So, it was 116 years ago this month that Charles & Caroline Ingalls and their four daughters were all together for almost the very last time, in this house here, this house that "Pa" built. He played his fiddle out on that porch. Laura & Almanzo, a.k.a. Bessie & Manly Wilder & their 7-year-old Rose, came to visit before heading off to Missouri in the summer of 1894. This was - did I already tell you this, Phantom Reader? This is a picture here of the Ingallses' little house on Third Street, De Smet, South Dakota, one of the stops I made on my summer junket, pretty much selling Laura Ingalls Wilder Coloring Books out of the back of my car. www.cherylharness.com/coloringpages.htm

This link will take you to a couple of coloring pages which you can download, samples from my LIWCB. You'll see that it's not your usual C.B., dear P. R. I promise

Still, it occurs to me that it's been 25 years now, since I got into the bookbiz, almost 21 since I quit my day job. 40+ books later & here I'm peddling self-published coloring books around the landscape and having a fine time doing it. Aiming my little red hoopie down long highways between Mankato, a.k.a. Deep Valley, Minnesota, where storied little girls of my grandmother's generation used to play. Maudie Hart and Bick Kenney [There's a Betsy-Tacy Coloring Book, too, she pointed out, with pride & a bit of rue. It really is pretty, my B-TCB, dear P. R. , no foolin' You'll be able to get one for yourself through my website or at that of the Betsy-Tacy Society. Coloring and reading a bit of well-written kid-lit is therapeutic. ] ; then over to New Ulm, that little German town, to share what I know about writing and drawing with young writers and artists. They didn't care so very much. What they wanted, understandably, was praise. Yeah, yeah, yeah, kid, you've got talent. Really. I might have told them that a god-given knack was only part of the equation, only the beginning, and the artists who once lived in the lovely old house wherein these heedless squirts were messing about surely would've agreed with me that youth is wasted on the young.

Speeding along, listening to a fine reading of O, Jerusalem by Laurie R. King. Driving into De Smet, South Dakota, on a Sunday morning. Stopping to visit the Ingalls Homestead www.ingallshomestead.com/ Oh, go there, any of you, if you happen to be going thereabouts and I'd say that even if the very nice, good looking & enterprising proprietors hadn't ordered 4 doz. more of my CBs. Then drive on into town and see where Ma lived out her last years, in that grey house on 3rd St..

Shaking hands with a hardy storekeeper [ www.loftusstore.com ]& thanking him for carrying my you-know-what. I sold one to a customer then and there, a good-hearted grandma.. A certain Mr. Loftus used to keep store there in that very shop, there on the main drag, Calumet Avenue, in the 1880s - no way him knowing that a teenaged neighbor, one of Ingalls' girls, would grow up to write about their town, that pilgrims & strangers would come there, knowing about him & his neighbors long after they all were in their graves.

Back into Minnesota, past rolling fields, hills, wondrous green from all the rain. Across into Wisconsin, stopping for a bag o' cheese curds & another of Fritos, over to Oshkosh - what a swell little town and what a far out exhibit of paintings by Norman Rockwell, an artist whose work I completely admire. It's downright heartening to peer up close at a master's brushstrokes, gleaming & precise.

A week ago? No, nine days, maybe it is now since I was standing on a platform in the Moravian Church at Heritage Hill State Historical Park in Green Bay, Wisconsin, [a glorious place. I'd say it and mean it even if Linda Mattson and the other marvelous, clever, and attractive people there weren't carrying my CB in the Gift Shop.] talking to folks about books, the writing [researching, drawing, painting] and reading of books, mine and Laura's. Trying w/ some success to make people laugh... http://www.heritagehillgb.org/tour/growing/church According to the souvenir booklet, if I remember correctly [be dubious] the church's cornerstone was laid in 1852, when Chas. Ingalls was 16 years old. Caroline Quiner, his future bride, but 13. Later on, I'd be heading home, driving south, not so very far from where she lived once upon a time.

