I have changed my behavior and manner countless times over the decades of my life to morph into the character I needed, or wanted to be, for the time period I was in. We all play different parts for the different eras of our lives but I am now realizing that Nana-Next-Door was my favorite thus far, and the part for this character has been temporarily written out of my life script, the children after all are now both adults and both living hours away at universities in Connecticut, and I am feeling a little bit like an out of work actress!

It’s not so much that I like to feel “needed” it’s that I enjoyed BEING needed. My part in their story was multidimensional; I was a book reader, a bird catcher, a smoke detector fixer, a homework helper, a bedroom painter, a thorn and splinter puller and boo-boo tender, a bus driver, a laundress, a snack maker and a chef, a personal shopper, and above all, a cheerleader…cheering them on in every way, every time they did or tried anything. For all the years of living here, next door to them, I did whatever my daughter needed me to do to help her with her kids, and I did whatever they needed me to do for them, or asked me to do with them, and the few times I EVER complained about any of it, and it was indeed infrequent for me to do so, my dad would laugh and say “it’s your job” and I knew it in my heart and soul that helping my daughter to raise her daughters was in fact the best job I had ever had and, & as I noted, my complaints or irritations were few.

“Nana-Next-Door my sock is torn and I’ve gotten a thorn, what in the world can we do?” is the first sentence of the first children’s book that I am going to write. It’s based on the day the Little-Blonde-Wonder got a thorn in her foot in the driveway. I have joked for years that my parents, who have said to me, since I was a teenager and dreamed of being a writer, *when are you going to write your book* that everybody already has had great ideas, and many people are better researchers and finer wordsmiths, and more skilled at character development than I could ever be, and have beaten me to the good luck of being a published author…and I have totes and totes and totes under my bed, purple totes, filled with pages and notebooks and journals, of starts and ideas and words…words, words, words…so many brainstorming stories, novels, memoir ideas, that I joke with myself that I already AM a writer, it’s just that hardly anybody reads anything I write, and I don’t get any money for it! BUT one night many months ago I woke with a start, and I thought to myself, “self, perhaps your job as Nana could be a story.” I have a few friends and women with whom I am acquainted who are artists and I am toying with the idea of asking one to draw and color the characters, and one to paint the background yard scenes, and one to do the clothes…I see the stories coming to life in my mind…I see the long driveway and the houses in the “compound” away from the street, and some of the tales, and adventures that happen with The Nana-Next-Door. To be clear, I’m painfully aware, having been a child who loved books & the library and then raised a girl to adulthood and then helped raise her two girls to adulthood, that there ARE ALREADY LOTS OF CHILDREN’S books, but what will it hurt to explore the possibility of this, this new role I could play, this character of *children’s book author* for myself? Nothing. It will not hurt one bit and may just cost me some money.

Sometimes I imagine the characters as human but more often than not I imagine them as some sort of creature that lives here amongst us in our woods, but like in any delightful children’s book they have human characteristics and cute clothing and expressions and opposable thumbs! The groundhogs here have ruined every vegetable garden I’ve ever grown, the chipmunks here have burrowed under my gravel to the point that I have nearly broken my ankle falling into a tunnel, we have a family of albino skunks that have made it impossible some summers to breathe or to open a window, we have deer, we have foxes, so there are lots of four-legged critters that could be reimagined into my grandchildren as characters.

The girls have only had one full week at University so far, and once my daughter and I are done with the initial shock of missing them I feel like I am going to need more to occupy my mind in the healing process of missing them in my life…writing them into adorable characters having delightful adventures and wearing fabulous outfits might just be the perfect antidote to my sadness…I mean really, I can only do so much yoga and crocheting and cleaning after work!!! There are lots of hours that are going to need to be filled in my new life! When a play finishes its run on Broadway, when a soap opera stops being part of daytime television, when a sitcom has its final episode, all of those people have roles that stopped…just like that, The End…and they start the arduous task of reinvention…and so I shall try as well.