I hate doing laundry. It ranks high on my list of onerous household tasks. But needs must, as the Brits will say.

When household tasks loom, I think of a quote from French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir:

“Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present … Eating, sleeping, cleaning – the years no longer rise up towards heaven, they lie spread out ahead, grey and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won.”

At my house, the battle against clutter and cat hair is never won. One pass with the vacuum cleaner and I have enough cat hair to build a new cat.

What, you ask, does this have to do with writing? To me, writing is a bit like housework. It never ends. I wrote a blog post last month and here it is, time for another one. Same with the newsletter. I spent two years writing The Things We Keep, the Jeri Howard book that was published in March. Now I’m back to work, on a new book.

It’s starting all over again, that perpetual cycle for the writer. Having released my polished progeny into the wild, to be purchased by avid mystery readers, I am once again struggling to whack the next novel out of the brush, wielding brain and keyboard instead of a machete. The book is tangled with plot threads that must be woven together, somehow. And full of characters that I envision inhabiting the book. Plus some that I didn’t imagine—who showed up anyway.

The next months will be spent wrestling with the new book, making the idea come together, persuading the people in my head to behave the way I want them too. Or in some cases, going along with them in the direction they lead me.

And doing research. This is a historical novel and it’s easy to jump down the rabbit hole, wondering what my protagonist wears, how she travels from place to place, and what she fixes for dinner. The novel is also based on actual historical events and features real people in supporting roles. So the timeline of my plot must account for that. In other words, I don’t want my protagonist talking to a historical figure when that person was out of town that week.

No wonder I’m talking to myself, and my characters.

Ah, well, I finish the novel, then I start a new one, and the process goes on and on. While the battle with dust, dirt and cat hair is never really won, at least when I’m finished writing a book, the end result is out there, available to readers.

Eight days! Stuck behind a mountain of snow. Our prize oak tree split and embedded in our car, stranding us. We were down to one charge on one power pack for one phone (our only lifeline) when power was restored.

Imagine no power for eight days. In the mountains that means no heat, water, lights, or flushing toilets. Oh, we had enough food. I went shopping two days before the storm as did everyone else in the area. I was standing, resting my elbow on my shopping cart’s handle, when a woman in another endless checkout line yelled, “It better snow!” 

It did. Feet of it. It was enjoyable, big fluffy flakes softly piling up on our deck, until a tree demolished our car, and the power went out. After that, we had no way out, nor did our neighbors. We have an excellent wood-burning iron stove and dry wood. We could light our gas stove with matches, but not the oven. We had headlamps, and lanterns of all sorts. Batteries for the ages. Puzzles. And a massive goose-down comforter in the unheated bedroom. We believe the ambient temperature of sheetrock to be forty-four degrees.

Now, if you’ve been paying attention, you know my most recent book Unbecoming a Lady takes place in 1876. That’s where we lived for those eight days. It’s tough. But what I learned is this, it can be done. It takes some reorientation, for sure. On the first day, you figure out what is essential, and how to operate all while praying that the power comes back on. You overuse your phone because it is your only point of contact with the outside world. And, in our case, the only way to file the insurance claim on our destroyed car. Oh, for a horse and sleigh like those used in Cora’s little prairie town of Wanee.

Then you get the endless emails from PG&E telling you they are on site and the power will be up Monday … no Wednesday … no Friday.

As time went on, we ate the food from the freezer in the order it thawed. We ate pretty darn good. One night we dined on coconut shrimp and dim sum. Way better than Cora’s winter mainstays of storage vegetables and salted meat.

We lived Cora Countryman’s life for over a week minus the three-story house to clean and the boarders to feed that define her days. Hard, all-consuming work. All your attention turns to staying warm, clean, and fed. You get up in the morning and light the fire, boil water to make pour-over coffee, scramble eggs, and fry bacon. Forget the toast. Then you gather fresh snow for your coolers and dump water in the toilet tanks until they flush. You melt snow and boil it to wash yourself and the dishes. Put fresh batteries in where needed. Shovel a path through the snow to the wood pile. Then shovel it again. Pull out the old laundry drying rack and set it by the fireplace, so everything is dry for the next day’s shoveling. You get the idea. And when it gets dark huddle around the fire with your puzzle. Then repeat.

My husband and I finished the puzzle, headlamps on our heads. It is striking how well we adapted to life without television, streaming, phones, lights, toilets, running water, and a microwave. Perhaps because games were played outside when we were kids, the telephone was tethered to the wall, and the television was a small square box with three channels. This isn’t to say that we didn’t delight when the microwave went diddle-diddle-dee, happily letting us know the power was back on.

Now, like Cora, I wonder how her mother found time to play Whist three days a week. And I have a deeper understanding of her day-to-day life. Now to write a wintertime mystery!