Oh, Lewee. This is probably going to be long.
I originally envisioned her as a sharp contrast to Annie.
Younger, not orphaned, below average intelligence (in my original vision, and initial draft) no great drive or ambition, few prospects. Well, a lot changed during the writing.
Fresh-from-the-box, as it were, Lewee had a mother—but no relationship pre-existed in my mind for what that relationship would be like (other than mother-daughter, of course.)
Somewhere around this time, the dear friend I mentioned in the blog for Chapter One, Ghosts, under the heading of “Second Thing’s Second”, relayed to me a story about something her mother had said to her. Something akin to the pancakes and syrup discussion in Chapter 6.
As far as I know, our mother never said anything remotely like this to my sisters. It was so far removed from anything in my experience, it astounded me. As I said earlier, how did my friend turn out so normal? Now, I don’t think that scene from my friend’s past fully encapsulated her mother. But it little the fuse, and I ran with it. (Oooo. Badly mixed metaphor. Or not; maybe completely accurate. The fuse is lit, and off I go running with the explosive in hand). Anyway, I took that one real-life scene and blew it up out of all rationality and proportion. And voila: Mother Jorgesson. (Or viola, as my cousin who plays the over-sized fiddle says.)
Lewee before the mirror. That image hearkens back decades in my memories. There was a short story in a women’s magazine (McCalls? Colliers?) where a mother was surreptitiously watching her daughter stand before a mirror and pondering her developing body. There was nothing really sexual about the scene (well, nothing intended; I was a teenager, so everything was sexual to a degree) but there was something very touching about the mother contemplating the changes here daughter was going through. The image meant a lot to me, at that time and since. So although the loving mother was not involved, I tossed that scene in. And in the mix, something started. Something Lewee was admiring, beyond the “blossoming of womanhood”. I don’t think I knew, at the time, just what it would be. But it would become for me a central bit of imagery.
I owe a great debt to that long-gone magazine short story, and for the friend who inspired me to take an old mother-memory and use it to twist that short story. Together they helped me to coax out what, for me, is the emotional heart of this book.
“Taking beauty advice from a frumpy old crow,” Lewee thinks. Again, not a thing I would have thought about my mother. But reminiscent of the disrespect a friend once showed to his mother’s face. So here it bubbles up.
Lewee’s fortress of solitude is a memory of a similar dugout in my ancient past. The setting for mine was not farmland, but it was idyllic. I was too young to appreciate it at the time.
Maybe it is an allegory for my life that that wooded hilly farmland has been hiding a dark secret, and will hide more. But hey. No spoilers. Just teasers!