The Boys

It's been a while since I posted new pictures of the boys. They're going through a very feral developmental stage right now--I could use analogies like maurauding pirates, rampaging wildebeasts, viking berserkers, etc to describe them. They're in a spitting/screaming/hopping/jumping/pillaging frame of mind with VERY selective hearing lately. And, as usual, I'm wondering what on earth I was thinking having them so close together.

John is well-into the Terrible Two's now--tantruming and screaming and head-butting when he doesn't get his way. And since his older brother is around to show him how to get into all kinds of trouble he wouldn't have come up with on his own, he's spending a lot of time tantruming and screaming and headbutting at me. And Sam is spending a lot of time in time out. So Sam has also started putting John in "time out," but that's a whole nother story...

At least they look angelic in photographs...

Anyway in honor of my marauding wildebeast berserkers, since it's February 9th, here are nine fun facts about the boys.

1. They have discovered the joys of hair styling... with maple syrup... on school mornings.

2. Yesterday I had the following conversation with Sam on the way home from school: "Mommy, stop singing." "I'm not singing, Sam." "Mommy, stop (mimes me lip synching). Just drive!"

3. John has learned the words "yucky" and "yummy". Poopy diapers and bread crusts are "yucky." Trains and french toast sticks are "yummy."

4. John loves watching The Wiggles and calls them the "gulls".

5. Sam has started "reading" books to John. John will bring him books and they'll sit together and Sam will narrate the pictures for him.

6.  John has figured out where I keep the Chef Boyardee in the pantry, and will go and get a can and stick it on the counter for me in the morning, so it's ready for lunchtime.

7. He has also started bringing me towels (completely unasked) when I'm in the shower... sometimes as many as three. :-)

8. John's eyes have officially turned green. I know it shouldn't matter to me, but I am soooo happy about it. They're the most gorgeous shade of turquoise. Not my dark green color at all, but more like my grandfather's, and that suits me fine.

9. Today, the boys were in Sam's room playing with the door shut. I went to check on them and said "If you need me, I'll be downstairs cooking dinner." Sam got up and said "Thanks, Mom" and then closed the door in my face like "We're good here."

Yes, we are. :-)

I Am Stoked!

When I bought the book on amazon.com, I had no idea what I was getting. The title was The North Carolina Flood July 14 15 16 1916, and I knew that it was self-published by the author and would probably be helpful as far as research went. I had no idea how helpful--and now I'm literally jumping up and down doing cartwheels of joy. This book is another perfect find.

The book was published in 1918, and is full of comprehensive eyewitness accounts of the flood, it reprints newspaper articles of the time, and is full of pictures, too. There is very little written about this flood anywhere else, and I may be going out on a limb saying this, but based on my trolling around the internet, it may well be the *only* comprehensive account of the entire disaster. I just have to look through the table of contents to see the scope of the damage. Anyone familiar with Western North Carolina would be aghast to think the floods and land slides reached from as far-flung locales as Asheville, Morganton, Marion, Bat Cave, Chimney Rock, and Wilkesboro. And this book describes it all.

It's like the universe wants me to write this book. Everything is falling into place.

I am giddy, I tell you. Giddy!

Perfect Finds

I wish I could tell you all the exciting things that have been happening around here lately, but unfortunately, I can't.

What I will bore you to tears tell you about is my latest consignment sale find. It's no secret that my boys like trains, or that Sam can find a picture of Thomas the Tank Engine the size of a postage stamp in a store as big as Wal-mart. But I hadn't realized how good I was at locating trains myself.

I was at the consignment sale the other night and wandered over to the bedroom decor area. Shoved between a wall and a shelving unit, I thought I spied a little blue smokestack. I wrenched the picture from its hiding place and Eureka! It was the perfect thing for John's new bedroom:

People that do not have children will probably not understand my euphoria, but at that moment, I felt like I had just saved the planet from a group of giant maniacle robots, scaled Mt. Everest, and founded the first colony in outer space. At a measly $8, it was absolutely the most PERFECT FIND in the world at that very moment.

