Kage Baker didn’t like change.

As a child, she simply wouldn’t acknowledge it. It happened, of course, in denominations as small as her outgrowing favourite shoes to having a new class in school every year. As far as possible, Kage ignored the changes. Adamant and determined,  she simply duplicated favoured shoes and garments: which is why, after she died, I found multiple identical, worn-out white tennis shoes, and ditto blue jeans, in her closet … Mrs. Baker just bore Kage off to the appropriate new classroom every year, and hoped for the best. Going to Catholic school, where uniforms were required, made it a little easier.

After 12 years of happily mindless dress choices, Kage entered adulthood and promptly took up historical re-creation. She spent the next 3 decades wearing madly colorful costumes … but between the picardills and corsets and multiple layers of skirts, Kage stuck firmly to her personal armour of Chuck Taylor tennies and Levi jeans. Sometimes under the multiple skirts. It can get damned cold in the Cow Palace.

Anyway, Kage was not a fan of change. It was undoubtedly why she wrote about time travel; it satisfied a deep need in her, to write what she treasured into immortality. She made sure that nothing she loved was ever actually lost. And in between saving things that would otherwise fall prey to thieves and the moth, Kage hunted diligently for books and candies and movies from her personal past; Glasswax stencils, and Biestle cardboard decorations, and wax oranges filled with sugar syrup.

She found them, too. And she took a genuine satisfaction from writing the otherwise lost into her stories. On one conscious and unconcerned level of her mind, Kage believed that she had tucked Brown’s Ice Cream Parlour and Spinx’s macaw and all her beloved dead into alternate dimensions, where they were safe.