Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker was not very fond of most animals. Or people. She had a fine impartiality about it.

The animals she did like, she liked as individuals. She’d probably have been just as fond of Momma’s dog Oliver if he’d been, say, a fat balding accountant in a golf shirt rather than the fat, balding beagle-Labrador mix that actually did save Daddy and Jenny from a club-wielding assailant one evening. Or maybe not. Kage didn’t like humans all that much anyway. She did admire Ollie for his devotion to duty, though.

My point here is that she judged animals the same way she judged humans: on a case by case basis, and with basic distrust. That distrust could be allayed by the demonstration of positive character traits, and she didn’t really count being fur-bearing or bipedal as all that important. If you were a good … thing … she was fond of you regardless of your species. It just wasn’t that easy for anything to get Kage’s trust to begin with.

She had a broad definition of what constituted human, though, along with a blanket suspicion of her fellow sapients. She disliked monkeys; she never wanted to see the apes when we went to the Zoo.  They made her nervous. Then she read all the Jane Goodall she could find while researching chimpanzees, and figured out why: Kage came to the conclusion that the great apes were people. That upset her, in precisely the same way that child abuse did. She began to protest the use of primates in experimentation; she espoused the idea that they should be honoured guests in zoos, given refuge rather than put on display. She wrote Hanuman, whose hero is an Australopithecine and whose foster-parents – whose very real society is inaccessible to him – are chimpanzees.

She liked a couple of dogs. She liked a couple of cats. She loved birds – well, parrots, anyway, who are very clearly some sort of people. One of her deepest relationships in life was with Harry, our Lilac-Crowned Amazon parrot. He was privileged to sit on her shoulder while she wrote; and, when he was bored, to climb down and swing on her braid. Sometimes he would lie comfortably in the hood of her hoodie, cradled between her shoulders and the back of her chair, grooming and singing.

Charles Darwin observed, in On the Origin of Species, that the intelligence of animals would be found to differ from Man’s not in kind – but merely in quantity. We all think the same way; humans are just especially good at it. But many things are nearly as good; some are just as good, and some may even be better than we are. And as Kage, who agreed with Darwin, commented, “God help them when we find them. Nothing will infuriate Homo sapiens like discovering they’re not Number One.”

Being a science fiction writer, she approached the idea of the alien with some interest. However, being Kage – for whom human never had been a shape, but a state of mind – she ultimately decided that there were no aliens. She made the Little Grey Guys a kind of human. She felt that Aspergers and autism were probably just variations on a theme, harmonies on the melody that is “most people”. She wrote fantasy where demons collected china, and sorcerers belonged to social networks. When someone at a Convention asked her why she didn’t write about real aliens – about BEMS, or Martians, or lizard men – she replied honestly: “Because I don’t see any. I just see people in different shapes. Either none of you are aliens, or all of you are.”

Poeple at science fiction conventions loved that remark. That was because most of them didn’t realize she meant it. It wasn’t a friendly pose or a knee-jerk liberal humanism, either. If nothing else demonstrated that, it was that despite seeing just “people” everywhere, she still didn’t like most of them.

She decided she wasn’t going to be one of those authors who constructs some amazing alien civilization in her stories: because she couldn’t see any aliens.

Personally, I think there is a great First Contact plot there – it’s an objectivity so broad and deep, Kage would have been more likely to object to the Alpha Centauran ambassador because he liked country music, than because he was a hive-minded invertebrate with a dozen limbs …

Kage Baker adored Santa Rosa plums. They were her favourite fruit in all the world, and she waited impatiently all winter and spring long for the first ones to appear in markets.

Santa Rosas are an excellent plum, but they are also small, and have a relatively brief season. They are an old variety, often hard to find among the bins of newer, stranger, larger, more brightly coloured and more durable fruit – plums and pluots the size of softballs, with polka dots and stripes and viral streaking, that will – for suspiciously unexplained reasons – stay hard as a rock for two weeks on the kitchen counter … Kage, an aficianada and a long-time fan of the venerable Luther Burbank ( who first bred them) would settle for nothing but Santa Rosas.

They sometimes showed up as early as half-past May. Other years, they didn’t surface until Kage’s birthday in early June, and rarely made it as far as my own in early July. But when they were around, Kage lived on them.

