A specter of love
October 29, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 8 Comments
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The thing about Virginia is that it’s old. There is history here, more than in most places, and that history isn’t confined to places like Williamsburg and Jamestown. It spreads westward too, over the piedmont and the mountains, right to my proverbial backyard.
Some say that our history is still alive in one way or another. I guess the story Jeff Jackson told me a few weeks ago could be classified as “another.”
Jeff and his father, Larry, are hunters. Big time hunters. The sort of Virginia boys who elevate it from sport to near religion.
Always looking for an edge as to where the best game is, Larry heard through the redneck grapevine there was a section of the mountains full of the biggest bucks anyone had ever seen. There was, however, one small problem—those woods were haunted.
Superstitions run deep in the mountains here. Larry and Jeff knew that. They also knew many of those superstitions were tales spun by moonshiners to keep prying eyes away from their stills. Besides, both of them had been in those woods before, and both had never seen anything other than squirrels, snakes, and the decaying foundation of an ancient cabin.
So they went. Hiked in one Saturday morning just before sunup. Jeff left his father under a stout oak on top of a ridge and then made his way another mile down the mountain. Walkie-talkies would keep them in contact, the woods would keep them at peace, and the prospect of a trophy buck would keep them watchful.
Larry sipped coffee while the mountain threw off its dark blanket and began the morning. The rising sun brought the woods to life slow and easy. Birds sang and critters scurried for breakfast. The cool wind was enough to keep him alert but not cold.
And then it all stopped. Everything. The birds, the critters, the wind. Life one moment, not-life the next.
Larry exchanged his thermos for his rifle, thinking that maybe the sudden stop in activity meant a bear or mountain lion was making its way through the area. But he heard and saw nothing.
Then from the corner of his eye Larry saw movement through the trees. He peeked from behind the oak and fingered the trigger.
Then he went numb.
There, no more than twenty yards away, was a woman. Not a big deal, usually. Plenty of women hiked the mountains. But two things set this particular woman apart from the rest. One was that she was wearing a wedding dress. The other was that there was empty space from her waist down.
Larry couldn’t move. Couldn’t talk, couldn’t shoot, couldn’t breathe. All he could do was stare as the legless bride floated past him and disappeared into the woods.
The silence remained behind like a whoosh of air after a car has passed. Then a cardinal sang from far away, a signal that all was safe. Other birds joined in. Critters went back to scurrying. The breeze returned.
And Larry discovered he could talk again.
“GIT UP HERE BOY NOW!!” he screamed into the radio.
Jeff, one mile down the ridge, had been oblivious to everything that had happened. All he knew was that his father was screaming for help, which to him meant Larry had either been shot or was in the process of being eaten.
“What’s wrong?!” he said through the radio. “DAD? WHAT’S WRO—”
“—Git. HERE. NOW!!”
Jeff ran.
He found Larry still peering from behind that oak tree. All his father would say was, “We gotta get the heck outta here, boy.”
A year has passed. Larry’s spent the majority of that time obsessed with what he saw. He’s researched and read, spoken with writers and professors. All to find some sense of what happened. He thinks he has.
According to Larry, the decaying foundation he and Jeff found was once the home of the Walker family in the late 1700s. Father, mother, son, and a daughter named Abigail, who just so happened to be hopelessly in love and engaged. But war came to the colonies. Abigail’s love joined Washington’s army. He never returned.
Larry’s convinced it was Abigail he saw that day, destined to forever roam the mountains in search of the man she lost and to be dressed for a wedding she’ll never have. There are some who snicker when he says that. And there are more than some who think that rather than stumbling upon a ghost, Larry stumbled upon a still and got sauced.
Me, I’m not so sure. I think Larry just might be telling the truth. Because there is ecstasy in finding true love, and there is torment in losing it.
Chasing happiness
October 27, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 18 Comments
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As is often the case, I didn’t say anything in response. I just let her turn around and begin the walk toward her next class, where the exam she’d spent four days preparing for would be handed to her by a cold and serious professor who didn’t actually have any power in making it worth it or not, either. I wanted to tell her that, that and more. But by then she was gone.
Not that actually saying something would have helped. I’ve learned that for the most part you should just keep your mouth shut when someone is venting in your general direction. Using words is not your job. Even the kindest and most heartfelt advice can backfire. Let them say their peace and wag their finger and warn that this better be worth it. If you have to do something, just do things like nod and smile and purse your lips. That seems to work.
