Welcome to my first book! 

It's an autobiography of sorts. Some of it's true. Some of it's not. Some of it's pretty obviously from somewhere in the depths of my twisted little brain and has no bearing on anything other than the fact that it seemed to be important in the moment, and that's okay.

The important thing to note here is that it's true enough to be memories that are very real to me. And that's okay, too.

My name is Evie. Or at least that's what I tell people it is. Mainly because it's a name I've always liked, and it's not the one I was given at birth. Honestly, I never really liked my given name. It's so fragile and weak it has never been quite a good descriptor of me as a person. So I gave myself a new one. 

My name is Evie.

There are a few other things you should know about me before we really get started. First, I'm middle aged. I have three living children. I was married once, but am not anymore. I was baptized a Roman Catholic, but do not practice anymore. I also get confused about what is and what is not. But I've learned to have a sense of humor about it. And I have official paperwork to prove what I have already written here. There are things that are confusing, though.

For example: I have been telling people for decades that I was born in a blizzard. That's the story I remember being told as a child. "You were born in a bad blizzard. Your mom went into labor, so we piled in the car and drove to the hospital. We got her checked in just fine. The doctor came to do the exam, decided that there was plenty of time, so he and your dad went to the cafeteria to have breakfast. By the time they got back, the doctor had just about enough time to put gloves on and catch." That was the basic gist of the thing.

Born in a blizzard.

Then I talked to my mom. "Oh, no! That's not right at all. I remember it being one of the nicest days we had all that winter. One thing I specifically remember was how clear the roads were. No ice or anything." So I looked it up online - and mom was right. It had been nice and warm for the area. The blizzard that I remembered people telling me about didn't come for another three weeks, though it was one of the biggest blizzards on record.

It brought up some questions, though: Where on earth did the story of being born in the blizzard come from? Who told it to me, and why? Did I make it up myself for some reason? Possibly cobbled together from a number of different stories that just blended together? What else was I certain about that was actually nothing but lies? Who else had I told these lies to? And, perhaps most important, did it really matter?

There for a couple of years these questions kept tumbling over and over in my mind. One would lead to another, which would lead to a third, then a jump to five or six more... It was a mess. My mind was a dark and stormy place. There were bouts of depression, suicidal thoughts and tendencies, a couple of addictions to legal substances (coffee, my dark friend and constant companion - because laying in bed trying to sleep made it worse and the caffeine crash helped to avoid that scenario), a divorce in there, a couple of moves, and the list goes on. It just wasn't pretty.

I found out other stories that I had been told - or had made up - which had conflicting sources and details. There is a small scar on my bottom lip. It looks like a mole, acts kind of like a mole, but everybody agrees it's a scar. One person says I got it because a metal and glass storm door fell on me. Another person says my mom knocked me down a flight of stairs - and a third says she did it on purpose. My mom says they're crazy and out to paint her in a bad light (which I actually have reason to believe), and that I was running around in stocking feet with a bottle hanging out of my mouth, and I slipped and fell. No matter what the story, though, there are some consistencies: I was teething. Whatever happened knocked some teeth out (2, 3, or 4 depending on who tells the story). All of them were found. Whoever found them jammed them back into my gums and ran me to the emergency dentist, who verified that my savior's instincts were correct, and doing that probably saved my teeth.

It didn't save my smile, though. Whatever trauma happened to my mouth stuck. It stuck hard. When my adult teeth started coming in, one had been pushed back nearly to my soft palette. The one next to it grew in toward the front of my mouth and off to the side. The one next to that came in blackened and dead. Whatever caused it, there were many visits to the orthodontist, and those front teeth have always been incredibly weak. Or at least they were until they all had crowns put on.

Finding out that the cause didn't matter when it came down to the nitty gritty did have an effect, though. It answered at least one of my questions. I may not know the hows, whys, and wherefores of what goes on in my brain. That's okay. I don't have to. I decided that it really doesn't matter all that much, as long as I keep myself (and hopefully those around me) from doing something either really stupid or illegal. I've told the guy I've been with for the past few years that things are scrambled in my brain, and I honestly don't know if about half of what I'm saying is true. He's honestly more worried about it than I am.

