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Short Story Sneak Peek: Tying Up to the Pier by Carol Wobig

I met Carol Wobig through RedBird-RedOak Writing. In person, she’s an amazing, calm, and kind soul. Her writing reflects the same with stories that are quietly funny yet full of great images and emotion. At a recent book launch, she read from her collection, POACHED IS NOT AN OPTION, and I asked–almost immediately–if I could share an excerpt here. After she agreed, my only challenge was choosing which story to highlight; they are all excellent.

Tying Up to the Pier

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Rachel lives in town. She takes me shopping on Wednesdays, which I do appreciate. She’s the youngest of my kids, and the bossiest. She has a list of things I should do: sell the cottage, move into town, fix my bunions, cut my hair. I look like the old lady that I am, my grey hair in a scrawny knot, my fat covered with polyester pants and flowered tops from Wal-Mart.

She supervises me all day long when we shop.

“Mom, do you see that curb?  Mom, do you need to use the rest room?  Mom, don’t order that. It’s full of fat.”

I’m only seventy-eight, not a hundred and eight.

So, it’s Wednesday and I have to put away these groceries, but first I need to get these loafers off. I only wear them when I go out to keep Rachel happy, and I do look with love on my old tennies when I walk in the door. Wally cut holes in them to relieve the pressure on my bunions.

It is odd to come home to an empty house. Wally’s coffee cup still sits on the counter with a spoon standing in it, a “Gone Fishing” note under its edge, the paper yellow and curled. It was his dream, this cottage. We moved out here for good when he retired. I love it, too, but yesterday I noticed that the front porch is leaning forward a bit. Maybe it needs to be propped up. What would that cost? And I can’t really keep up with the outside work. The trees are starting to drop their leaves. Next will be the snow. What will I do about that?

Another problem. All summer, I’ve slept on a lawn chair out on the porch. Some nights I start out in the bedroom, but before long I’m out on the porch. It isn’t death, that Wally died in the bed. I knew it was coming, and in the end found myself wanting it to come for his sake and mine. I’ve washed everything, aired it out for weeks, but still can’t breathe when I lie down in there.

And my worst problem is the pictures. Not only did Rachel take dozens at every Christmas and birthday, but she fixed them in frames, brought them over and hung them on the walls and arranged them on every flat surface in the cottage. Even in the bathroom. Now I have to walk through the place like an old horse with blinders. They’re attacking me. I could just take them down, but she’d have a fit.

Lots of the pictures are of Wally and his best buddy Willy. I know, Wally and Willy, the teasing never stopped. Willy’s tying up at the pier right now. He just threw a stringer of fish out of the boat, is hoisting himself up onto the pier.

I meet him at the fish table by the back door. “Nice catch.”

“Got a couple of perch.” He holds them up by the gills.

I sit on an overturned bucket, rest my back against the warm shingles. Scales fly up his arms and into the white hair fuzzing up over his undershirt.

“Just one’ll do,” I say, when he hands me four fillets.

“Sometimes I forget he’s gone.”

“Not me,” I say. “I’ve got all of these damn pictures looking back at me day and night.”

“Just take them down. I can do it for you.” He wraps his fillets in newspapers and hoses down the table.

“It’s not that simple.”  I sweep the fishy water out onto the grass.

“Rachel?”

“I’m afraid of her.” I laugh, but it’s the truth. “I’m afraid she’ll think I’ve gone off the deep end and haul me off to the home.”

“I’ll stand up for you,” Willy says and buttons up the plaid shirt he’s taken off before he cleaned the fish so Shirley didn’t get mad at him. He has his fears, too.

“Thanks,” I say. ”We’ll see what happens.” I stand at the top of the stairs and watch him walk back down to the lake, the bundle of fish under his arm. He looks up and waves before he pulls away from the pier.

That night, the temperature drops. I wrap myself up in two of the kids’ old sleeping bags, and add one of Wally’s knit hats and a pair of gloves to my ensemble. Cold as it is, one lost mosquito buzzes around my neck until I give up and let the damn thing bite me. I can’t sleep anyway. The cottage. The leaves. The snow. The pictures. The cold. If I move the wrong way, the cold sneaks in and I have to readjust everything.

In the morning, warm in my cocoon, I listen to the radio I keep out here.  A cold front is on the way. Now what? I don’t really want to wake up under a blanket of frost. Wally died on May 12th, almost six months ago. I do know what Oprah’s advice would be: I should kick myself in the butt and move on. The other day she said that if you want something, you should imagine it first.