The tantrum above is of a fairly common sort around here, the result of a combination of too much course work to keep up with and too little time to do it all. I’ll give the young lady who was yelling at me credit, though. She was still trying. Most of the college students here give up around this time of year, content to either coast their way through the remainder of the semester or acknowledge defeat and withdraw.
But not her. She’s in this for the long haul. All of the papers to write and textbooks to read and exams to take are merely the last obstacle the must hurdle on the way to what she wants most in life.
Happiness.
That’s it, just that one word. While many people her age seem to have their futures already laid out in detail, including everything from their work to their home to what they’re going to drive, she’s kept things manageably broad. She just wants happiness. Whatever profession she ends up entering, whatever sort of house she ends up living in, and whatever vehicle she drives doesn’t really matter. Just as long as they offer her a happy life.
I didn’t really know what to say to that. I’d never known anyone who went to college just to be happy on the other side of those four years. And though I was tempted to say here reasons for studying so hard and fretting so much were good ones, I couldn’t. Because that just didn’t seem right to me.
There was a time when I measured my own happiness as the distance between the life I lived and the life I wanted. The closer those two lives approached one another, the happier I was. The farther away they drifted, the more miserable I became.
And that seemed right to me in a funny sort of way. I thought that everyone needed a goal, someplace to get to or something to accomplish. Such a thing kept people from fading away into the sort of death that can find the heart long before the body. I still think that’s true. But where I tripped myself up was in thinking that I couldn’t be happy until I got there.
I think that’s sort of what’s happening to the student who was yelling at me. “This better be worth it,” she said. By which she really meant, All of this work now better bring me happiness in the end.
Maybe it will. I certainly hope so.
But a part of me thinks she’ll learn what I did, that the things she seeks are with her now, this instant, and that she misses them because she constantly looks ahead rather than around.
She’s right in believing that happiness is a place and a time. But it isn’t later, somewhere else.
It’s here, now.
Things that scare the heck outta me
October 25, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 4 Comments
My kids are asking when it will be time to pull the Halloween decorations out of the attic and onto the house. It’s a strange request given the fact that aside from a few cobwebs and maybe a mouse or two, there are no Halloween decorations up there to bring down.
But maybe there should be.
With all the excitement I bring to holidays like Christmas and July 4, I’ve been a little lax in the Halloween department. It’s a day that sometimes seems to clash with my faith. There’s a growing push by Christian leaders to boycott October 31 and treat it as just another day. Witches and ghosts and goblins aren’t good for the soul, they say.
Maybe that’s true. But I for one have never minded Halloween, if for no other reason than it makes us a little more comfortable talking about something we rarely do–what scares us.
If you’d like to know what scares me, what truly shakes me to the core, then hop on over to Katdish’s blog. I’ve bared my soul. You’ll find interesting things, scary things, and things that may even alter your opinion of me. And that’s okay with me. After all, we’re all afraid of something. It’s what we do with that fear that makes the difference.
Our stories
October 22, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 9 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
I try to schedule field trips into my writing life as often as possible. Sitting at a desk and staring at a sheet of paper can dull the senses. It contracts you. The Out There gets lost in all of the In Here. It’s nice to get out every once in a while and wander about the world.
That’s how I found Archie’s store. Because when you are driving down a lonely country road and you happen across a dilapidated building masquerading as an antiques store and the sign on the marquee says Dead People’s Junk, you have to stop and look. You just do. Very often the places that seem too good to be true are true after all.
The creaky wooden door finally gave way with a hard push, ringing the bell that sat suspended over the archway. The old man behind the counter—“Name’s Archie,” he said, and then added, “You break it, you buy it, even if t’ain’t worth nuthin’”—offered me both a Coke and the general layout of the building. “Furniture’s in the back. Art—and I use that term loosely—is to the right. Guns are over by the far wall.”
I sipped and walked, letting my mind wander. Antiques are such because of their age and their scars. They have endured through the years, survived countless moves and deaths and threats of the landfill. And it is because they have endured that they are all rich in story. Antiques are a form of living history.
That’s what I was after in the land of Dead People’s Junk. The stories.