We found them for one blessed week in 2009 – just one week. She ate dozens in that time, though. I never saw a single Santa Rosa last year, not though I searched fruit stands and farmers’ markets and Whole Food stores galore – no Santa Rosa plums anywhere. Which saddened me; I wanted some to eat in her memory, and also I very much like ’em myself. I was forced to be content with interesting varieties of pluots and apricots, and somehow bore up under the strain …

But now I am beginning the hunt again. I would be very sorry to learn that Santa Rosa plums have somehow vanished south of Pismo Beach. Maybe there is some metaphysical reason they no longer roam where Kage once walked. Maybe I have to go North to find them – the Safeway in Novato, where we once found black apricots, or Mr. Burbank’s own gardens in Santa Rosa itself (where Neassa and Carol Skold are both on staff, he he he …) I will, if I have to.

I’m a devout Californian; I eat fruit that grows here. No December strawberries from Chile for me! I wait for the Oxnard fogs to yield our own berries; I track strange apples down in the canyons of San Luis Obispo, and buy cherries from plywood stands under the olive trees in Gilroy. Damn near everything in the world will grow somewhere along our 1,000 mile long coast – Kage and I hunted from Fort Bragg to San Diego in our time, and I know where all the interesting bushes and trees and vines are … places where you wonder if the green-eyed young man who hands you your overflowing bag of plums is quite human. Shaded hollows under eucalyptus trees where you really rather hope he’s not …

Many’s the time we drove away from some such fruit stand (at least one wall made of an ancient billboard advertising motor oil or chewing tobacco) and Kage would say, “I think he was a yendri.” Then she’d take a mouthful of a Santa Rosa plum, blood-warm from its time in the sun and no more than a quarter hour off its tree, and say, “Yep. Only a yendri could grow this.”

She’d always throw the pits out the car window, to have their chance to be trees. I need to drive up those ways soon, and see if any of her trees are bearing fruit this year.

Kage Baker did not do perky. Or cute. Winsome, darling, anything requiring the head tilted to one side and the suggestion of dimples: anathema to her. This despite the fact that as a small child her hair was a mass of copper ringlets and Momma favoured ruffles on little girls – aside from a congenital weakness for cool shoes, Kage was having none of it.

Consider the look on her baby portrait’s face. That was not a twee kid.

I have been known to try for a stiff upper lip; even to stagger along with a bored fox in my tunic, complaining that it wants down. Sometimes one just does not want to admit one has reached a stopping point. But this morning … well, I don’t think I’ve managed to reach a starting point.

I’ve made coffe (and am drinking it) and I even have a load of laundry in. But my bed still looks like a major migration went through it. Something besides me seems to have slept in my hair, and possibly in my mouth. My head is filling up like a balloon with mucous. I hope  it’s mucous – could be custard. Could be an invasion of squids. Could be my brain dissolving into primal ooze. But there is no perky in me.

This blog may be the intellectual high point of my day. I will write, working on Marswife: despite a suspicion that whatever I write will also be snot, and have to be wiped up and redone later. Mostly, though, I am going to emulate the great and wise Kage Baker- who chose to be a whiny invertebrate on days like this, lest her zombie state communicate itself too much to the work … it’s time for movies. Books. Knitting. Whinging.

I don’t do perky either.

Kage Baker showed her work to very few people for most of her life.

I always thought her innate reticence would be the biggest problem when she ultimately tried to get published. I really thought she might founder on the whole business of working with an editor. I even essayed a bit of cautionary advice as it became obvious she really did mean to submit her writing professionally.

“You know,” I ventured, ” an editor is going to tell you to make changes. There are going to be things you have to drop or add or switch around.”

“That’s all right,” said Kage. “Why should it be a problem?”

“Well, you might not like that,” said I, recalling some awfully vigorous conversations about scenes that had logical flaws. These had varied from the proper spelling of mercenary to an argument about which way a camel’s knees bent, with a detour to argue Kage’s assertion that fish were not animals. (And, of course, do raw potatoes carry tularemia?)

“It’s an editor’s job,” she said, with commendable logic and maturity. And then, with not quite so much, “I listen to you, don’t I?”

Yeah. About as much as the waves listened to Canute.  Nonetheless, when it actually came to it, Kage turned out to be a perfect lady regarding editorial interference. She made changes when she thought they were needed, she was polite, she was prompt, she actually did  consider every alteration seriously and objectively. And when she decided the suggestion was crap, she explained her choice courteously.

Except for the editor who objected to someone being able to see the Milky Way from the surface of the earth – because, he said, Earth is in the Milky Way and you can’t see the galaxy you’re in … the same gentleman did not know what the “nap” of a carpet meant. For these – and several other reasons – Kage finally asked him if he’d been raised in a Skinner box, and pulled her manuscript from that house.