So, I get dressed and take my coffee down to the lake, sit on our old boat that’s pulled up on the shore, close my eyes, and try to get my imagination in gear. The sun warms my face, the lake laps the shore, and next thing I know I fall asleep and dump the coffee in my lap.

“Hey, Anita,” Willy putters up to the pier, cuts the engine “I need to talk to you.”

I walk out on the pier. My wet pants slap against my thighs.

“I forgot to tell you yesterday,” he says after we have a good laugh about my pants, “I told Wally I’d take care of the yard for you, and the snow.”

“Oh, yeah?”  I fold my arms and look over toward the island so he doesn’t see my eyes fill up. “That’ll be great.  I was worried.” Wally, my sweet Wally, taking care of me from the other side.

“And I’ll see if I can find somebody to brace up the porch before it snows,” Willy adds. He pulls the cord on the motor and backs away from the pier. “I’ll get back to you.”

“Thanks,” I say and watch him guide his boat out to the middle of the lake and drop a line.

All that’s left is the pictures. What would Wally want me do? He’d want me to be comfortable in the cottage he loved. Protect me from Rachel, I say to him and walk back up the hill.

I carry all the pictures out to the kitchen table, open up frame after frame, and drop the photographs into plastic grocery bags. The frames I stack in a box for Rachel and wait for her daily death call.  At 11:01 the phone rings.

“I’m out shopping.” she says. “Do you need anything?”

“I do,” I say. “A bucket of white paint.”

“What are you going to paint?”

“I want to do some touch-up work.”

“Not in the living room. You’re not going to take down all those …”

“Oh, I’m losing you,” I say and hang up. My people on “The Guiding Light” do that all the time, but it’s a first for me. Feels good, until after lunch, when I hear the crunch of tires on the gravel in the driveway.

. . . .

9e1712b1861b0ad8986ce7.L._SX80_Carol Wobig spent a few years in a convent and many more years working in a pizza factory, before she retired and started writing. Her monologues were performed in community theater, and her stories attracted fans in Gray Sparrow Journal, Clapboard House Journal, and on Milwaukee Public Radio’s Flash Fiction Friday. Contact Carol at carolwobig415@msn.com. You can purchase a copy of POACHED IS NOT AN OPTION, on Amazon, on Nook, and at Milwaukee’s East Side independent bookstore, Boswell Books.

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Redirect: Writing in Short Form

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Today I’m guest blogging for Rochelle Melander, the Write Now! Coach, and talking flash nonfiction:

There are certain stories my gut wants me to put down on paper.

Like the one about the summer I turned twenty-two, when I climbed into a tiny Isuzu Trooper and rode in the back seat all the way from Norman, Oklahoma to the Catskills of upstate New York. So much changed for me during that trip, change embodied in the vision of Pennsylvania’s vibrant green hills rolling along side me like waves.

Or how, the week after my mother died, I desperately clung to whatever artifacts of hers I could, from her bible to that pair of gaudy glasses she wore in the late eighties. Why did she keep those glasses, and why couldn’t I let them go?

And then, the story of how, preeclamptic, I gave birth to my son three weeks early, in a state of frenzy. Then, I walked around in a slight haze of post-partum depression for the next six months, so much so that getting him and myself from the upstairs to the downstairs floor of our house by day’s end was cause to rejoice. In a ball of tears. Because everything about motherhood frightened me.

I want to write these stories. In fact, I’ve tried to write all three. But, I’ve struggled to transform the power of those memories onto the page.

Read more from my article, Writing in Short Form: The Power of Flash Nonfiction on Rochelle’s blog.

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When Less Equals More, Guest Post by Rochelle Melander

Today, I welcome Write Now! Coach, Rochelle Melander to the blog.

Rochelle and I met a short while ago over coffee, and, while I nibbled away on a giant blueberry muffin, I groaned about my inability to move beyond the first draft of my novel. I can’t possibly tackle such a large work of writing, I complained. Rochelle then offered me a bit of perspective on long, complicated projects like novels. I loved her advice so well that I asked her to write a guest post about it.

And, lucky for you, she’s not only giving us three tips for surmounting the insurmountable, but she’s also giving away a 30-minute complimentary coaching session. If I were you (and I wish I were!), I’d drop my name in the comments, stat! Random.org will choose the winner on Tuesday, April 30th.