Like the kitchen table that sat stately and dignified in the corner of the back room. Solid oak, with the worn shine of countless years of meals and gatherings. The price tag made me wince and whistle a long exhale. 1927 was written on the tag beneath the dollar amount, as if to justify the value. I took a step back. This was not something I was interested in breaking.
But still, a part of me felt the price would be more than satisfactory if the story of the table was included along with the chairs and the center leaf. Two years after it was built, the stock market crashed. Then Hitler rose. The Japanese attacked. The bomb was dropped. Kennedy was shot. Interspersed between those were times both hard and soft, the ebbs and flows of the great tide that was life. Who had sat at that table through the years? What family had broken bread there? What joys did they share, and what sorrows? To me, those answers—those possibilities—were worth more than the quality of the construction or the grain of the wood.
I exercised my mind in that manner for about an hour, moving through the crowded aisles of castoff belongings. There was a rocking horse I imagined once belonged to a small boy who grew up to be deathly afraid of horses after taking a tumble from that wooden substitution on one long ago Sunday afternoon. A desk where a young lady once sat to write a Dear John letter to her boyfriend at war. An opulent set of china—Never Used, said the tag—that was an expensive wedding gift to a couple who chose a simple life over the extravagant lives of their parents.
I roamed and touched nearly every surface of every object, listening. I thought about the sign out by the road and wondered if that had been Archie’s idea. I wanted to ask him. But by the time I made it back around, he was asleep in his chair. His half-finished bottle of Coke sat by the cash register—an antique in itself. Orange crumbs from the pack of crackers he’d snacked on littered the front of his shirt.
I managed to leave without waking him and pointed my truck toward home. I was satisfied. In my opinion, no better field trip could be had.
But I thought about that sign again as I passed it and decided it was all wrong. That was not Dead People’s Junk. Archie’s store may have been filled with remnants of the past, but they also spoke to our shared future.
To a time when perhaps our own dining room tables will be stuck in the corner, and when people will come and touch them and wonder. That brings me a great deal of comfort. Because we leave more than our belongings to this world when we pass on to the next.
We leave our stories, too.
As speaking of stories and writing and whatnot, my friend Matt Appling posted an interview with yours truly over at his blog, The Church of No People. He asks some not-so-typical questions, and he’s giving away a copy of Snow Day. You can find the interview here.
Encouraging a young reader and epic dad fail
October 20, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 27 Comments
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For a week I watched her curled up on the sofa with brow furrowed. She was the perfect reader, the epitome of the audience every writer desires. She laughed much. Cried some. She pondered and asked questions and underlined her favorite parts.
And it was during all of that when I began thinking about how I was such a wonderful father, fostering in my child a love for words and books and stories. How I was expanding her mind and giving her proof that any dream could be attained with the right amount of work and faith. Yes, a wonderful father. Perfect but for my fallen nature.
Looking back, it seems appropriate that a few nights ago I would be brought back down to earth in such a sudden way. There is a great amount of danger in thinking too less of yourself, but the greater danger lies in thinking too much. Wonderful fathers do not dash the sense of magic and possibility that is inherent in their children. And yet that is exactly what I believe I’ve done.
It began late at night, in that dimness of mind when wakefulness and sleep melt into one another. I was settled in bed, eyes closed, when a thought that perhaps for days had been boring its way to the front of my thick head finally broke through.
It was the afterword. I had written about Santa Claus in the afterword.
About how he wasn’t real.
I threw the covers back and sat up. How could I be so stupid? How could I have forgotten that? Yes, every child must at some point be confronted with that horrible and inevitable truth. It is often the first baby steps on the road to adulthood. But this way? Having to read it in a book your father’s written? There, in black and white, told by the man who has told you over and over that people who don’t believe in Santa are wrong?
My mind seemed to fold in on itself. Men tend to think of problems in terms of solutions. How something went wrong and why doesn’t matter as long as it’s fixed. And I had to fix this. Now.
And that is why I did what just hours before I would have sworn was unthinkable, an act that was so vile and so contrary to everything I believed in that in the process of its commission I felt part savage and part Nazi:
I took my knife into my daughter’s bedroom, opened the copy of my book that lay on her nightstand, and very carefully cut out the afterword.
I set the book back on the nightstand exactly as I’d found it. My daughter, immersed in a sleep of innocence the likes of which I would never enjoy again, never stirred. The only thing that kept me from taking a shower to try and wash all the failure off was the fact that her belief was intact.
