DING! APPLES WIN!

This week the apple was named the most pesticide-laden of all fruits and vegetables, so what’s a consumer to do?
How do you eat an apple?
Should you eat apples?
What should you do with the non-organic apples you just bought?
Is it okay to eat non-organic apples if you peel them?


Everybody should know how to clean an apple. Let’s say you’re on a tight budget and you haven’t purchased your apples in the organic section of the grocery store.

Like radiation, exposure to pesticides is cumulative.

You can’t eliminate all pesticides from your diet, but you can cut down on how much you ingest. How? Wash the fruit.

In order the understand how to wash an apple, you need to know what happens to an apple in the field and after harvest. Pesticides are applied with a carrier, and that carrier is usually oil-based. Pesticides are horribly, horribly, horribly expensive, and the oil makes the pesticide stick to the fruit so that it doesn’t wash away in the first rain. Another thing to know: Apples are sprayed all season long, from first bud (to make them set) to just before harvest. Pesticides can’t be sprayed within a certain time frame, I think it’s maybe two weeks before picking, but I’m not sure about the exact time restriction. The final chemical application might be something called Stop Drop, not a pesticide, but a product that keeps the apples from…you guessed it, dropping. This can be applied two to five days before harvest.

After the pick. This rarely applies in small orchards, but you want to know what makes those beautifully displayed apples so shiny? Wax. They go through a wax bath before hitting the shelves. So you have wax and oil and pesticides. This is why water alone isn’t the best method for cleaning fruit, and why it’s best to wash apples with soap. The soap (in products like Fit, a fruit and vegetable wash) will cut the wax and oil.

So if you haven’t eaten an apple in quite some time and you want to eat a shiny, beautiful apple, wash it with soap and rinse it well. Of course it’s simply best to buy organic, but we can’t always do that. And I don’t know what to say about peeling. I’d like to know how much poison leaches through the skin. It would depend on the apple. A thick-skinned apple like a Winesap or a Jonathan might not have much leaching at all, but something thin, like a Transparent, would most likely have more.

Pesticides create perfect, beautiful apples.

KITTY MEMOIR

“Yesterday I was put to sleep.” Kitty memoir


It shouldn’t hurt this much, but it’s like the death of a person. I wish I’d waited one more day. And one more day. I retrace the past week, I examine and wonder, and see the days through a different lens every time I look at them. One minute I think I waited too long, years too long. Another, I think I didn’t wait long enough. I wish he were with me right now. That’s all I know.

He was old. Almost twenty.

The princess and Latoya, St. Paul 2003

The last animal from what I call our old life, the life on the farm.

“He’s so charming,” people always said.

He loved it when a group of people got together and sat around talking and laughing. He loved the sound of laughter.

It’s like the death of a person.

He showed up on our farm as a kitten, probably a dump.
“Don’t touch it,” I told my daughter, who was already mentally cuddling the animal. “It might have some disease.”
“It has devil eyes,” my husband said. “Look at how it’s looking at me. Making eye contact.” There was fear in his voice. “Don’t feed it and it’ll leave.”


But the cat didn't leave, and we began calling him Latoya, thinking he was a female.

He hung around the corncrib and caught mice.

One day I found him there, sick. I took him to the vet.
“Pneumonia,” the vet said. “Never seen a case this bad. If he lives, he’ll always be in bad health.” I found out he was a boy, not a girl.

So I took him home and put him in a box in the basement.
“I don’t want that devil cat in the house,” my husband said.
“What is he going to do? Put a spell on you?”
“Maybe.”
The cat recovered and he was returned to the outdoors. I got him neutered, but we continued to call him Latoya.
He was always around. In the field near the house. In the evenings, when I went for a jog, he would follow me, get tired, and wait in the roadside ditch for me to return, then follow me home. I fed him, and he became my cat.

In 1994, I went on a trip.
“Don’t forget to feed Latoya,” I told my son and husband. “I don’t want him roaming, searching for food.”
While I was gone, my husband accidentally ran over Latoya with a sickle mower, a mower used to trim ditches. He was so mangled that he should have been put to sleep, but my son coaxed him out of the culvert where he’d gone to die. The vet did what he could. “I don’t think he’ll live, and he’ll never walk or use the litter box. Take him home, but you’ll probably need to have him put down.” Poor Latoya had two and a half legs, and half a tail. They’d shaved him, and he was as naked as a mole rat.