When Less Equals More:
Using Small Steps to Tackle Big Projects

by Rochelle Melander

Highly visionary companies often use bold missions–what we prefer to call BHAGs (pronounced bee-hags, short for “Big Hairy Audacious Goals”)–as a particularly powerful mechanism to stimulate progress. —Jim Collins

Accomplish the great task by a series of small acts. —Tao Te Ching

I start the day with buckets of energy and a packed to-write list. Not only do I have several blog posts due, but there are queries to write, speeches to prepare, and stacks of books to read. Add to that my day job: I’m a writing coach and productivity consultant. I can’t imagine life without at least one “big hairy audacious goal” – and right now I have a few racing around my brain, competing for slots in my schedule. Before I get to my mid-morning snack, I panic and my energy level sinks. How can I accomplish all this?

One small step at a time. That’s how.

According to psychologist Robert Maurer, author of One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way, the fear center of our brains panic at the thought of a big hairy audacious goal. When we think about writing a book, our fight-or-flight response kicks in, and the thinking part of our brain freezes. We experience “writer’s block.” When we break that big goal into small steps, taking teeny tiny steps toward writing a book, we tiptoe past the fear part of our brain and are able to move forward without panic.

I’ve been using the small step method to write books for years. And that’s how I plan to get through this week and accomplish my next big hairy audacious goal. Here are three ways to use the small-step method to tackle your writing goals.

Write a small chunk.

It doesn’t matter what you are writing, an epic novel or the definitive guide to soup—every single project can be broken down into small chunks. In Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird, she equates the big old writing project to “trying to scale a glacier.” No kidding. Her solution: “I go back to trying to breathe, slowly and calmly, and I finally notice the one-inch picture frame that I put on my desk to remind me of short assignments. It reminds me that all I have to do is write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame.” (p. 17). The one-inch picture frame puts a wonderful visual boundary around your writing. Other small chunks include: a scene, a character action, a paragraph, a single idea, a sidebar, or a descriptive detail.

Small step: Break down your big project into a list of several small chunks.

Write for a short period of time.

Many of the clients I work with bemoan their lack of time to write. They long for a whole day or weekend spread out before them so that they can play with big ideas and dig into their writing. I’ve had the same desires, until I actually get those big chunks of time without the spouse, kids, and dogs. Then I panic: “Oh my, oh my, oh no—how can I possibly fill all this time?” I long to be back home, where I can fold towels, chop vegetables, and walk dogs between writing sessions. Over the years, I’ve discovered that I actually accomplish more in a series of short chunks of time than I do with a whole day of “free time.”

IMG_0230Small step: Schedule a short period of time (5-15 minutes) to write every day this week. “Every day?” you ask. Yup. That way it will become a habit. Up your chances of success by tying your writing to something you already do: a morning cup of coffee or your lunch break.

Take on small projects.

Have you heard this quote from Cicero, “Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents and everyone is writing a book.” Cicero was a Roman philosopher who lived in the mid-first century BCE (106-43 BCE). As a writing coach, I can assure you that nothing has changed. Children still disobey their parents and nearly everyone I meet wants to write a book. Few seem to have a smidgen of interest in tiny projects. And yet here’s the deal: short writing assignments placed in big venues can garner a lot more attention than a book. According to an article in the Huffington Post, “The average U.S. nonfiction book is now selling less than 250 copies per year and less than 3,000 copies over its lifetime.” Compare that to the million or so readers who might encounter your short piece in a periodical or online.

Small step: Choose a small writing project to work on—a blog post, a filler piece for a print magazine, or a flash fiction story.

Your turn: How has the small step method helped you tackle big hairy audacious goals?

rochelle smallRochelle Melander is an author, speaker, and certified professional coach. She has used the small step method to write ten books, including the National Novel Writing Month Guide Write-A-Thon: Write Your Book in 26 Days (and Live to Tell About It) (Writers Digest, 2011). Rochelle teaches professionals how to create a writing life, write books fast, get published, and connect with readers through social media. For more tips and a complementary download of the first two chapters of Write-A-Thon, visit her online at www.writenowcoach.com.

Also, subscribe to her Facebook page or follow her on Twitter.

PS. Don’t forget to drop your name in a comment; you could win a 30-minute complimentary coaching session.

* Snail climbing wall Photo credit: lisasolonynko from morguefile.com