Back to bed. Settled into my pillow, covers over me. I said a prayer of both thanks and forgiveness and waited for God to tell me everything would be okay.
He didn’t tell me.
Because I shot up in bed again when another thought managed to finally puncture my thick brain.
Why do writers include things in an afterword?
Because they’ve mentioned them in the book itself.
I hadn’t just mentioned Santa’s imaginary existence in passing. I’d written an entire chapter about it.
Out of bed. Back to my daughter’s room. I looked at the placement of her bookmark.
She’d read that chapter about two days prior.
And that is where things stand as of now. She hasn’t mentioned Santa. I haven’t either. And she seems fine, has even begun a Christmas list.
But I wonder. I wonder what this Christmas will bring. I wonder if I’ll walk into her room one December night and find her in tears. And I wonder what I’ll say.
In praise of the temporary
October 18, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 2 Comments
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I call it Daddy Duty, those things that I as a father am supposed to teach my children. Things like respect and honor and why you should always do your best and love God more than anyone else.
Seems simple enough, except for all the times it isn’t. I’m not sure whether it’s because I’m just not that bright or because my kids are just that smart, but often it seems as if they’re the ones doing all the teaching and I’m the one doing all the learning.
A case in point is the subject I’ve been trying to teach them lately — the value of the eternal. Don’t worry about the things that never last, I’ve told them, just concentrate on the things that never end. Again, that seems simple enough. Also true enough. But as they’ve taught me, it isn’t always such.
Want proof? Head on over to katdish’s blog.
Coming out of the dark
October 15, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 13 Comments
image courtesy of guardian.co.uk
For the last twelve hours or so I’ve been watching the rescue of thirty-three Chilean miners who have been trapped two thousand feet below ground since August 5. It’s been without a doubt one of the most amazing things I’ve ever witnessed and a testament to all that is good about humanity—our compassion for those in danger, our ingenuity for solutions, our love for one another, and our faith that God will see us through even the most unimaginable circumstances. This is a celebration, and rightly so.
I’ve kept up with these men. I’ve seen the news reports and the You-Tube videos, those grainy-green images of ordinary souls choosing to make the hell they were marooned in soft around the edges through friendship. By all accounts, it was their hope and faith that kept them alive. Hope that their fellow man would find a way to rescue them. Faith that God would help them persevere.
It’s their hope and faith that have captured me, not simply their condition. There is hell upon this earth in many places—some would say most places. Places where the stories are not recounted by television reporters and the shadows are not illuminated by floodlights. These men are different. They’ve told their own story and chased away their own shadows through the power of a faith that glowed even brighter in the black tunnels that were their prison. Yet they have done even more than that.
These are people who were thousands of miles away and thousands of feet below, and yet they still managed to somehow hold up a mirror in front of themselves through which I can see myself.
I’m sure I’m not alone. I’m sure you’ve paused at least once in the past few days to wonder what you would have done in those circumstances. How you would have survived and what would have happened to your faith. Would you find a strength and a trust you never thought you possessed, or would what you possessed be snatched away and lost?
My answer? I don’t know. I would like to think I would resemble Mario Sepulveda, the second miner to be rescued and the one who said, “I was with God and with the devil, and I reached out for God.” Or that I would be like Mario Lopez, the tenth rescued and the one who knelt beneath a wide sky to offer a prayer of thanks.
I would like to think I would have joined in their belief that they did not number themselves as thirty-three but instead thirty-four, because God was down there with them. That I would emerge from that hell with my chin up and my chest out, just like they have.
I would like to think that.
And maybe it would be so. Maybe I would prove myself worthy of the challenge God had given me and rise up a better man.
I have never been in a mine, but my life has had its own share of dark and silent places that offered little chance of rescue. I’ve felt that hopelessness consume me. Watched as my strength and faith faded along with the bright light and the wide sky. I will say God preserved me and others rescued me. But whether or not I emerged a better man is a question I cannot answer. The body may be brought up out of the pit, but a bit of you is always left behind and a bit of that darkness always follows. Many of those men may find that to be true, and that is a shame.
In some ways I worry more for them now. I think of the clamor that will surround them and the hounding they will receive, all for the chance of a headline or a news special. That, I think, is a bigger shame.
But I will thank them now and always. Their bravery and their faith, their steadfast hope, has illumined the cracks in my own. I will work on those things. I must.