I think it was Garrison Keillor [oh, the acres of bleached white cardboard I have painted whilst listening to his voice over the radio] who said once that an artist may be out of a job, but she's never unemployed.

I think I shall paint a picture today.

Sisters

"Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same." Emily Bronte

So, thirty birthdays were all that were allotted to Charlotte Bronte's kid sister, Emily, born in Yorkshire on the 30th of July, 1818. I'd be willing to bet that about two jillion words have been written about Mr. & Mrs. Bronte's daughters [and their brother]. Outwardly quiet, grievous lives contrasting with their passionate words. Doesn't take much imagination to summon up images of pen scratchings, compressed lips, cold fingers, eyes glinting dark & bright out of shadowy corners. God & I know & now you know as well that I'm too distracted this very moment to wax on about those long-ago lives, except to honor Emily and her sisters. And speaking of sisters, Wolfgang Mozart had one, Maria Anna, whose fingers conjured the liveliest of glittering music from many a harpsichord. If you're reading this, you're seeing what she looked like as a spooky-precocious young musician and you probably know that she and her younger brother were just kids when their dad was hauling them all over Europe. What a piece of work old Leopold M. must have been! Anyway, today's Maria Anna's birthday, too. The Emily Bronte quote above refers to Cathy & Heathcliff, of course, but I could imagine, unhampered by any sort of scholarship & not suggesting anything icky, that Wolfgang & his sister must have shared a powerful bond, having weathered such a childhood together.

It's Henry Ford's birthday, too. Coming up on his 150th in 2013. Did he have a sister?

Don't know.

Don't much care, really....

July 29

"Ours is a world where people don't know what they want and are willing to go through hell to get it." Don Marquis, born this day in 1878

So, Clara Bow, the girl who had "IT" would have been 105 years old today. She'd had it, I'll bet, by the time her life came to an end, rather sadly & too soon, I seem to remember, by way of a documentary I saw a long time ago. www.clarabow.net/

And, according to Wikipedia, this is the anniversary of the birth of William Powell.Go to this link and you'll see how handsome he was.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Powell If you have nothing better to do today, this hot, steamy day, one of Mr. Turner's channels is showing his films today. Right this minute they're showing Reckless w/ Jean Harlow, another IT girl, beloved by her costar, blue-eyed Wm. P., soon to have his heart busted, so the old gossip goes, when Jean dies young in '37, about a year & a half after that movie came out .... When I was a kid, old black & white movies came on after the local news, at 10:15 P.M. ....watched them on summer nights. Wm. Powell & Myrna Loy in The Thin Man Jeanette Macdonald, Spencer Tracy & Clark Gable in San Francisco. Don Ameche in Swanee River. It was a film about the life of Stephen Foster, who wrote songs & died the hard way. The movie was made in 1939, the magic year. Twenty years later found 8-year-old me, sitting in the dark with my mom, not wanting to start crying in front of her, when poor, handsome Don/Stephen kicked the bucket, too sad, too broke, too drunk, too soon. Sigh....

Edna

"Being an old maid is like death by drowning, a really delightful sensation after you cease to struggle." Edna Ferber (1885-1968)

I wanted to share, too, that in the course of my gallivant, I spent a bit of time in Appleton, Wisconsin, childhood home of writer Edna Ferber. Sure, she was a journalist who knew just about every big shot + many a colorful bit player in the 1st half of the 20th Century and she'd be worth knowing if only for having been a member of the Algonquin Round Table. www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/the-algonquin-round-table/about-the-algonquin/527/

Stage Door, made into a classic film w/Ginger Rogers & Katherine Hepburn ( "The calla lilies are in bloom again..." ) was just one of the plays Edna wrote with Geo. S. Kaufman. She won the Pulitzer Prize for So Big, her fine little novel. I confess I'm not that much of a fan of her others, such as Giant, Saratoga Trunk, Cimarron, & Show Boat, but of the films born from them? Oh baybee.

No, the reason Miss Edna will always resonate with me is her wonderful memoir, A Peculiar Treasure. Read it and find out what it was like to be a hard-working, celebrated writer, living in a glorious, hellish time in the world.