And I should know, because I'm on a constant, and constantly fruitless, search for perfection.

Tom and I had a heated argument discussion the other day about my insistant need to create charming, train-themed bedrooms for the boys. It all began over a $160 comforter, that Tom insisted I would be out of my mind to give to a 3 year old boy. Okay... maybe so. He said his bedroom didn't have a theme when he was growing up, and he had the same boring solid-colored comforter most of his life, and made it to adulthood emotionally unscathed.

Well, goody for him.

When I was little, I had a Strawberry Shortcake obsession akin to Sam's for trains. And my bedroom was an explosion of every imaginable Strawberry Shortcake paraphenalia known to mankind, and even more things unknown to mankind that my mother had made me. I had Strawberry Shortcake sheets, curtains, comforter, canopy for my bed, pillow cases, throw pillows, rugs, jewelry, hair bows, t-shirts, shoes, backpack, etc. And it made me ecstatically happy. I was maybe 4 at the time, at an age where I was starting to have definite likes and dislikes, at an age when I was becoming my own person, and the more I was surrounded by the things *I* liked, the better loved and understood I felt.

I'm sure without those things, I would have made it to adulthood without the need of a good therapist, but all the same, I look at that time in my life as a very magical period, where I lived in the same world that my imagination had conjured.

I still get that feeling when I'm writing--when I'm literally living only in the world created by my own head. I block everything else out and it's as close to perfect as I've ever felt. I'm probably telling on myself here, since most people don't clamor to hide inside their own heads, but maybe it's a trait common among writers. I was reading about J.D. Salinger and his near hermit-like existance in rural New England, and it sounded like a pretty good life to me, too.

I want to create that kind of emotional retreat for my boys, even if they aren't like me and won't see their private space in the same way I would, because my personal philosphy as a parent (and, for that matter, as a human) is to open yourself (and your kids) up to everything, throw ideas at yourself (and your kids) like errant Velco balls, and see what sticks. I know well enough from my writing that you only need a split second experience to change an entire course of action. Lots of experiences give you lots of choices. And the more time your mind is allowed to wander, the more courses of action it can explore.

Which brings me back to my writing... as always.

As I mentioned in my last post, I've been reading Our Southern Highlanders by Horace Kephart. I've been living up in Bear Wallow (at least in my head) for months now. It's been a blurry visit because I don't have all the details ironed out yet, but reading the book has certainly helped inform my mental picture (although it was written about the mountaineers that lived further north of Bear Wallow, where it was more isolated and poorer than the particular area I'm writing about). Anyway, yesterday I sat down and started transcribing my notes into a Word document. I wasn't consciously plotting my novel. I was just writing down snippets of interesting information and letting my imagination mull over them a little. And I came across mention of a "poke supper," where girls prepared delicacies for fund raisers, and young men would bid on them--sometimes bidding up to $50 for a pretty girl's "poke"--because the winner got to eat dinner with the girl who prepared the meal and then escort her home. So my mind was turning...hmmmmm... and then this morning, while I was fixing breakfast for the boys, a new plot thread snapped into place.

I don't want to jinx anything by throwing the word "perfect" around too much, but it seems to me that this book, at this moment, is another PERFECT FIND.

Getting Inspiration

I haven't had an opportunity to do any writing the last couple of weeks, and am gnashing at the bit to get back to it. But that doesn't mean I've been a slacker. I took the opportunity while Mom was visiting to catch up on my research for the novel. Over the last week and a half, I read The Proper Bostonians by Cleveland Amory and Our Southern Highlanders by Horace Kephart.

And I come away from the experience, sure as I ever could be, that my title 900 Miles is more than perfectly appropriate.

I'm pretty sure that in all of America, there are no two groups of people more different (and yet so fundamentally similar) as a Southern Appalachian and a "proper" Bostonian. I won't go into it now, because what would be the point of writing the book? But I will say that I'm absolutely giddy with the possibilities.