Anyway: part of the point here is that Kage was so convinced she was a patient, reasonable respondent to editorial demands, that she became one. That’s an important moral. The other point is: she taught me that acceptance of criticism is situational – and if you asked for it, you had damned well better listen, because someone is offering you the fruits of considerable time and effort.

If you didn’t ask for it, the case is altered. Go with your gut response. And when you have stopped leaping around the living room howling out doom and destruction on the critic, have a drink and never ever read their review again.

All this remembrance and philosophy has led me in a meandering way to say Thank You to all of you, Dear Readers, who sent me comments on the first installment of Marswife. Everything everyone said has been of enormous help, especially in pointing out places where I had wandered off the cliff-edge of my own imagination and left you behind. I’ve thus been able to shore up several crumbling edges.

Those of you who also sent me questions – oooh, that’s fun! I’ve been sending out responses bit by bit; I have to ration them because I do so enjoy correspondence and will sit chatting for hours rather than get back to writing. But I mean to answer all of them, I promise. That too helps me work out details.

And, if anyone is willing, I will send out another installment in a few days. I need to forge ahead for a bit and develop more momentum. But then I may ask for your excellent help again. I may even number the pages, as one patient reader has noted that if she wants to reference a line, she now has to count down several hundred of them – which she obstinately (but sensibly) refuses to do … you get no respect when one of your Readers is your sister. But it was a system that worked for the Brontes and for Kage, so I am sticking to it.

And now back to Commerce Square, where I left my heroine asleep in a pile of vizio …

Kage Baker loved treasure hunts, especially the sort with maps and cryptic clues and secret codes. She loved scavenger hunts, too. She was particularly fond of the ones took all day and  ran you all over the neighborhood or the city looking for exotic things. We took part in a few of those in our 20’s, assembling crews of experts in cryptology, cartography (and not throwing up in the back of the truck during fast drives) with us  to follow complicated lists of clues across Los Angeles.

You need people who can subsist on bottled drinks and finger food, who can eat a Tommy Burger with one hand while flipping pages in a Thomas Guide with the other. People who know right from left, and are not shy about insisting on which is which; who are not too hung up about the direction one drives through a parking lot, a car wash or a drive-through. Really enormous bladders are good, too.

Our best showing was 4th place. But that was pretty good, considering that to win you had to climb the fence of the locked Botanical Gardens at UCLA, and that half the teams didn’t make it back until after dark. One never made it at all; just gave up somewhere in the wilds of San Pedro and went home …

Kage also loved research, and for exactly the same reasons: solving puzzles, beating weird hidden clues, locating treasure where no one thought it existed. Research, though often viewed as a boring past-time of necessity, is actually a wild ride through other people’s obsessions and secrets – or so Kage felt. And she want to know what was hidden. The gossip of the ages was her goal – maybe not to make it public, but to hoard the secret knowledge for herself.

Besides, as she was fond of telling history students at Renaissance Faires, fact is not only stranger than fiction, it’s more fun. The things people really do – and then understandably and frantically conceal – are a lot more peculiar than anything a writer can make up. Although Kage certainly gave that axiom a run for its money … but as she also said, when questioned sometimes about the sources of her ideas, all the crazier ones were based on utter fact. She couldn’t make up stuff as weird as that.

(Well, she could., actually. But she didn’t have to very often. And it was only because she spent a lot of time with very, very strange people.)

Kage loved specialty libraries and locked stacks. She nagged contacts into giving her entry to museum laboratories, back stages, locked sound stages … Aunt Anne let her investigate all the hidden tricksy concealed trapdoors in the set of Phantom of the Opera at the Music Center once – Kage was enchanted. (Tiny lifts and trapdoors for individual candles! she exulted. And the whole staircase Death walks down folds up like a garment bag!) We wandered around the bridge of the Enterprise on the first two Star Trek movies.

We got to handle the Chinese pottery found in Drake’s Bay in Northern California, the broken blue and white ware that is believed to have actually been used by Drake and his brave mariners when they careened their ships for maintenance on those stony beaches. This was before the present museum was built – Kage just looked at the Park Ranger in the information center in Inverness, and said wistfully, “Oh, I’d love to see those!” And the guy said “Okay,” and handed her a shoe box, wherein there was much crumbled paper and several pieces of 500-year old Chinese pottery. I thought Kage’s hair would catch fire.

