Available on Kindle

I am waiting for the proofs of "To All The Horses I Have Loved Before. In the meantime, it is available on Kindle. This is the early edition, so there may be changes later :) It's a collection of short stories about families, rural Minnesota, regional humor, and farm life.

This is a much smaller book. I hope to create a series, working on the next one, tentatively titled Tubby and Me. However, we are currently in the early stages of our summer declutter and clean-up. There are no outside activities for the next three months, so we always end up decluttering at this time of year. This is also the house's scrub-down season. Not my favorite time of the year at all. This year, I have pledged to be ruthless in my decluttering. If it doesn't belong to me, it doesn't look like anything I want/need. It goes. John and Lilly are following me around the house!

When I was a kid, I wanted "stuff". When I was a young woman, I wanted a family. Now I have a family and too much damned stuff! Apparently, the people who live in my house also insist that they are allowed to keep "stuff" as well. As George Carlin pointed out, "your stuff is 'stuff, ' but other people's stuff is 'shit. Not to worry, John has survived sixteen years with Lilly and me, almost twenty-four, and has learned how to defend their 'stuff. '

It's the books that are killing me. We have seven bookshelves in our living room, just our living room. These are not tiny bookshelves; they are taller than I am. And they are packed full. Some are double-stacked. Then there are the bedroom bookshelves and the computer room bookshelves. Lilly has announced frequently that when John and I are gone, "the books are the first to go"! As a contingency plan, I have my niece Mandy on standby. As soon as she hears the first word of my impending doom, or sudden death, she is to rent a U-Haul and drive straight through to Nevada. A friend of mine passed away over Easter this year, and I inherited six five-gallon pails of books, with two storage units to be opened soon as well. At this point, Mandy may need to convince her brother to drive a second U-Haul for her. I have donated three bookshelves of books to work. I even go so far as to tell all the patients repeatedly, "If you are in the middle of reading that book when you get discharged, just take it with you, don't worry." So how in the God's green earth do I still have so many books?

I blame John. He is a reader. I knew that when I married him. We met at age 11, and he was a nerd then. I accepted the fact that he had not changed when I married him thirty-seven years later. I encourage him to use his Kindle. But he won't. It's just not the same reading a book on a Kindle; it doesn't give the whole 'atmosphere' of reading. But that's my excuse; he doesn't have one!

Lilly owns six books total. Somehow, the two of us have a child who listens to podcasts and reads online. Sometimes I wonder about her. I knew my ex-husband, her sperm donor, was cheating on me during our marriage. How can I be entirely sure that she is my child? (Lilly hates it when I say that.) I guess it's just a roll of the dice when you have a child. It happened to Donna as well.

Each year, Donna and her then-husband would go on a family vacation. The kids would pack something to do on the long drive. Lee would take something obscure and vast, like the teachings of Plato and Socrates and their influence on modern civilization over the centuries. Gus would take a Louis L'Amour western or two. Lon would take the same book he had been reading for the last several years on vacation, optimistic that this year he would finish the 250-page paperback. Dayle wouldn't bother to bring anything along, after all, there are road signs and billboards to read.

Lee is the oldest, then Gus, Lon, and Dayle. The answer is simple. My eggs were too old when I had Lilly. This theory has been proven twice over in our family.

Where was I going with this? The fumes of lemon Pledge are starting to get to me!

Oh yes, I gave the new book a new name. It is a collection of short stories of the humorous mishaps of my family and me. To All the Horses I Have Loved Before. It will be available in print on Amazon at the end of July, depending on the outcome of proof editing. It is available currently on Amazon Kindle.