28th of July

So, 81 years ago today (on Beatrix Potter's 63rd birthday), Janet & John "Black Jack" Bouvier welcomed their firstborn child into their lavish world. Dark-haired girl baby with wide-set eyes that'd see just about the best and the worst of life. Ah well, it's all over now & has been since - 1994? Can it be so long since Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis died? Golly. And I just checked www.brainyhistory.com, which I do about everyday [go ahead: roll your eyes heavenward] & discovered that this is J.S. Bach's deathday. Uff da - can it actually be 260 years since he kicked the bucket? Yup. And somehow that doesn't seem so very unbelievable.

It happened that I had the chance to see the Wilder Pageant in Walnut Grove, MN. As soon as it looked as if the audience & cast members were not going to be thunder-stormed upon, drenched and/or struck by lightning, the pageant, entitled "Fragments of a Dream," was held not so very far from the banks of Plum Creek where Caroline Ingalls did her best to keep house in a dugout. (I took a picture of the sky, but you'll just have to trust me as to its dramatic beauty because I can't position the picture here so the sky is UP and the earth is DOWN.)

Before the all-clear, we've-got-a-field/let's-have-a-show was announced, I was perched on a hay-bale in the backstage barn, my attention torn between an electric sky full of boiling clouds, popping bright with glorious sheets & crackling, forking stabbers AND all the other people with me in the barn, hanging about its big open doorways at either end. All around me were cast members, young & old + family & friends.

More later, m'dears, honest.

I'm Ba-ack!

So, here I am with the seriously cute William Anderson, a.k.a. my friend Bill, up at the Laurapalooza. More about him and said gathering later. Meanwhile, long time, no write - not here anyway and why? Because I've been AWAY. Lovely, enchanting word hat is. Distracted. Out on the road I've been: Independence, MO > KCMO [at The Reading Reptile, the best children's book store in the land] > Clear Lake, IA, w/ thoughts of long-gone Buddy Holly, forever young > New Ulm, MN, where I conducted a bit of a writing workshop with a gaggle of 9- & 10-year-olds + a handful of teenagers (a handful indeed, let me tell you. Nearly knocked over by trouble-&-heartache vibes coming off them) in a house once lived in by Anton Ga'g, a wonderful artist who died too young, but not before fathering 7 children. He's known these days chiefly because one of them, Wanda, grew up to be a writer & artist, author/illustrator of Millions of Cats. Really, M. of C. was my introduction to children's books, thanks to Bob Keeshan, a.k.a. Captain Kangaroo, bless him, back when I was short & cute & Ike Eisenhower was in office.

From New Ulm, where I climbed 99 steps in order to look up the skirt of Hermann the German www.roadsideamerica.com/story/11260 over to Mankato, a.k.a Deep Valley, MN, to the 1st annual Laurapalooza, where I met Julie of Wisconsin, who sews swell prairie dresses, pinafores, & bonnets to be worn at pageants & other occasions, celebrating the life, the stories & values expressed in the work of the Ingalls's 2nd daughter, bless her forever.

I got to meet Miss Melanie Stringer, gloriously attired in a gown of brown + swellegant straw bonnet, a la Miss Ingalls, c. 1882; my friends Barb & George Hawkins, Maria Millen,

Lona Falenczykowski, one of the Founding Mothers of the Betsy-Tacy Society as well as the voice behind the microphone at KMSU-FM on Monday nights for Jazz with Miss Lona www.mnsu.edu/kmsufm/schedule/jazz. and of course, Bill Anderson, who knows all there is to know about the Ingalls & Wilder clans. Again, more about all of this and ever so much more, later on. Too much to tell

at this sitting. For now, I must be away.

this land is still his land, his, mine, ours

Woody Guthrie's birthday today it is.  His mother brought him into this vale of tears in July, 1912.    Yes," he'd write & sing, "as through this world I've wandered I've seen lots of funny men; Some will rob you with a six-gun, And some with a fountain pen”

I'll be thinking of that wise, rambling song-spinner today and the day will be better for it.