We talked a student aide in the UC Santa Barbara Library into letting us see their copy of the 16th Century Matthew Bible. (We had no standing or ID there.) Or almost – her supervisor came back from lunch as she was about to hand it over the counter, and summarily chased us away. I think the unfortunate student aide was maybe a physical education  major …

When she was 16, she laid one intemperate and incredibly fortunate fingertip on a Van Gogh. It was a more innocent time, and security was in its infancy; no way could a teen-aged girl  manage to pet The Sunflowers in these modern time, and somehow not get caught. The canvas would not even be uncovered, probably. But for Kage – the art was naked, all the other shuffling patrons were blind, security had drunk soma for lunch: she touched immortality. She claimed to be horrified at her behaviour in later life: but I think she was lying.

For myself – I must say, the joys of research are vast and intriguing. Today I discovered that someone has managed to make an aerogel out of diamonds, and I know just what I want to do with that factoid. Kage never decided what vizio was made of, but I think I know now.

Though, fun as it is know that insulation can be made out of foamy micro-diamonds, and that today in 922, after much hardship, Abbasid envoy Ahmad ibn Fadlan arrived in the lands of  the Volga Bulgars … I would rather be racing through the Crossroads of the World off Sunset Boulevard, looking for a one-way alley next to a taco stand run by a man with a red moustache. That was a damned good research hunt.

Kage Baker, though she was terminally shy, loved her audience. She really did. She wrote for nearly 30 years with an incredibly tiny one – often just me – but she was aware she needed it. As much as writing satisfied her just on its own, in a virtue-is-its-own-reward sort of way, she needed to share it with another set of eyes and see if it worked.

Kage though that virtue-reward thing was largely crap, anyway …

Until the great Gardner Dozois published Kage’s first short story, “Noble Mold”, her largest audience to date had been a dozen school girls. Her friends in high school all wrote, and they passed around their (really scary bad) manuscripts among themselves. They were mostly Mary Sue works, of course – it’s not weird when you’re  15; only when you’ve passed 30. Even Kage started out writing Mary Sues, but she didn’t stay there. It wasn’t long before one of her writing buddies observed that no one else was writing anymore; they were just reading Kage’s stories. And a splendid time was had by all.

For years after that, I was the only audience, and a happy one I was, too. Kage wrote every single day. Vast treasure! Cubic tons of paper! A rainbow of inks! Entire universes scrolled out from her pen; there are more worlds, Horatio, packed into my storage unit than are dreamed of in your philosophies …

Kage would always hand me the latest day’s adventure’s (on the off chance I didn’t merely grab them off her desk and run off cackling) and say, “Feed my ego.” It didn’t mean she only wanted praise; it meant she really wanted a reaction, even if it was a monochromatic Wow! or Blechhh! She wanted to know how – and if – the progress of the story hung together, moved the reader, invited speculation. My attempts to oblige (and occasionally my refusal, too) led to all sorts of fructifying dialogues. Also to much pizza, ice cream, burgers and miles driving in search of the right electromagnetic corner of the California coast. Kage was very dependent on ambiance.

Yestreday I asked my Dear Readers to check my efforts at a story, and tell me if they were any good or not. And if they were sufficiently Kage-like or not. Many of you answered, all full of the most invigorating enthusiasm – even a couple who wrote and told me, “I never let anyone see my work in progress, but if it works for you – go for it!” Now, that is encouragement; urging me to follow my own path. Remarks have been coming in all morning – and though I did not use Kage’s old code-phrase to me, you have all been sending nice bites to my ego regardless.

Which was really, really sweet of you. No one had to do that, and everyone did. You are such nice Dear Readers!

There have been many very intelligent and useful critiques, too. This is the stage when one wants to do the face-plant of despair about leaving off some character’s limb; not when the book has come out and a gleeful fan wants you to put your signature over the error. The general consensus is that “Marswife” is worth pursuing. And so I will. Linn-the-agent even concurs.

I’m well-supplied with pluots and coffee and Welsh cheese. Back to Mars!

Kage Baker had an enormous confidence in my ability to take up her pen and continue her stories. I have wavered between bounding enthusiastic determination, and the soul-sinking certainty that there was no chance in hell. Somewhere between these two extremes, I actually managed to finish the sequel to The Ladies of Nell Gwynne.