Because there are many dark places under the wide sky.
Of fairy tales and monsters
October 13, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 11 Comments
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I try to keep my children fed on a steady diet of fairy tales, usually at night just before bed. I’ve found that is the time of day most conducive to the imagination—the darkness, the shadowplay on the walls, the warm covers. That small period of time between awake and asleep is when all things seem most possible, both the good and the bad.
I tell their stories separately. My son usually goes first, as those fifteen minutes or so provide ample time for my daughter to discuss “girl things” with her mother. By the time I sit upon the edge of her bed and in the outer reaches of her Disney princess lamp, she’s more than ready to participate in a bit of reverie. But though these two sets of fairy tales involve two very different children, there is much in common as far as plot and characters go. These are, after all, fairy tales. They know what to expect.
Things like danger, for instance. Damsels in distress and princes in peril. There is lost treasure and hidden lands. Adventure and, at times, the very slightest hint of romance. And monsters. Usually monsters.
I’m sure there are a lot of parents out there who join me in these nightly visits, many of whom do so with this one goal in mind—to get their children to sleep. That is the goal. This isn’t always easily accomplished, but it usually works well enough. Better than threats, at least in my experience.
But I will say that getting my kids to sleep is only one of the purposes of the fairy tales, and not even the most important one. To me, the important one is that they become introduced to the power of story to shape their lives.
For thousands of years humanity sustained itself upon the very sorts of legends I read for and tell my children. They are our shared connection to the past, back to a time when they were shared to our forefathers around campfires and in great gathering halls. Stories not merely of King Arthur and Lady Guinevere, but also of Grendel and Achilles.
To speak of them and pass them on is to preserve the very best part of what it means to be human. They grant my children an education they sadly lack in their public schooling. I truly believe that. I believe that I not only entertain them, I teach them.
I teach them the values of things such as sacrifice and perseverance and honor. The healing that is found in forgiveness. The necessity of love. All virtues that make life not only more beautiful, but worth the living.
This past weekend brought alone with it the first of October and the promise of Halloween. That means both of my kids will require more scariness in their bedtime stories, an extra dose of monsters and witches and ghosts. I gladly acquiesce, even if that means the odds of a late-night bad dream increase.
The monsters have their own place in the stories that shape our lives, and that is a lesson I wish to teach them, too. Because truth be told, fairy tales aren’t really that far removed from reality. There really is treasure in this world; I’ve found some of my own. And there really are vast hidden lands, though they’re for the most part inside of us than out. My children will find their futures littered with danger and adventure and romance. I want them to know that ahead of time.
And they will confront their own monsters. I want them to know that ahead of time, too.
Not just that those monsters exist.
But that they can defeat them.
Message in a bottle
October 11, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 32 Comments
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I woke this morning thinking of our family vacation to the beach this past summer. On our last day there, I walked out onto the pier to fulfill what had over the years become a personal ritual. Tucked into the back pocket of my jeans was a small glass bottle with a note inside. Nothing profound, just a few words that said I was here and that I hoped whomever would find it would be there. I tossed it beyond the tide and watched as it bobbed in the current and was then taken away.
I’ve done this every year since I was a child, and I will continue to do so. There is something inherently fantastical about a message in a bottle. That it could connect one human being to others is virtually impossible, most say. And yet history tells us different.
In 1784, a Japanese seaman named Chunosuke Matsuyama and his forty-four companions were shipwrecked on a reef in the Pacific Ocean. Shortly before they died of starvation, he carved their story on a piece of driftwood, secured it in a bottle, and tossed it into the water. One hundred and fifty years later, Chunosuke’s bottle washed ashore in the very village where he had been born.
And there was Thomas Hughes, a British infantryman who in 1914 wrote his wife a letter, placed it in an empty beer bottle, and tossed it overboard into the English Channel. It was found by a fisherman in 1999 and returned to Thomas’s daughter, Emily. She was two years old when her father went off to war, and never got the chance to know her father. Thomas was killed in battle two days after writing those final words. It was the only letter Emily ever had from him.
On their 1979 cruise to Hawaii, John and Dorothy Peckham spent their time putting notes into empty champagne bottles and throwing them into the ocean. Four years later, they received a letter from Hoa Van Nguyen, who said he and his brother had found one of the bottles while adrift in the Pacific attempting to escape Communist Vietnam. Hoa wrote that finding the bottle was an answered prayer and gave them the strength to carry on. The Peckhams wrote back and offered to help Hoa and his family escape to America. The two families met in Los Angeles in 1985.