Over the next month, pieces of him fell off, but he slowly recovered, and the devil cat became a housecat. My constant companion.

St. Paul, 2005

He had no trouble getting around, and could even run and climb a tree if taken outside. Like the vet said, he had respiratory issues off and on his whole life. But he lived and lived and lived.

Two years ago, he was diagnosed with hyperthyroidism, but he couldn’t tolerate the medication. And as time passed, he got so he could no longer go up and down the stairs to sleep with me in my bed. His weight dropped from sixteen pounds to five.

Church house, 2009



I would spend evenings downstairs in the living room with him, watching television. He lost his hearing, and began to yowl if he thought he was alone. The social butterfly. A few days ago, my daughter came by and we realized he could hear us, and he enjoyed sitting with us as we talked and laughed. He still loved the sound of laughter.

This day has been coming for a long time, but I didn’t know it would hurt so much. He was a cat. A cat. But it feels like the death of a person. I don’t understand how humans bond so strongly with their pets, but it’s something profound and crazy and painful and maybe beautiful. I’m not sure about the beautiful. It hurts too much for beautiful.

Twenty years. He was with me through the death of my husband, my move from the farm to Iowa, my move to St. Paul, my move to Wisconsin. In the past several years, he required constant care. Because of that, my adult children and I took him with us when we went up north and stayed at a cabin for a week. I’m not sure if he enjoyed it, but he took it all in stride, the way he did everything.

Me and Latoya at cabin, 2010



I’ve had a lot of cats in my life, but he was special. Unique and almost human. I can’t believe he’s gone. The house is so empty. There’s a giant hole in my heart that I don’t think any other pet could ever fill.

DEWEY FOREVER

If you happen to read The Orchard, you’ll know that I lived just outside the town of Burlington, Iowa, before moving to St. Paul, Minnesota. My place was located four miles out of town, up a steep and rutty dead-end road. At the bottom of the hill, before the challenging road, was a farm owned by a strange little man who wore nothing but brown jockey shorts that had once been white, striped tube socks, and tennis shoes. His name was Dewey, and I never saw him in anything but the shorts, although I assume he wore more clothing in the winter.


Dewey’s style of undress wasn’t unlike that of the Naked Bookseller immortalized by Lee Goldberg back in 2006.

Lee is the one wearing clothes.


Dewey sold ear corn out of his barn. A person could just drive into the barn, put a bag in her car, and leave money in a wooden box. I never ran into Dewey while buying corn to feed the squirrels. There were times I was sure he was in the house, and times I could tell he’d just been there. Like a bowl of milk left for the cats. The best way to get a halfway decent look at him was when he was walking his dog along the road, or when he was in the field on his tractor. I was told he wore the underwear to town, and that he’d been escorted out of the mall on more than one occasion. I was told the only person he liked was his mother, and she was dead.

He and I were both antisocial misfits, but I liked to think mine was temporary. I was healing, and I knew that one day I would emerge from my self-imposed exile ready to reconnect with the world. For Dewey, it wasn’t a phase. And I imagine when he was kicked out of stores, he didn’t see himself as the one who needed to conform.

One day I notice a lot of activity just across the road from his house, on the edge of a cornfield.

Dewey was building something.

Every time I passed, he was working away. Digging and prepping the ground with an end loader. Pouring cement. Tractoring in huge cement crosses that eventually made a fence. He painted them white. It took weeks. A monument? It looked like he was building a monument of some kind.

And then one day a metal archway arrived.

Dewey Byar Farms Forever.

I still wasn’t sure just what I was looking at. A monument to his farm?

A few weeks later, I drove by and saw something new inside the square of white cement crosses. A fresh mound of dirt. A grave. Flowers. And I realized Dewey had built a cemetery for himself. At home, I checked the obituaries and found that he'd died of cancer.

The evening before I moved from Iowa to St. Paul, I thought about the cemetery and rushed down the hill to take some photos before it got too dark.

Isn't it equal parts sad and fantastic?
And aren't people weird and wonderful?

