Peg Kehret Blog

Mr. Stray is a tabby cat who showed up in my woods about nine years ago. I first saw him lurking in the tall grass, hunting mice day after day. When I took some cat food out for him, he ran. I left the food, and after I was back inside, he crept out to eat it. I have been feeding him ever since. I gradually moved the food bowl from the back woods to my front porch. He has a water dish there, too, both protected by a low barrier so that Lucy, my dog, doesn’t eat the food.

Several attempts to trap him failed. He would look at the food in the trap but refuse to go inside. I finally gave up. Mr. Stray no longer runs away from me but I still can’t touch him. Sometimes he’ll “talk” to me but he always stays about six feet away, and he waits until I go back in the house before he eats.

That first winter when it began to get cold, my husband and I worried about Mr. Stray. Carl was one of those people who could figure out a solution to anything and he came up with a plan to keep Mr. Stray warm. First he bought a covered container that was meant to be a litter box, and he sealed the joints with duct tape. It’s made of heavy plastic, with an opening for the cat to enter. This became Mr. Stray’s house. Carl put a small heating coil inside it and then drilled a hole in one side of the container for the cord to go through.  We wanted Mr. Stray’s house to be in the corner of the porch where it would get the least wind, and there wasn’t an outdoor electrical outlet in that area so Carl drilled a hole through the wall of our log house! He threaded the cord through the hole and attached a thermostat. When the temperature gets down to 38 degrees, the heat comes on in Mr. Stray’s house. We draped a bath towel over the top for extra insulation.

Mr. Stray is no fool. It didn’t take long for him to discover the toasty little house and he has slept there in the wintertime ever since. Periodically when I see him out in the woods, I remove his blanket and shake out the dirt. Sometimes I wash it and put it back. When I knit special cat blankets for Pete and Molly, Mr. Stray got one, too.

Mr. Stray appears in my book, The Ghost’s Grave, although in the book he became Mrs. Stray.

We are having a cold spell right now, with snow on the ground and temperatures at night in the low teens. When I take Mr. Stray’s breakfast out each morning, his head pokes out of his house to see who’s there. It always makes me smile.

Carl has been gone for more than four years - but the heated house that he made for Mr. Stray continues to keep a little cat warm on bitter cold nights. That makes me smile, too.

My Christmas tree traditions have changed over the years. When we were first married, Carl and I chose a tree that went to the ceiling. We bought a special ornament that year, which I still have, and for many years we continued to get large trees that were both beautiful and unwieldy. They always seemed bigger at home than they did outside.

During the years when we traveled a lot, we often chose a Christmas ornament as our souvenir of the trip. Many are dated and when I unwrap them each year, I am flooded with happy memories of distant times and places. I have an ornament from New Orleans - I was there for an American Library Association meeting, and one with bluebonnets on it from when I attended a Texas Library Assoc. conference. There’s an ornament from Duluth MN, purchased when I won a Maud Hart Lovelace Award, and another from Missouri that commemorates my first Mark Twain Award. I also have ornaments from the Tenth Birthday Trips that we took with each grandchild, as well as the fragile glass reindeer that was my favorite ornament when I was a little girl. I always felt privileged to be allowed to carefully hang it on the Christmas tree each year. Now as I hang it, I gratefully remember my parents and my grandparents.

When we built our log home, we began buying living Christmas trees that we could plant in our woods. I love the idea of this but found that there are two drawbacks. One, a living tree shouldn’t be kept indoors for more than a few days, and I like to enjoy my decorations for about three weeks. Second, a living tree with the root ball and container of soil is much heavier than a cut tree and therefore harder to move.

Instead of buying a Christmas tree this year, I decided to use one that needed to be removed from my own property. A young fir tree had volunteered to grow right in front of a vine maple that Carl and I had planted the first year we were here. It wasn’t a good spot, so I decided to make the little fir tree my Christmas tree. I sawed it down, brought it in, and discovered that the trunk’s diameter was too small for my tree stand. So the tree is in a vase inside the stand.

This is truly a “Charlie Brown” tree, like the one he chose at the end of the animated special, “Charlie Brown’s Christmas.” My tree is fairly full at the bottom but very sparse near the top. It holds only a fraction of my ornaments so I selected the most precious and they show beautifully. Every time I look at this little tree, I smile. It may be a new Christmas tradition.

I’m also smiling because I learned today that Stolen Children is already being reprinted. Signed copies of the first edition are still available from Lindon Books: lindon@skynetbb.com. Small independent book stores are hurting in today’s economy, and they are not getting a government bailout.

I’ve started writing a new book. As always, I begin with two main feelings: excitement over the possibility of creating a good story, and acknowledgement of how much hard work it will take. I don’t outline my books in advance.  I don’t “pre-write” or create character sketches or do any of the other exercises that are often assigned by creative writing instructors. I don’t mean to imply that such methods aren’t valid; it’s just not how I work. Every writer must find her/his own path.

I usually begin with an incident. In this case, the incident comes from a letter to the editor which appeared in my small local newspaper about two years ago. As soon as I read it, I saw it as book material so I clipped it out and put it in my Ideas Box. Every so often, I read it again and each time, possible scenes occurred to me. A character began to emerge.  My head is a muddle of such future scenes and people, often for more than one book. It’s small wonder that I forget to put out my garbage on collection day.

I’ve seen a draft of the cover for Runaway Twin, and I like it a lot. My only request to the illustrator was to please make the dog on the cover look like the dog I describe in the book. I’m not just being picky. When Pasado’s Safe Haven had a fund raising auction, I donated the opportunity for someone to have their pet in one of my books. The winning bidder asked me to use her dog, Snickers. This dog is in Runaway Twin. I had sent pictures of the real Snickers to my editor, who sent them to the artist.

My fun surprise of the week was that I won a door prize when I attended a benefit lunch for Seattle Children’s Hospital. This is the hospital where my grandson, Mark, had his brain tumor removed. Every year I attend their holiday lunch and donate books for their silent auction. This time I won an ice-cream cake from Baskins Robbins.