Amazing, isn’t it? All of them.
That’s what I woke thinking. Just how amazing and wonderful it all is.
October 11 marks the official publication of my first novel, Snow Day. Those of you who have been gracious enough to visit here know about the story and why I wrote it. I won’t revisit that. What I will do instead is say this:
Today I am tossing a longer letter into a larger sea. I will spend the next long while watching it bob in currents made not of water, but of voices. I do not know where those currents will carry it or when or how far. But I have abundant hope that if need be, my little bottle will wash upon your own shores and offer whatever comfort and hope you need.
If that is indeed the case, then I invite you to toss a bottle of your own my way. Let us complete that amazing and wonderful circle and share our stories. We may in fact become convinced that life is more than a spattering of randomness.
That it is instead beauty and joy and a reason to smile.
My friends at Faith Words have been kind enough to throw me an online party to celebrate the official release of Snow Day. I would be honored if you would join us.
Visit their Facebook page here.
And follow them on Twitter here
Watch for the #SnowDayBook hash tag on Twitter for updates, trivia, giveaways and more surprises.
Updates will also be posted on my new Facebook page here.
You’re invited to a party
October 8, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 20 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
The first party I was ever invited to was held at the local skating rink in honor of Kevin Bowen’s sixth birthday. Kevin and I were pretty good friends—our desks were side by side in Mrs. Washington’s first grade class. Proximity in the classroom more than made up for the distance between us in other areas. Kevin’s parents were country clubbers, the sort of people who hired other people to cut their grass and then watched them while sipping martinis from the veranda. My parents? Not country clubbers. At all.
That first party was quite the experience. The invitation said “Sunday attire requested” at the bottom, just beneath big red letters that spelled out FUN! Mom explained to me that meant I had to look like I was going to church. I couldn’t quite understand how anyone could have FUN! at a party while being dressed for preaching, but I didn’t care. This was Kevin. My buddy. And it was a party.
It was also good one, as it turned out. Kevin’s mom was as prim and proper as I’d expected, but she was also nice enough to loosen the reins of adult supervision enough to allow us kids to have as much fun as we could. We laughed and played and told stories. There were gifts and prizes. We were all exhausted by the time it was all finished, but it was the sort of exhausted that leaves you feeling good.
I’ve been to a lot of parties since, but my first was by far the best. Not just because we were all kids, but because we were all just as much different as alike. There were black kids like Ronnie Somerset and white kids like me. There were rich kids like Kevin and poor kids like most everyone else. Healthy kids like Michael Davis, who skated for three hours straight without stopping, and sick kids like Jamie Heatwole, who laughed more than anyone though confined to a wheelchair.
None of that mattered. That’s what made it so good. It didn’t matter what we had or didn’t, we were together. Joined for a few short hours with no other goal in mind than to celebrate and smile.
That’s the way to throw a party.
In that regard, I’d like you to consider this an invitation. Monday marks the official publication date for Snow Day, and the good folks at FaithWords have been kind enough to offer to host an online party for the occasion. Feel free to join us on Twitter and on my new Facebook page, and be sure to stop back by here Monday morning for a very special post. If you’d like to sample the first couple of chapters, just click on the Snow Day cover in the sidebar.
It’s entirely appropriate that you should all be invited. I have readers who’ve been visiting my virtual front porch since the beginning. Many came along shortly thereafter. Many more just recently. Regardless of when or how our paths crossed, I can say from the bottom of my heart that none of this would be possible without you. Your comments and emails and constant encouragement have been sweet water that saw me through more arid deserts than you know. It’s because of you that Monday will be a lot more than just the start of a new workweek.
Like Kevin’s mom, I promise FUN! Unlike her, Sunday clothes are not required.
As always, I say come as you are.
Faith Words will kick off the party at 9:00 a.m., CST
Visit their Facebook page here.
And follow them on Twitter here
Watch for the #SnowDayBook hash tag on Twitter for updates, trivia, giveaways and more surprises.
Author of Snow Day and Paper Angels (November 2011), both by FaithWords. But don't let that fool you. I'm just as confused as anyone.
And that is fine with me, because the great thing about wandering around in the fog is that you never know what you might run into.
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