got home last night and as soon as I got my arms around him, the symptoms ceased. Just like a light switch had been thrown. Oh, I've had a few traces of it since then, but they usually come when I'm about to get a hot flash and then they disappear as soon as I begin to cool down, so essentially, I AM HEALED.

Which is odd because I've never been the sort of wife or woman who's well-being depended on the presence of her husband. In fact, I love my times alone.

But that's what happened last night. I was worried quite literally to tears and I'd lost every bit of any shred of a sense of humor and I was practically tripping on my anxiety and then he pulled up into the yard, I went out to greet him, we held each other tight, and boom, done.

Now I know that I'll go through the whole damn thing again. It'll happen. And I'll chastise myself and I'll try to talk myself out of it because really, the oddest thing is that I am not afraid to die. Hell, I never thought I'd live this long. And I've been with people when they died and it was not scary but actually beautiful and peaceful and so natural that it just doesn't seem like something to be afraid of. Although of course, what I'm really afraid of is that I'll have to go to a doctor who will want to see what's going on with my internal organs and get tests and shots and X-rays and MRI's and CT scans and more shots and the doctor will stand there with my folder open, my entire life and fate written in codes and numbers and values and he'll be afraid to look me in the eyes to tell me what all these numbers and values and codes mean and it'll really suck.

But for now, today, this minute, I'm not worried.

I know I'm dying in the sense that every one is dying from the moment of birth but I also know I'm alive and feeling pretty well and I'm not apt to have to see a doctor today.

And I wish with all my heart that by this point in my life I'd not be so crazy. So inclined to just go off into a sort of insanity which I feel I have no control over whatsoever, but just have to ride out and deal with until it's over.

Like labor.

Except instead of getting a beautiful new baby when it's over, I just regain the ability to function without constant fear which, in a way, means I've gotten my life back and so maybe I've given birth (once again!) to myself.

Which is a process I seem to have to go through over and over and over again.

And here I am now, the world as green as it can be, the crickets thrilling me with their trilling, the sun spilling like gold into patches of light in the backyard and leaking into my heart, which is open and happy again.

Healed, perhaps by love, perhaps by holding on to the sanest thing I know, which is a man who was crazy enough to marry me which I know makes no sense but is just one of those mysteries of life for which I am almost unbearably grateful.

Now, Back To Business

So back when I was still a hopeful young sprout and capable of things like researching agents and sending out query letters and so forth, I learned a lot. Mostly what I learned is that if you want to get a book published, you should write a book on how to get a book published.
Because obviously, everyone in the whole damn world has written a book and wants to see it in print. And then of course, up on the big screen. Starring Will Smith and Angelina Jolie.
Or in my case, Ashley Judd and, well, I never did figure out who the dude character would be played by.
I wanted to play the mama.
The first agent query letter I sent out was to a woman agent I'd actually seen speak. So I wrote my pathetic and humble little I-am-no-one-and-my-book-probably-sucks-but-wouldn't-you-like-to-see-it letter to her.
Frankly, I had two problems.
One, the theme of the letter was I am no one and my book probably sucks and the other was that I sent this query out about one week after 9/11 and the agent's office was in NYC.
Yep. I did.
And the letter I got back from her wasn't even addressed to me and got the title of my book wrong.
So I learned a few things.
After awhile, my query letters got better and I started getting REAL letters back from agents that sounded, if not exactly enthusiastic, at least slightly more positive. A few asked to see the manuscript. And so it went.
As I gained a little bit of confidence, I started having more fun with my query letters. I mean, why the hell not?
And the one that I finally wrote that actually got a LOT of attention, and finally an agent, although that didn't work out so well, was bizarrely over the top. For your amusement, I will copy part of it here.

Thanks for listening.

"From the pen of the newest undiscovered author comes a blockbuster read! In the tradition of Connie May Fowler, Lee Smith, Fannie Flagg and Rebecca Wells, Mary Moon has given us another salty, strong and vibrant Southern woman to love. In her first novel, The Yearning Heart of Apalachicola Rose, Ms. Moon has created a character with heart and soul who learns just how strong and capable she is when her husband, a no-good pretty boy truck-driver named Billy, leaves her and their four children one beautiful spring morning to go and live with his new love, a woman in Oklahoma, leaving Rose with nothing but a shattered heart, a broken dream, and a six-pack of Budweisers in the refrigerator. After Rose drinks the beer, cuts her hair, and cries on her red-headed mama’s shoulder, she realizes that she cannot afford the luxury of wallowing in misery and so, like Scarlett O’Hara faced with the coming of the Yankees, Rose cuts down her curtains and makes a dress!
No! She doesn’t do that at all!
She gets on with her life and despite the fact that she has only a high-school education and a part-time job as a waitress, she manages to support and nurture her little family, survive the terrible Florida heat and: her gossiping small town neighbors, a major hurricane and the passes of an oysterman with very few teeth! This little Southern gal has spunk!
And then, into Rose’s backyard and life walks Raymond- a man with a beard! A man with a motorcycle! A man with a past! A man who knows how to decorate! Despite that, he really is “all man” and this all-man teaches Rose what love is all about! From their first lusty encounter under a full moon on the deserted white sands of beautiful St. George Island to the fulfilment of their passion in Raymond’s futon, Rose and Raymond are destined to be together!
But are they? Will Billy come back and reclaim the woman that he believes to be his and his alone? Will Rose succumb to Billy’s old charm and fall back into the life that she now knows is empty and false?
These and many other questions (including- will Rose get kicked out of the state of California for not knowing what Tofutti is?) will keep you reading long after your regular bedtime.
A full set of real characters accompany Rose on her journey to happiness. Black and white, gay and straight, Rose’s friends and family are there with her, every step of the way, making sure that the picturesque town of Apalachicola is populated in a colorful and amusing way.
Ms. Moon writes with passion and with authority. The reader cannot help but think, “By golly! Here’s a new voice with passion and authority!” From page one, to page last, this is a book. A real book. Read it and laugh. Read it and cry. Read it and remember what it is that we read books for! “Made me restart my book club!” Oprah “Gave me the strength to carry on!” Bill Clinton “Made me want to be a Southern woman!” Norman Mailer “Inspired my newest album!” Bob Dylan “Made me want to go back and work at the Dairy Queen again!” Anna Nicole “Laughed so hard I broke a rib and couldn’t do yoga for a month!” Madonna “Cried so hard that I had to get my Botox redone!” Anonymous

Okay. Do you see how desperate and insane the trying-to-get-an-agent process will make you?
I believe I've proved my point.

Not Much But It's What I've Got. Today. Now.

I just want to say that I got more visitors to my site yesterday than I have ever gotten in a day.
I don't know if this is because I threw my novel idea out there or if it's because I was nominated for "best crazy mother story" on The Newborn Identity website. (Tasty readin' there, folks.)
I'm thinking it's the Newborn Identity website.
Anyway, today's one of the those days where I think my own children could win a contest like that, quite easily.
And that's all I have to offer today, or right now, anyway, and must go shower because I'm going to lunch with a friend who just got divorced. This is not a celebration, it is an honoring of a passage into a different existence.
And I feel a deep need today, right this second, to give us all a very, very heartfelt bless our hearts and also to thank every one who made suggestions about my novel finding its way into the world and keep those ideas coming in, folks. I am considering them all.
Much love....Ms. Moon