Balancing Act: A Window Opens by Elizabeth Egan

Alice realizes the question is not whether it’s possible to have it all, but what does she—Alice Pearse—really want?

Elizabeth Egen's debut novel A Window Opens finds the fine line between melodrama and humor. We watch Alice's life go from a perfect balance of life and work to losing control. The story could have become tear-jerking sad, or it could have become humor, a satire on choices women have to make today. I felt it hit the right, life-like mix.

Alice in nearing forty, married fifteen years to a corporate lawyer vying for partnership, and mother to three kids (and a dog). She works three days a week at a job she loves: reading books. When her husband discovers he isn't in line for partner, he quits his job and decides to open his own law office. To help finances Alice takes a full time position with a new company, Scroll. It seems like a dream job. She is lucky that her babysitter can work full time, and the kids love her, and her husband can fill in when needed. All seems well. For a while.

As her job demands more of her time and energy Alice has less to give at home. Things happen and Alice feels out of control. Her father finds his cancer has returned. Her husband isn't taking his career change well; he is drinking to excess. Her kids are changing and Alice isn't there to notice. Her coworkers and bosses are not really friends; it's all about the money at Scroll.

I understand Alice's life. My dad died of cancer, and Mom too; I know all about that. After Mom died, Dad couldn't face the empty house and took to having a few drinks when he came home from work. My husband lost a job, has struggled with job changes. I tired to juggle a 30 hour a week, home office job while homeschooling.

Egan gets things pretty accurate.

And I liked Alice. She tosses around books and quotes and I get them. This is a book about a reader and readers will love Alice. Her kids go to the local bookstore and bring home piles of books. But they are not allowed to play video games. She is an optimist with a can-do attitude, a gal who wants to make her daddy proud. That attitude also means she holds out hope while ignoring the warning signs.

I like that Nicholas and Alice struggle with their life changes. Neither do so great; Alice allows her job to take over her life and Nicholas seeks escape from the pressures. Like real people. Communication breaks down. After the death of Alice's father she forgets that her husband is also grieving. And I like that their love is able to slog through until they can find themselves again.

Egan saves her satire for Scroll founder Greg, a man who is chasing the big bucks and changes his mind about what Scroll is according to the latest research reports. Scroll is big on going paperless; hence the preference of ebooks over 'carbon based' books. Greg doesn't consider that electron devices need power, and power means a need for fossil fuels. So it's not about being Green. Scroll looks for individuality, then insists on conformity. Alice's  boss Genvieve tells her, "I've got your back" then sends an email warning Alice about what behavior is acceptable at Scroll.

I agree with the review by Tabitha Blankenbiller at Bustle when she writes, "Although the situation in A Window Opens feels grim, the novel remains true to Alice's spirit and refuses to become dreary. The book could have easily fallen to the predicable trope...women has all, women loses all, woman starts over....It's easy to write about families that totally fall apart and relationships that implode; it takes much more tact and skill to write about strain and ultimate resilience."

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

A Window Opens
Elisabeth Egan
Simon & Schuster
Publication date August 26, 2015
$26.00 hard cover
ISBN:9781501105432

Laura Heine's Original Applique

Among the many vendors at the American Quilt Society show in Grand Rapids was Fiberworks  in Billings, MT, owned by designer and Laura Heine, Her enchanting animals made of floral appliqués brought us back to her booth for another look.

 The patterns are available alone or in kits with the fabrics required for the quilts as shown.

She layers fussy cut floral fabrics to make the bodies of the animals, paying attention to how design elements in the fabric can suggest details such as fur, feathers, and facial features.

 She has patterns for wall hangings and bed size quilts.

Her designs are fresh and modern, suitable for children of all ages.

30 Hours Without Power

The day started by Kamikaze leaving a dead rat at the patio door. Our apple trees are heavy with fruit, and all the varmits in town are coming to feast on them. I had brought in dozens of apples the day before, intending to cook up something. But seeing that brown rat I was ready to cut the trees down and replace them with a pergola! I can take the black squirrels and the birds and the opossum coming to eat the apples. Rats are another thing.

I went to my quilt group, ran an errand. Our son was making dinner, his white chili crock pot meal. I only had to make the cornbread. Dinner was delicious and we had another meal's worth left over.

It was a beautiful evening. The weather was fine, there were no storms, nor were a.c. units maxing out the system. Still, the power went out. The dishwasher was running and then stopped. The fan blades slowed to a still. the lights went dark. It was 7:00 p.m.

