Today - Writing Again

After a two-year hiatus, I am writing again, feeling like a teabag left to steep in order to gain its full flavor and strength. The vision of the book and even the title has evolved and is now history, not fictionalized. Working title - An Awful Providence, the true story of Miss Harriet Rice. .

I had a non-ordinary experience, in broad daylight at Lake View Cemetery, North Union. There for the first time, visiting the burial site of my great, great grandparents, Nathan and Deborah Rice (their gravestone is posted below). The Historical Society had given me directions and a map of their plot. Admittedly, I was in an altered state, high with emotion and excitement. I had brought a simple geranium, not knowing I would be putting it at the base of an elaborate marker inscribed with quotes from the Book of Proverbs! I dug into the tough sod and planted. As I stood up, I witnessed a dark slanted shaft out of the corner of my left eye. Shaped like a flat bronze crystal, it slid quickly at a 45 degree angle into the ground into, as it turned out, the grave of James Bannister Rice, their son, who died of typhus 1835. That was the first apparition. Then,on the same day as I was driving out, and  under these two ancient sugar maples, I saw a youngish man in a brown suit coming toward me with a child, a barefoot girl who was holding flowers. I stopped and rolled the window to say hello. Neither answered. No reaction. They seemed to stare right through me and we had no interactions. Puzzled. I drove on... and looked back to see them in my rear view mirror. Not there. I turned completely around, to be sure...but they had completely vanished. Had I imagined the whole thing?

I have since found out that my apparition was most likely a residual haunting, benign and harmless, an imprint or disturbance on the atmosphere, a kind of playback of past events and triggered by increased energy levels at a certain location. Possibly related to the fact I had stopped to embrace the trees when I first arrived at Lake View Cemetery and I was already in an non-ordinary state of receptive energy.

Check out my web store  nancynicolart.com launched four years ago. I also exhibit at Burdick Art Gallery, Bank Street, in Wellfleet and am an affiliate member at Viridian Contemporary Art Gallery, West 28th St, NYNY

Now back to work...

While in Maine this June, I spent time in Friendship, a beautiful coastal town with a rocky beach and many old homes and fixer-uppers. Harriet Rice, the hero of my novel, was sent to Friendship to recover from typhus in 1834, after her brother Albert died. It was believed that swamp air mixed with effluvia caused typhus and sea air would cleanse the lungs. Harriet was eventually called back home to assist in the care of her sick siblings, several of whom would also die from typhus.

The novel as it is going on is very much about farming, death and survival in rural Maine. This bandstand was here in Harriet's day; this green is where local men mustered during and after the American Revolutionand later at the beginning of the War Between the States, called by some the Civil War. This is also and where hogs on the loose were rounded up and kept in pens

Examples of hand-painted signs and furniture to order

Here's a collection of hand-painted furniture and business signs I have done as commission work. Check it out on my Facebook page, Nancy Nicol Art 

Reflections

My ultra-short story called Abattoir is included in this collection of personal narratives published by Telling Our Stories Press.  Available for purchase at Amazon.com 

http://www.amazon.com/Reflections-Ultra-Short-Personal-Narratives/dp/0990008134