The Emilie Loring Collection

If a character in the book you were reading put her laptop and her HydroFlask into the same tote bag, you’d call it foreshadowing. I missed it, though.

In a hurry to follow the ambulance taking my mom to the hospital, I was utterly surprised when I looked into the bag and found my laptop soaking in a shallow pool of lemonade. Uh oh.

Mom recovered from influenza in a week’s time, but she sustained new injuries in the hospital, so an investigation is underway as she receives continuing in-home care from the wound team. Similarly, my laptop remained in ICU through the Thanksgiving holiday. When it finally returned to me, it was wiped clean, and I undertook the reloading process.

If I were writing fiction, that would be enough drama, but in real life, the fates had more in store. Upstairs, leaky plumbing silently released water that accumulated and finally burst through the ceiling downstairs. To ready ourselves for the restoration process, all of the furniture from the foyer was moved into my study, where my Emilie Loring materials reside…

"But the smart frog flew like a tug-boat screw,
And he swore he'd not go down.
So he kicked and splashed and he slammed and thrashed,
And he kept on top through it all."
~ Holman Day

Floor, ceiling, and walls have now been repaired, and I will apply fresh paint today, as soon as I finish two quick blogs to you–one that I tried to write on my phone during Mom’s hospital stay, and a short story of Emilie’s that you certainly deserve after waiting so long to hear from me.

Thanks for your patience as I handled things here. Life sure comes at us fast sometimes, doesn’t it?

But Emilie was right about the beautiful things being as real as the challenges. My granddaughter made Christmas cookies with me this week. The hospital, computer, and upheaval–poof! All gone in the joy of that smile!

On to the blog post I started before the havoc began…

What’s Missing from Emilie Loring’s Books

Best Blueberry Muffins

Martha Stewart’s most recent cookbook shares one hundred of her favorite recipes, including blueberry muffins. Her ingredients and their measures seemed awfully familiar (see: “Kudos and Muffins for You”), so I pulled up the vintage recipe from Boston’s Jordan Marsh department store and compared it, side by side (or top to bottom, if you’re reading on your phone) with Martha’s.

One hundred years later, it’s still a winning recipe.

The fields around Emilie’s Stone House were filled with wild blueberries in late August. It’s a wonder, then, that she included none in her cookbook, For the Comfort of the Family. Currants, raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, even gooseberries, appear, but nary a blueberry. She made up for it in A Certain Crossroad:

“… into a clearing blue with enormous berries.”

“Look at those berries in the middle of the pasture! They are the biggest ever!”

“Lured by the increasing size of the berries, the man and the girl followed the faint trail. With her mouth full of the luscious fruit, Judith demanded thickly, ‘Could bears have made this path?'”

“Aren’t these berries whoppers?”

Reading

The caption above says that Emilie is reading, but notice what she holds in her right hand–her reading glasses! We know that she needed them: “Because I had left my spectacles upstairs, I read a recipe wrong…” But we also know that she was highly conscious of her appearance: “It is no use having smart heroines if their creator is dowdy.” I find this little insecurity about wearing glasses an endearing exception in an otherwise bold woman.

Emilie Loring loved reading, and her characters are well read, but we rarely see them reading. Geoffrey Hilliard collects books, Noah Caswell quotes the classics from memory, but her characters rarely read books “on stage,” as it were, unless it’s out loud to a child.

“Her thoughts were on the indistinct rumble of her father’s voice in the room overhead as he read to Betty.” Gay Courage

“With Betty’s soft gold curls against her shoulder Nancy read aloud from the story of Alice in Wonderland…” Gay Courage

“Sonia settled his head more comfortably against her shoulder and picked up the book. ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea…'”

Reading is an active internal process but too still for the pace of Emilie’s novels. Instead, she shows her characters between reads:

“Tommy Benson, his finger beetween the pages of a book, his hair rampant, his blue eyes sparkling with mirth, egged on the two as he quoted from his favorite ‘Ancient Mariner…’ The Trail of Conflict

“Carfax laid down his book and approached the group by the fire.” Here Comes the Sun!

“The man’s sensitive hands were folded upon an open book…” A Certain Crossroad

Did she ever use the same device that she used for thoughts, quoting a book and relating the character’s thoughts about it? I have a nagging feeling that she did, but I’ll let you find and share those examples while I get busy typing Emilie’s short story, “Kismet Takes a Hand” for you.

Happy Holidays and Happy Landings!