If I'm going to be honest about the whole thing, I usually just try to have fun with it. It helps the people around me have fun, too. Or at least most of them. There are a few who have decided that I'm the spawn of the devil or some such nonsense, too. But mostly people just laugh and have fun with it. And that's the way it should be.

I understand that the introductory chapter there may have been a little off-putting. That's kind of the way it goes sometimes. At the same time, I'm actually a pretty normal person - if normal even exists. I work a full 40 hours a week, just became eligible for benefits not too long ago, and even signed up for a 401k program. I read a lot, spend way too much time on the internet than what's good for me, and am a sucker for those stupid online quiz things. You know the ones. Pick your ten favorite colors and we'll tell you your personality!

Just about everybody I know has done a few of those in their lifetime. Then there's stuff like facebook, reddit, and tumblr... All perfectly good time wasters. Usually used to keep from having to do the dishes and the laundry - the two neverending chores of every household. The ones that are never done. 

I also spend quite a bit of time tending to the houseplants. I've always been attracted to green and growing things. Especially the edible kinds. Growing up, before we moved from the suburbs to an urban farming area, we had a garden in the yard. There was a big cherry bush with asparagus growing under it, a small strawberry patch, and about half the back yard had been converted to grow fresh vegetables. The cherries were somewhere between "tart" and "mouth puckering sour" so I mostly left them alone. Unless we were doing pies or something similar. Then I would be sent out in the yard with a big old bowl and set to picking. Those were some of the best pies and tarts I ever had... after enough sugar was added. 

The strawberries never yielded much. Nobody could ever really figure out why... until my dad woke up in the middle of the night and found me out there in the middle of the patch with a flashlight. It wasn't the first time he'd caught me doing something similar. The first time I can remember (and that he will corroborate) I was in the garden. We had planted two rows of the green english peas. They were starting to ripen. Dad was looking forward to starting to harvest them a couple of days later, and had been talking about it, so I decided they must be pretty much ready. He woke up at about dawn one morning and came to check on my sister and I out of force of habit. My bed was empty. 

Now keep in mind that this was not unusual. Not by any stretch of the imagination. There were literally hundreds of times when he would come to check and I would be somewhere other than my bed. Usually asleep. There is a picture floating around somewhere of me sitting on the trainer toilet. Evidently I had gotten up, put my clothes on, gone to the trainer toilet, and fell asleep on my own lap. This was an ongoing thing.

On this particular occasion, however, he could not find me. I was not in the house. Nowhere. None of the closets, not in the toy box, under the basement stairs, in the dryer, under the train set, under the beds or couches or chairs, in the kitchen or bathroom cupboards, the bathtub... none of the "usual" hiding spots.

No.

He went outside in a panic and found me very calmly sitting in between the two rows of peas, sharing them with a wild rabbit. The rabbit was at one end of the rows and I was at the other. Pick, shell, eat, toss the shell. Lather, rinse, repeat. He told me once that he sat there and he watched me munch my way through about half of the row before I noticed he was there. I must have thought this was perfectly normal and acceptable behavior, since I just picked a handful of pods and brought them to him to share.  It turns out that over the course of the next about week, week and a half I ended up eating most of what we had put out there. We ended up not actually harvesting more than a single potful for the family table, thanks to my getting up in the middle of the night and knowing how to open the screen door.

The next year we had eight rows of peas. We also planted carrots. The carrots saved the peas, but I think Dad honestly regrets ever showing me how to dig them up and eat them at such a young age. 

The story of the growing carrot patch is pretty similar to the story of the growing pea patch. It started out with two rows. Then four. Then six.

The year we had six rows of carrots was also the year Dad planted lettuce for the first time. "Just one row" to see how it would grow. It grew. He just didn't realize that it was a success until he discovered the bowl and fork sitting on the back stoop one morning with the remains of ranch dressing in it. I think that was the first time I made him facepalm - but it certainly was not the last. I singlehandedly turned him into a master of facepalm. It's one of the accomplishments I take great personal pride in.

It made perfect sense to me, though. Talk about a fresh salad! Everything you need, all right there. Lettuce, carrots, tomatoes, cucumbers, and the dressing was in the fridge. Who wouldn't take advantage of that?

