BOOK CLUB FRIDAY--GUEST AUTHOR MIN EDWARDS

Min Edwards is the pen name of archaeologist, former bookstore owner, and proprietor of A Thirsty Mind Book Design, Pam Headrick. She writes from the office in her 200 year-old farmhouse on the shores of Cobscook Bay, an arm of the Bay of Fundy. And her village, Lubec, Maine is the most eastern town in the U.S., the site of Quoddy Head State Park and the West Quoddy Head Lighthouse where people gather from all over the world on January 1 to great the first sunrise on the coast of America. Learn more about Min and her books at her website.  

As we move into the holiday season, I think we’re all thinking of our families, our past... recalling our choices and why we made them. At least that’s what I’m doing again this year.

I had a lovely life in a community just outside of Austin, Texas for thirty years. I lived near my retired parents. My brother visited often. My son loved his school. But of course, we all grew older and things happened. But in 2011 I thought I needed a change. My parents were gone, my brother was married... my son was out of college and looking for other opportunities. So I sold my perfect Texas house, said goodbye to my friends of many years, tried to talk my housekeeper into coming with me (she gently refused) and headed north to Maine in a 29-foot U-Haul with all my stuff, most of which is still in boxes, six years later.

It took my son and me five days of travel... it was summer... hot as heck... and the roads were so crowded. But we made it unscathed.

Several years later I wrote my first novel, Stone Bay... about a Texas girl who blew up her life, sold everything, bought a house sight unseen from Realtor.com and left for the wilds of upper coast Maine.

I guess this novel was a catharsis for me. I got to illustrate all my fears and question my choices since leaving Texas, laying them all on the shoulders of my heroine Amanda.

Since the day I stood in front of the house I’d owned for decades but hadn’t seen since the early 90s (it had been an investment only... affordable waterfront), the choices of the last years have bothered me.

For one thing, village living, no matter where you live, is difficult. The native folk probably have roots going back generations; they’re a close-knit group who, although they’re kind to strangers (or those from ‘away’ as the residents of my village say) they don’t consider you one of them. You often speak differently, look differently, are politically different (and this is a hard one to deal with especially in these times). You find yourself seeking out others ‘from away’ instead of trying to blend in with the native population.

Now, six years later, I have friends but am just now learning to embrace the Old Guard. And those folks have wonderful stories to tell and their kindness is overwhelming. I wish I had started sooner to cultivate their friendships. But I was always looking backwards. My Texas friends called and said, “come home,” and I ached to do that. I tried joining organizations but nothing was a fit for me. So, after a few years I just retreated to my house, rarely leaving it, and I became for the most part a hermit.

When the calendar turned and 2017 hit me in the face, I realized that to be truly content in my new life I needed to embrace my community, both Old Guard and those ‘from away’. I stopped planning trips back to Texas for the winter when I realized how difficult it was to travel to the nearest airport... and how expensive. Nope, I was going to join my community. I was going to say instead of... “Hello, I’m from Texas’ to “Hello, I’m from the most eastern town in the U.S.” After all, millions of people are from Texas, but only a little over a thousand are from my little village. I’m thinking that’s something to crow about.

So, I guess the moral of this story is... you can go home again, but perhaps your current home is the right place for you now. Don’t look back with yearning but forward with anticipation.

Let me hear from you about your choices. Have you moved to someplace that you can’t seem to fit in? After you made a life-changing choice did you say to yourself, “What the heck was I thinking?”

For a visit with my fictional self, Amanda Warner, drop by Amazon and take a look at Stone Bay by Min Edwards. I poured all my questions and my surprised revelations into this novel.

Stone Bay

Amanda Warner is a Texas girl from her cowgirl hat right down to her silver-tipped boots. She’s a successful woman, but romance has passed her by. On a whim to find that elusive spark that others seem to enjoy, she buys a new home... sight-unseen... on the Internet... in Maine. However, when she pulls up into the driveway of her new house, one that looks nothing like the online images, there’s a handsome stranger standing on her derelict porch. At that moment, she realizes she might have bitten off more than she can chew, in home ownership and romance.

Kevin Franklin, retired Army Intelligence officer, successful builder, has been unlucky in love throughout his life. He’s been more concerned with keeping family, friends and his country safe than finding a soul mate. Things may be changing for him though. When the new cowgirl in town walks into his life and into the house he was planning to buy for his sister, his luck takes a turn... and not always for the better.

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#COOKING WITH CLORIS--GUEST AUTHOR MIN EDWARDS WHIPS UP BLACKBERRY/JALEPEÑO SAUCE

Min Edwards wears many hats... author, book designer, archaeologist, and citizen of the most eastern town in the U.S... the edge of America. As a reader, she doesn’t chain herself to only one genre. She loves, almost equally, romance, suspense, thrillers, and sci-fi. If a book takes her someplace she’s never been with a story that makes her heart beat with excitement, then she considers that an excellent book. She strives for the same excellence in her own stories. Learn more about Min and her books at her website/blog. 