ALDO LEOPOLD

I've always had a fascination for Aldo Leopold, mostly because of his environmental and conservation ethics, but also because he's from my hometown of Burlington, Iowa. Like me, he moved from Burlington to New Mexico, then back to the Midwest and Wisconsin, and he and his family are buried in Aspen Grove Cemetery (Burlington) not far from my grandparent's graves. I look him up whenever I visit.

Really want to see this documentary.




Looks like you can purchase a DVD here.

PLAY DEAD GETS A MAKEOVER

What do you think of this cover?

I spent a week trying to find the perfect image, but everything I came up with missed the mark. Nothing really evoked the feel of the book, which is decidedly dark Gothic, but with a tiny bit of camp thrown in.

Finally found this image, which I sent to the great Robin Ludwig, who worked her font magic. I also had the book professionally formatted, and it can now be found at Barnes&Noble as well as Amazon. The iBook will be next.

I chose Play Dead for this makeover because it outsells all of my other titles, and I wanted readers to have a more satisfying reading experience. I also think Play Dead has held up better than most of my Frasier titles. Why? In my opinion, it's because it didn't adhere to the expectations of the police procedural. This can be a tough sell on release day, but in the end I think writing outside the lines has given Play Dead a longer life because it doesn't feel dated and it doesn't feel like a plot you've read a million times.

TWO WAYS TO WIN AN ARC OF THE ORCHARD

You'll find a lot of cool things at Brenda Novak's Annual Auction for the Cure of Diabetes.

Like full manuscript evaluations from agents, vacations, dinner with writers, shopping trips, cruises, and a lot of books.

Brenda Novak's annual auction

I used to ask people to leave a comment in order to enter a drawing. I would actually write down the names and put them in a bowl, but Goodreads has this handy little thing that does it all for you.

The only drawback is that it tries to match readers with books. That's good for a writer, but maybe not so good for people who read my blog because you will be competing against many people who've probably never heard of me and might not even care that much about winning a book. But I thought I'd give it a try.

GOODREADS BOOK GIVEAWAY

I'D KILL FOR A DEAD BODY

Weird things people say when they find out I've written a memoir.

“Who is the memoir about?”

Some people think you need to be a celebrity to publish a memoir. That confusion is understandable. A few agents told me the memoir wouldn’t sell because I wasn’t a celebrity, so if the gatekeepers are saying no, then it’s understandable that people who aren’t even in the business would be confused.

“Maybe I can finally figure out who you are.”

This might seem a strange comment, but it actually makes sense.

I never talk about myself. I never talk about my past lives. I willingly left them behind. And how do you convey an event or a series of events in a light conversation? In a few sentences? It can’t be done, so why try to share it? Especially if the story is dark. People don’t want to hear about that kind of thing when you’re out for dinner. It’s not the time. And maybe if you got wasted enough to share some dark corner of your life, chances are you’d regret it once the hangover wore off. So I can totally understand the bafflement 95% of people feel when I tell them I’ve written a memoir. And stranger still, that anybody would want to publish it. Because live and in person, I’m pretty ordinary. Boring, really.

But as you get older, you begin to realize that those events you stuck away shaped who you are, and maybe it’s time to take them from the bottom drawer and examine them. If you dare. Because it’s a head trip.

I’m working on a second memoir, and more bafflement comes my way. “A second one? I don’t get it. Why would anyone write more than one?”

I’ve come to realize that many people, including the media, confuse memoir with autobiography. There’s a huge difference. Memoir is an artistic interpretation of an event or events. It could be about a day, a week, a month, a year. Or a lifetime. So a single person might have many memoirs in her.

I thought this second memoir would be easier, but I'm struggling with the same issues that I now suspect come with the memoir territory. How to make true life a page turner. How to broaden the story so it is more than the sum of its parts.

A dead body. I'd kill for a dead body right now. Really wish I would open a closet door and find the beef-jerky remains of a man dressed in a leisure suit. Or at the very least, a fetus in the attic.

I have to remind myself that I've been through this before. And the story came together before. And it will be okay without a dead body. And once it starts sounding like a memoir, I know I'm off track.

This week I sent out fifteen ARCs of The Orchard, and realized that no one outside people in the publishing world, the publishing world including friends who freelance edit, have read this book. No one. Gulp.

I still have a few ARCs left, so if you are a reviewer or bookseller and would like a copy, let me know.