We had a six hour Internet and phone back-up power source. We reported the outage to Detroit Edison. After a while the website said the expected the problem to be solved by 1 a.m. We lit candles and used up the last juice in our tablets to read our books then retired early.

Our Kamikaze enjoying the power outage.

It was dark! No school parking lot lights. Most of our little 'burb was affected. The night orchestra of insects buzzed loudly, but didn't drown out the roaring generators at neighbor's houses. I woke a few hours later; DTE had no idea what was wrong or an estimate of when power would be restored.

When we retired we assumed it would only be 6 hours before power was restored. We awoke knowing that after 12 hours without power all our food would be lost. We had just filled up the 'fridge. There were leftovers, pasta and potato salads, grated cheeses, milk, sour cream, yogurt, cream cheese, farm fresh eggs, and coffee creamer inside. Also greens from the farmers market.

First there was denial. Could we save it yet? Then there was  anger. Then finally acceptance. All the stages of grief.

We let our son use up the last of the hot water for his morning ablutions. He has a job. We are retired. he grabbed coffee and breakfast at work. We went out to a locally owned diner then came home.

The elementary school across the road was quiet and empty. We read outdoors. I finished up an appliqué project of a fish and thought about the book review I had planned to write. I finished another book. I looked at the apples I had planned on making into applesauce and a crisp.

Fishy, Fishy from Guildcrafter's Quilt Shop in Berkley, MI

We went out to Biggby for our afternoon tea/coffee and used the WIFI. Then went to the Blair library to plug in our tablets and finish our online business.

We dined at a local restaurant then took the dogs for a walk. People had gathered outside, talking and sharing and questioning. Parents were playing with the kids. Kids were playing with the dog. People sat on the front porch and I stopped to talk to a couple down the street. They told me they had bought a generator several years ago, tired of the outages. And that there was a skunk in the neighborhood!I expect he'll be looking for our apples, too. I sure hope Kamikaze or Suki don't run into him.

The loss of television and computers had brought some families and neighbors together. Perhaps it is a good thing, once and a while, to be forced to give up all the things that divide us.

The power came on 30 hours later at midnight. We have no idea what went wrong. There is nothing on the news or online from the City, nothing on Facebook.

This morning we cleared out the food, cleaned the fridge. Leftovers, pasta and potato salad, dairy, anything with eggs, dairy or mayonnaise, cooked veggies, veggies that had browned or wilted, grated cheese had to be tossed. Luckily the freezer was full and only the frozen fruit bars had melted.

The To Be Tossed Pile

Time to head back to the store.

And time to price generators in preparation for the next time we lose power.

Handkerchief Fashions,Story Book Quilts, and Patchwork story from 1964

Woman's Day magazine from June 1964 had an article about using handkerchiefs to make dresses! The overblouse seen in the photo above was made from five 14" linen handkerchiefs. The hand rolled white edges are seen.

 Above left party dress with a halter top and full skirt was made with fourteen 18" cotton handkerchiefs, plus satin ribbon for the straps and waistband.

The red and white cap sleeve blouse was made from two 23" cotton handkerchiefs with mitered and side slits at the bottom.

The sun dress, 'a flattering compromise between a muu muu and a shift" used fourteen 14" handkerchiefs. Two were folded over to make the yoke, with the others joined and fathered into the yoke.

Designed by Theresa Capuana these quilts had mail order patterns in crib and twin sizes, for the cost of $1.00 each.

 The story in this issue was Patchwork by Sharon Quigley McCann and illustrated by Ted Coconis.

"The tiny bag of minute triangles which had been, to say the least, a strange wedding gift had not entered Christine's mind since the occasion of her wedding shower until one evening about four months after she and Joe were married. She needed something worthwhile to absorb her time while Joe studied...the patches and her Aunt Amanda's desire that she make a quilt came as her salvation.

"She wants me to make a quilt. She gave me the first pieces for my wedding shower: a hundred at least. But there's a catch. The quilt must be entirely hand-sewn, and...after I put the first pieces together I can work on the quilt only when I feel unhappy.

"When it's finished, it will teach me a lesson about life, according to Amanda. She says it's a very important lesson.

"Four years, a pair of healthy twin sons, one law degree, and one dream home later, Christine decided, on Jennie's first day of school, to finish the quilt.

