Summer Dance by Nan Rossiter

Author:Nan Rossiter [Rossiter, Nan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2017-04-03T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 21

I truly believe that living in Mrs. Cohen’s cottage full of books—and spending so much of my time reading—had renewed my interest in writing. Every time I finished a book, I thought: I could’ve written that. I am perfectly capable of stringing words together into sentences that will eventually become paragraphs. I can create feelings, experiences, and eventually, a story. It may never get published; it may not even be good; but it’s perfectly doable. How hard can it be?

I also believed that writers lived lives of luxury—setting their own schedules, working in their pajamas, going for long walks or out for leisurely lunches whenever they wanted, drinking copious amounts of coffee and tea during the day, and wine—or something stronger—at night . . . and answering to no one. At least that’s what I thought until I sat down and actually tried to write something. Yikes! Where to begin? How to start? There are so many words to choose from . . . or should it be from which to choose? The latter sounded archaic, but the former was a grammatical sin—Sister Agnes had pounded this into our heads: Never end a sentence with a preposition. Was this just a myth? I wondered, or was it grammatical suicide? I’d read a lot of books that seemed to ignore this rule, but since it had been pounded into my head, I always cringed when I heard someone do it.

For years, I dabbled, but the stories I made up didn’t ring true, and the only story I could truly tell—based on what I “knew,” as Sister Agnes suggested—involved reliving my past and dredging up memories that filled me with shame. Would telling my story help other people somehow? Would that make it worth the heartache?

I wrote in fits and starts, keeping a notebook in a drawer next to my bed, but I never got very far and I often tore out pages and threw them away—I was afraid someone might actually read them!

When I wasn’t reading or trying to write, I was working at the bakery. Abe had been right, of course—the bakery never really slowed down—people always needed bread. On a couple of occasions, I went with him to the Cape to check on the stores now selling his bread. We brought big Nantucket-style baskets with Nantucket Bread engraved on copper plates, and I even set up displays at a couple of the stores with free samples of cubed bread that customers dipped in bowls of olive oil.

On Thanksgiving, Coop and I went to the Cape with Abe to help serve a turkey dinner with all the fixings at one of the shelters. We were put to work as soon as we got there—Abe carving turkeys, me scooping mashed potatoes, and Coop ladling gravy. When dinner and dessert—apple or pumpkin pie with whipped cream—were served, we joined the other volunteers for a dinner of our own and it was the most delicious Thanksgiving dinner I’d ever eaten. Abe—who’d been

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