I'm also fairly certain that was the incident that prompted Dad into looking for alternatives to chemical pesticides, too. He finally realized that there was just no keeping me out of the garden, and that if I upped my game any further, the pesticides might do some real damage. We tried a lot of things. Some seemed to work well, others did not. Pouring cheap beer around the edges of the garden to keep out snails and slugs worked fairly well. So did planting marigolds at intervals around the edges.  Never could get rid of the grasshoppers, though...

Not that it stopped us from trying. We ended up with smaller yields, and a couple of pretty well destroyed crops, but the work was put in anyway. I was out there helping, too. Dad made it clear that if I was going to eat most of what was grown, I would have to put in my fair share of the labor. So instead of learning to ride a bike and roller skate like the other kids (mental note to self: the plastic shoe and the tricycle) we went out and got a child-sized set of gardening tools. I was more proud of that than anything. Dad and I would spend hours on the weekends getting rid of weeds, setting the sprinklers, making sure the plants were spaced correctly, tieing the tomatoes to the cages...

Or, rather, Dad would tie the tomato plants to the cages, and I would get distracted by eating the tomatoes fresh off the vine. Tomatoes that fresh, still warm from the sun, taste completely different than anything you can find in a store. Or even at a farmer's market, where they have been picked for at least a day or two before you get to them as a consumer. Thinking about it now, I can remember the heat of the sun on my face and shoulders, and how it felt to bite into a tomato and suck out the juice and seeds. They're so much sweeter off the vine like that.

On a related note: Dad and I had a conversation a couple of years after I had moved out. It was the first time he had planted tomatoes since he had started living alone. The gist of the conversation was that he had forgotten how many tomatoes actually grew on a single vine. He was overwhelmed. He had made and canned spaghetti sauce, pizza sauce, salsa, tomato sauce, tomato paste, plain old stewed tomatoes... and was less than halfway through the harvest. No wonder he felt so much better after we stopped using pesticides.

I can also remember the day he quit using chemical fertilizer on the lawn. Instead, he switched to either plain old cow manure or mulch. Thanks to my sister tattling on me.

Dad had mowed the lawn earlier in the day. This is something that happens often when you have a lawn. Or at least it should. The thing is, we had borage that was starting to overgrow part of the lawn in the back yard. Borage is an herb with little purple flowers. It's a hardy little sucker. The original intent was to have a small patch next to the back door because they're pretty. It didn't stay contained. We started off with one little plant, and it eventually took over about a quarter of the yard. It got the point where Dad would just mow the borage along with the lawn, except  for the little patch where it was supposed to be growing. 

Now because Dad had mowed the lawn, I was sitting in the back yard eating borage flowers. My sister caught me. I remember her running inside to tattle, yelling at the top of her lungs.

"Daddy! Daddy! Evie's eating flowers!"

As you can imagine, it didn't take long for him to make an appearance. He came barreling out of the back door like a rocket, ready to either wash my mouth out with the hose or rush me to the emergency room or some other such thing. Which, honestly, I can understand - eating flowers? 

Anyway, he came charging outside and saw me sitting there next to the borage patch. He came to a screeching halt and facepalmed. Hard. (See? He learned quickly.)

"Evie?"

"Yeah, Daddy?"

"Why are you eating those?"

"They smell like cucumbers." (Which is true - borage smells like fresh cucumbers when it's cut or crushed.) Munch munch munch. "And there's a picture in one of the cookbooks."

A pause. "There is? Can you show me?"

"OK Daddy!" So I get up and we all troop on inside, where I pull a cookbook off of the shelf and flip through it until I find the picture. It was a recipe for a cake that had been decorated with the (completely harmless and edible) flowers of a borage plant.

Insert a double-handed facepalm with the scrubbing motion attached. "OK. Evie. Next time you want to eat something that's not in the vegetable garden, come show me first. You were right about this one, but some things are very bad for you. You can get very sick. OK?"

"OK Daddy!"

He regretted that one. I woke up early, remember? It only took a couple of weeks for the stipulation to be added that I was not allowed to eat anything from outside of the vegetable garden until after both sunlight and coffee happened.