"Perhaps, she thought, she should give the quilt to Jennie on her wedding day, telling her of the events that each section's construction recalled to her mother. Perhaps by giving her the comfort that she had lived through these turmoils, she could cushion the blows that her daughter would inevitably feel.

"Putting the center piece in position, she attached the edges. Yes, that's what she should do: give the ugly thing to Jennie, as a sort of warning.

"She spread the quilt on the living-room floor and went to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee...as she walked into the living room and saw the quilt lying as she had carefully placed it, it seemed to assume and entirely different appearance from that it had had five minutes before.

"How could it seem, now, not to be homely? It looked, in fact, with its character of completeness, like a work of art? ...Why, it was actually beautiful!

"Now, now, is the lesson mine to learn. After so wrongly regarding it for all these years as the fruit of the worst hours of her married life, she knew now--ah, and this was the lesson she had never guessed in all the times she had tried! The quilt now, in its truth, in its oneness, in its deep beauty drawn from each of the episodes it recalled to its creator, declared it had been made lovingly, when she, girl-turning-woman, was at her best.'

Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story by David Maraniss

My Detroit

In June of 1963 I was still ten years old when a van containing all my family's possessions moved across the open expanse of southern Ontario towards Detroit, MI. My family had sold the family business, a service and gas station in Tonawanda, NY, along with the only home I had ever known, a giant 1830s farm house surrounded by a Post-War Levittown community.

Detroit lured my Dad with hopes for a profitable job in the auto industry, with good benefits and a pension, a job without the physical stress of working outdoors in Buffalo winters.

My grandparents had moved to the Detroit suburbs in 1955 so I was familiar with the long, tedious car ride across Ontario, the dramatic and eerie drive through the Tunnel into Detroit, the sight of the impressive skyscrapers of the city, and the lights along the busy boulevard of Woodward Avenue.

Dad got a job at Chrysler in Highland Park that offered my family a working class lifestyle: school clothes from K-Mart, hamburgers at Peppy's, two cars, a home of our own. Medical insurance meant Mom could get the most up-to-date treatments at Henry Ford Hospital for her autoimmune disease.

Dad at work as an Experimental Mechanic at Chrysler

It was in Metro Detroit where I had many firsts: the tragic murder of President Kennedy, followed by those of  Rev. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy; my first mock election when I learned about LBJ and the Great Society; my first interest in 'pop' music, listening to Motown on a transistor radio tuned to CKLW; my first visit to the Detroit Institute of Arts; the 1967 riots; body counts on the news during Vietnam. The first car I knew by sight was the Mustang. We took trips to Belle Isle to watch the freighters go by and see the electric eel at the Aquarium, and to the Detroit Historical Museum, Greenfield Village, the Cranbrook Science Museum, the Detroit Zoo. My first ball game was at Tiger's Stadium.

Dad died seven years ago. He knew he had been lucky to have worked during the Golden Years of the auto industry, a time when a grease-monkey with a high school education could get a Union job and work overtime and make a good salary. His pension allowed my widowed Dad to do whatever he wanted in retirement: buy a cabin, be on the go, eat out.

Dad left me my family's home; it was not even ten years old when my folks purchased it in 1972, a modern ranch on 'Snob Hill'. It was a far cry from the Tonawanda house his family had moved to in 1935 with no heat on the second floor or indoor plumbing.

the realtor's photo of the house in 1972

It was Detroit that made my family's American Dream possible.

Once In A Great City

David Maraniss saw a commercial during the Super Bowl that brought a wave of nostalgia. It inspired him to write Once In A Great City. He focuses on Detroit in 1963, just after the Cuban Missle Crisis, to fall of 1964. It was a time when Detroit was 'on top of the world' with visionary leadership, record breaking profits for the Big Three, and Motown's stars on the rise. It was where President John F. Kennedy first spoke of 'ask not', and where Rev. Martin Luther King first had a dream, and where President Lyndon B. Johnson first spoke about a war on poverty. It is also when legislation to open housing for all persons failed, when Africa American landmarks were being torn down for parking lots, and Malcolm X called for revolution.

Walk to Freedom June 1963

I loved how Maraniss gives a complete picture of the city, story arcs that fitt together like a jigsaw puzzle to make a Big Picture.

Grinnell Brotheres sold pianos on time, and Cass Tech had great music teachers. Migrants from the South seeking factory jobs brought a rich musical heritage with them. Music flourished in Detroit, jazz and blues and Mowtown.