Now it turns out there was a contract for, and considerable publisher’s interest in, a book of Martian stories. Kage only did three or four … but she left two plots and titles (with attendant notes) for further tales. I had them down as “someday, when I have proven myself a little more …”. But one thing I have learned that when a publisher is interested, you had damn well better find something to show him. Fast.

My agent would like to have one of these in hand, at a 10,000 or so word length, like, last month. I can easily write a story of that length in 10 days to 2 weeks – but the question is, are we talking Shakespeare and the monkeys here?

I did 2,200 words on “Marswife” today. I like it, but cannot for the life of me tell if it is any good; and, if it is, is it sufficiently Kage-esque? Kagelike? Kage-i-form? The two patient ladies to whom I usually bring my whining plaints – Kimberly and Neassa – are as willing as ever to advise me. But not only do I feel a dim guilt-like feeling at so constantly abusing their generosity (which will not, however, stop me from doing it), there is also the fact that this is a further reach from completing one of Kage’s Victorian romps.

So I am going to take advantage of a few of you. Who wants to be drafted into an impromptu reading group? You, Dear Readers, have come with this far because you loved Kage and her work: you know her in that special way that only dedicated and intelligent audiences know a writer. Would any of you be willing to have a look at the first draft of the first fifth of a story I am trying to complete at light speed?

And tell me if I wasting all our time? I’d rather waste a little of yours, good friends that you have been, than foist something nasty off on a larger audience. So if you are willing, to potentially take one for Team Kage – tell me where to send it and I shall inflict my insecurities and palpitations on you.

Kage Baker was a firm believer in the theory that the Universe waits to see when you are busy, tired, or flush with unexpected cash. Then it sends you a virus from space, or a tax audit, or an out-of-town visitor, or something vital on the car goes moldy (that happened once …). Most of these disasters she could lay off on support staff, but when what Fate saved up and sent was work … well, she had to handle that herself.

Now I get it all. This is especially unfair on a day of crystalline puffy clouds and a sharp North wind out of nowhere, when all I want to do is curl up with a novel and a cup of coffee and a cat and a parrot and some chocolate-raspberry biscuits. I want to watch the cloud shadows on the greening trees, and rejoice in being warm (the heat has transmuted – again – into the breath of frost giants). I want to take an afternoon nap.

But … today TWONG II had to to the actual publisher (he says he’s delighted to have it. I am suddenly terrified.) There are plans afoot for a Best of Kage Baker volume, and all the story files had to be sent off. There are also plans afoot for a volume of Martian stories – of which there are only 3 extant, and a heck of a lot of notes. Would I like to see an E-book of Hotel Under the Sand? I have been invited to consider being a co-editor on a tribute volume for Kage: stories in her worlds, written by her author buddies  – she did several of these herself and thought them great fun. But first one needs a guest list before the dance can begin, right? Right.

And the nephew would shyly like help with a term paper (and I am always saying Oh, honey, just ask, it’s what I do …) And the little black cat must be petted immediately or she will die, noisily, in the middle of my keyboard. And the parrot is jealous and making little soft come-hither whistles to get his own head petted.

I need the patience of Job and the determination of Athena. And the arms of Kali. I need to be haunted. But … as Kage used to say, Needs must when the Devil rides behind you with a turnip. I am not sure what the hell that ever meant, but it always sounded undeniably urgent.

So – 20 files sent off to the publisher, and the manuscript for TWONG II. Send an explication of the Mars project and how little there is and what it will take to finish it. Start sending invitations to numerous busy authors asking for a little of their time for a little of someone else’s money. And yes, I’d love to see an e-book of Hotel!

This certainly puts paid to my weary middle-of-the-night plans to become a fungus on the stump of life.

Kage Baker spent most Mother’s Days for the last 30 years at Renaissance Faires – as did I. We had art to make, and understanding parents.

At Faire, everyone ran about urging customers to buy pretties for their own mums. Standard selling practice – hawk your goods to the holiday-smitten children, and many lucky moms will go home with freshwater pearls or bottles of flower esssences, or at least a garland in their hair. Faire people gave flowers to various of our own who were known as especially beloved or competent mothers. Women who did Faire in family units – like most of the ladies in my group – got special Mom-gets-breakfast-in-sleeping-bag mornings from small beaming children half in costume and proudly bearing the treats on wooden platters. Happy Faire matrons wore flowers in their caps and bosoms all day.