Summer in Maine

I’m a transplanted Texan. I lived for thirty years in a golf course community on a lake just west of Austin, Texas. When I arrived there in 1981, it had a population of 1500 people. When I left thirty years later the population was over 10,000, the Austin metropolitan area was close to 2 million, and traffic was a nightmare. In my community, we had two upscale malls, several supermarkets including a Whole Foods, a new hospital, and enough restaurants to please anyone’s palate. Gosh, I miss it.

But, in 2011 after years of excruciating summer temperatures and rising taxes, I moved to my small bay-front farm just outside the most eastern town in the US—Lubec, Maine. And what a change, both personally and culturally! For one thing, winters are awful but beautiful, autumn is spectacular, spring is called Mud Season for a good reason, but summer... oh my, it’s like heaven (with huge mosquitoes and mean horseflies). And everything is green. Our flowers grow bigger than anywhere else. Even the wildflowers are spectacular. Texas may have their bluebonnets, but we have lupines in colors from white up through pink and onward to deep purple. And they’re three feet tall. It’s like alien bluebonnets!

There are drawbacks, of course. For one thing, I now live almost 100 miles away from everything... no hospital, few doctors and no specialists, no shopping except in the summer months and all but one of our cafes and restaurants are closed from October through April.

Of course, there are the excellent things about living up here; the best is the summer. We have a short growing season, but the vegetables and flowers don’t let that hold them back. Every Saturday at our Farmers Market down on Water Street—aptly named as it’s next to the water! —farmers bring in the current weekly bounty of produce and fruit and of course, baked goods from the hands of lovely little ladies who’ve kept the church dinners, potlucks, and their family kitchens humming for years with delicious, Down East delicacies.

I’ve got to tell you, I’m not much of a cook myself. So, I enjoy Saturdays buying the ever-changing abundance of fresh produce and already-prepared entrees set out before me.

My small farm, though, and it’s a farm in title only... nine plus acres of mostly woods, wild apple trees, berry bushes, and wildflowers... is beautiful no matter the season. But summer is the best. Oh, and I have more than six hundred feet of wild Maine beach all to myself. It’s not a sandy beach, but made up of small stones rolled and smoothed by the waves. We call this kind of beach a shingle beach, and it sings when the tide is coming in rough. Yes, we’re the people who cope with forty-foot tides, which is another story entirely.

I must say that I don’t take the time to pick much of the fruit, which grows wild on my land, but I do love the blackberries. What I like about them is their versatility. I can drop them in a blender with vanilla Greek yogurt, a little milk, a smidgeon of sugar, and a banana, and out pops a fabulous smoothie. Actually, I normally cook the blackberries first and run them through a fine-mesh sieve. I hate the seeds... it makes my smoothies crunchy. Then again if I have a hankerin’ for dessert, I cook them down, add sugar, sieve out the seeds, add just a bit of cornstarch to thicken, if necessary, and drop that into one of those ready-to-bake puff pastry shells—baked first (talk about versatile) and add a dollop of fresh whipped cream.

But my favorite blackberry recipe is my Blackberry/Jalapeño Sauce. This is good year-round. Since I’m still such a Texas girl I even add Jalapeños to my cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving!

Blackberry/Jalapeño Sauce

Ingredients:

1 cup of fresh blackberries (or frozen)

1/2 cup 100% cranberry juice

3 T. sugar

3 or more slices Jalapeño pepper (without seeds unless you want the heat; I use jarred sliced peppers)

1/4 teas. lime juice

1/4 teas. Raye’s Winter Garden Mustard (hey, I’m shopping local, and Raye’s is made right across the bay from my property)

Cook the blackberries in cranberry juice until they’re soft. Cool slightly and sieve over a bowl to remove the seeds. You’ll leave a lot of stuff besides the seeds behind, but you’ll get a nice smooth slightly thickened juice to work with.

Put the juice back on the stove and slowly simmer while you add the sugar, pepper slices (chopped fine), the lime juice, and mustard.

Feel free to adjust the ingredients; more sugar if you like a sweeter sauce, more peppers or less, a different mustard, lemon juice if you prefer that to lime.

Trust me, this is great particularly on pork or chicken... or even as a topping-with-a-kick on vanilla ice cream.

Precious Stone, a High Tide Romantic Suspense, Book 4

A gift of thanks to a young girl from the Tsar more than 100 years ago... and now the Russians want it back.

Collee McCullough, the owner of The Bakery in Stone Bay, Maine, has a perfect life until early one morning men in suits come calling. She has something someone dangerous wants. Something that her Russian great-grandmother Natasha took when she fled Russia in 1913. Too bad great-gran never told her family what she had or where she left it.

Jake Elsmore, visiting Stone Bay to sell his mother’s house, walks into The Bakery for a cup of Earl Grey tea, but gets more. There she is. A sprite in a flour-dusted apron, stepping out from behind a big burly policeman; a lovely, fiery-haired fairy toting a shotgun while two men are laying insensate on the floor of her shop. Looks like that tea will have to wait.

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