I had not known about Detroit's bid for the 1968 Olympics, championed by President Kennedy championed. What would have happened if they had won the Olympic bid? Would the 1967 riot still have occurred or would the city have been proactive about solving racial problems? Would things have been different?

Maraniss unravels the underlying roots of Detroit's undoing, evident even at its apex. In a few years riots precipitated white flight. The Walk to Freedom down Woodward Ave. led by Dr. Martin Luther King was eclipsed by racial tension. Foreign cars put America's large gas guzzlers out of business. (Reuther had argued for smaller cars; no one listened.) A Wayne State University report had warned that suburban growth would bode ill for the city. African Americans could not find housing and jobs equal to their education, and their communities were dismantled for 'progress.' Warning signs were dwarfed by the hubris of success.

Maraniss celebrates the heritage that Detroit has given us: a heritage of upward mobility, Motown music, Civil Rights, the Mustang.

1965 Ford Mustang fastback in front the Ford Pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair in New York.

This is an enlightening book. I felt nostalgia and recognition for a Detroit I hardly knew.

See Detroit, once a great city on Youtube here.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Once In A Great City
David Maraniss
Simon & Schuster
Publication Sept. 15, 2015
$32.50 hard cover
ISBN: 9781476748382

Still Rowing...And Other Quilts

 

I am still working on the Row By Row projects. The one above is from The Quilt House in Indian River, MI. It uses a neat technique for the 'half circles': you sewed two circles right side together, quartered them, and turned them inside out. The quarter circles are placed on the squares and sewn along the seam allowance,

The row below was the 2014 one from Front Porch Quilts in Troy, MI. I enjoy embroidery and the cabin is super cute.

My friend Martha brought me a table topper kit from 2014--I forget which shop. It is an Irish Chain with fussy-cut appliquéd circles showing lighthouses.

 A nice summer quilt!

I hand quilted and finished the block from Hawaiian-Inspired Quilts by Judith Sandtrom which I reviewed here. 

When I was at Petals & Patches in Cadillac, MI I saw this cute quilt hanger and dragonfly quilt. At the next stop I found the amazing dragonfly and cattail fabric. I made my quilt longer than the original pattern so I could have more of that great fabric.

 Below on a lily pad note the dragonfly button I found at JoAnne Fabrics.

A quilt friend liked it so much I am ordering two more of the quilt holders--one for her and another for me to so I can make another quilt for a gift!

Remember This? Boomer Nostalgia

Looking through vintage magazines I remember things I had forgotten.

I remember when making little pizzas was a cool snack! It was easy as "1-2-3" when we used a toaster/broiler oven.

Recipe for Pizza Dreams
3 large English muffins
1 small can Tomato sauce
1/2 tsp Oregano
Anchovy Fillets and/or Italian Sausage

1 cup Mozzarella cheese cut in small pieces (or sharp Cheddar or Amer.)
1. Pull muffins apart. Place on pan lined with Reynolds Wrap. Toast lightly under broiler. Remove.
2.Spread each piece with tomato sauce, sprinkle with Oregano. Add Anchovy fillet and slices of sausage, and pieces of the cheese.
3.Return to broiler until cheese is melted and he sauce is bubbling Serves 6.

Nehi is made to the highest flavor standards in America. That's why it's America's fastest-selling fruit flavor line. Try Nehi Orange, Nehi Grape, or some of the other fine Nehi flavors. And try them soon. A product of Royal Crown Cola Co.

And try them soon? Don Draper would have never let Peggy slip that one by.

The Coppertone Ads always had that little girl whose panties were being pulled down. Not so cute today. 

Breck Shampoo showed real women, many who became well known actresses and models, always painted in soft pastels.

Sally Draper? Is that you? Once a upon a time we had to add sugar to the Koo-Aid mix of artificial flavors and artificial colors. Then this innovation came out--sugar ADDED. Whole generations grew up on Kool-Aid. Sad.

I had no idea that in 1963 there were automatic ice makers. My folks never had one. Ever.

 Vinyl flooring was so popular folks even installed it over wood floors. Yep.

The Patty Duke Show! Cousins who looked alike but were different as night and day. I watched it. Did you?

I remember my brother got Soaky toys. I was too old.

But my school lunch sandwiches were packed in Waxtex!

I wore Hush Puppies.

 I think they cheated. Or Mom was very young when she gave birth.

This photo is SO romantic. The night, the lovely lady, the dial of the phone lit up like the moon.