Some years we had major group breakfasts before Opening, in the Inn Yard, cooking over the fire pit: scrambled eggs, metric tons of bacon, drop bicuits – famous breakfasts, those were. They were mainly for and by my own people, the Guild of St. Albans that ran the Inn; but we took in a lot of strays. And we fed them, too. It was an obligation I learned from my own mother – if you’re going to run a Great House, you take in the hungry and see to it they eat.

Mother’s Day was a big day for that custom. But, we were at Faire, not at home … so sometime during the day, there would be clandestine phone calls by most of us to our own, real mothers, to assure them that their most peculiar offspring – us – did really love them and would be by for dinner just as soon as possible …

Mamma was in the arts, and a daughter of an industry family – people were always missing holidays due to locations or performance times or tours. So we were always forgiven. As long as we eventually showed up … Momma had a wonderful collection of pink and silver glass from her favourite booth at Faire: she got so much of it over the years that she had a favourite.

And today, they are probably doing all that out there at Faire. And I hope they are having a wonderful time. Momma is long gone, and neither Kage nor I had children of our bodies. I am a little out of the loop this past year.

But I took my sister Kimberly to a Farmers Market early, early this morning, where we got fresh bread and strawberries and rhubarb preserves and carrots and cherries – wonderful treasures! And then we went to see Thor at the Vista Theatre in Silverlake: where they the best popcorn in Los Angeles (Real butter! Free refills!), and the manager dresses in costumes for special events. Today, the Manager of 1,000 Faces had grown a beard and bleached it golden blonde, and was dressed head to toe as The Mighty Thor. It was grand.

I hope yours was too, Dear Readers.

Kage Baker loved the pearly advent of summer in California. Warm grey days were among her favourites – the directionless cool light, the air like a perfect bath, the nacreous ceiling of the world resting softly on the hill tops … whether it was the haze rising from the L.A. Basin or the coastal fog in Pismo Beach or San Francisco, she loved it.

June is grey in California; increasingly, as climate change has brought us wetter winters and warmer summers, so is May. The whole place fills up with steam, I think – the hills begin to sweat as the season warms, and soft grey mists rise into the air to meet the morning fog rolling in from the coast. Somwehere in the night, the sky vanishes – by morning, the sky is like polished granite, a faint dark pattern running west to east where the sea air comes into meet the rising fog from the Valley.

It’s not unusual for us to see no sun from Mother’s Day to Fourth of July – it always clears up by the Fourth, gets hot and clear as molten glass. Sometimes the fog comes in again afterwards – there’ve been a few years lately where the only clear weekend all summer was the Fourth of July, and we continued in the grey warmth until September. By autumn it always clears away, and the loveliest sunny days of the year come in then.

Come to Pismo Beach! the banners in front of the Chamber of Commerce always read. In Fall, the Coast is clear!

And so it was. But until then, it’s grey in the mornings from San Francisco to San Diego.

This is how I best remember it from childhood; even more from adolescence. Those grey mornings that always seemed to start with finding a rummage sale – we’d scamper off in triumph, clutching old comic books or faded paperbacks of Edgar Rice Burroughs or Pogo books whose owners didn’t appreciate them. We’d hole up somewhere and read greedily until the day wore away and the grey sky began to dissolve – not lift, it didn’t work like that. It slowly thinned and faded and was inhaled back into the earth, until the afternoon sun shone down like a magic trick, from a miraculously un-occluded West.

Those days lasted, oh, 40 hours each in my memory – just from getting up to dinner time. Especially on Saturdays. A grey Saturday could last two or three days, as I recall.

I have books, today, the perfect bounty for a grey Saturday. One of them is one of Kage’s absolute favourites – C.S. Lewis, Until We Have Faces. Not Narnia, no, not even remotely – but I recommend it as heroic myth, and a woman’s story, and a model of the world and of God. If you are interested, Dear Readers, it was a model that influenced Kage’s feelings very strongly. I don’t see much if it in her writing – a conscientous workwoman, she built her own style –  but it was in her life and living; and in the stories she told me when we were both girls.

On a day like this one, when we were young, Kage would have retreated to the branches of the live oak outside Mamma’s studio; or up to the flat roof outside her own Tower window. She’d have a bag of plums and a favourite book. Later, if I joined her with my own fruit and book, she’d put them all down and we’d discuss her stories, her worlds.

I have pluots, garnet-coloured with golden flesh and a taste like honey and spring water. I have this book Kage loved. I’m going to go sit where I can look into the branches of the mulberry tree, where a squirrel with white feet is eating ripe berries. And I’m gonna eat and read myself into a stupor, in the long, slow, warm, grey afternoon.