This novel originated as a conversation in my head about what was wrong with Home Improvement. I was driving along in the mini-van, on the way to the preschool, when I started thinking about why my story just didn't seem to have any steam. I think I was also mulling over something I'd read in Writer's Digest about how the characters in a romance novel need to be at odds with one another on a fundamental basis (which is hard to work with when your characters are married, in love, and only in disagreement about which house to buy--which was my ultimate problem with Home Improvement).

The conversation in my head went something like this:

So if I was going to write another book, who would my characters be? Who would immediately be at odds with each other?

Well, a mountain healer would certainly be at odds with a "real" doctor. And it wouldn't hurt if he was arrogant, and unreceptive to mountain remedies, and didn't understand the culture, and thought everyone was a stupid hillbilly. That would create a lot of conflict. I could do something with that...

But what would bring them together? I know! The flood!

And then things totally spiraled out of control...

And here I am.

I just ordered a book off of amazon.com that I hope is going to be useful, too. It's called The North Carolina Flood July 14, 15, 16 1916 by W. M. Bell. It's out of print and hard to find, so I was lucky there were copies available somewhere. Hopefully, it will inspire me even further.

My Latest Project

Since we've got snow and ice coming, and since it's almost a certainty we're going to lose power, you're getting a two-fer tonight since there's a possibility I won't be able to update my blog for a while.

My mom is visiting from Idaho for the week, and we got to talking and she said she'd make Sam a train quilt for his birthday. We went to get fabric for this quilt, and while we were out, we discovered that the local Wal-mart was clearing out its fabric and everything was 50% off.

My boys both LOVE trains and one of the fabrics on sale at Walmart was a quilted panel for making a train-themed baby quilt. At $5/yard, which makes one complete quilt, it was hard to pass up, so we got a couple of panels to make a quilt and pillowcase for John. But then we decided why stop there? We could also make valances to go with the quilt, so we bought a few more panels. And then we got to thinking that it might be easier to just applique the trains on the baby quilt onto the big quilt mom was going to make, so we got 4 more panels.

As you can see, we are now up to our eyeballs in train quilts.

And we've spent more hours than I want to admit to pulling out all the stitching so we'll have unquilted fabric to work with.

But the finished product is VERY cool. Here is the train quilt I made John. It is backed in the blue fabric to the left. Mom made him two pillow cases out of that. John is so excited. He keeps going back to it to touch it and examine it more closely. And today Sam asked us, "Hey! Where's mine?"

Bear Wallow Is A Place

Bear Wallow Mountain Pictures

The house on the left was my Aunt Hattie's. She was my great-grandmother's sister. Bear Wallow Baptist Church is on the right. It was founded by my my great-great grandfather.

During the 1916 flood, a baby girl and an elderly man (both cousins) drowned when the family tried to cross the footbridge directly behind this house and get to their barn. The barn was destroyed during a landslide, but the house was not washed away in the flood and still stands.

A typical Bear Wallow home, surrounded by mountains.

The house my Uncle Bob grew up in (he married my grandfather's sister). His family fled their house and sought shelter in a cave in the mountains during the flood. Their house was washed away and this is the house they built to replace it.

Since I'm spending so much time here in my head, I thought it was only fair to share a few of those images with you. The quality isn't great, because I took most of the pictures right out the car window, but this place is alive with family history for me.

You Just Never Know...

One of the biggest southern stereotypes is that those of us from the South like to talk, will talk to anybody, for any length of time, about nearly any subject. And this is especially true when you are stuck in a long line at the fabric counter at Walmart and the sales associate's barcode-creator-thingy malfunctions.

So my mom (who's visiting from Boise) and I (with John, who was acting like any male would who was stuck in the fabric section--can you say caged animal???) strike up a conversation with another grandmother, mother, and (more civilized) toddler who were waiting in line behind us.

The older woman had a strong accent and my mom asked if she was from New Jersey. No, she was from Boston. We talked about accents and moving across the country and suddenly having an accent when you never had one before...

And I'm not sure how the conversation meandered in this direction, but I started telling the woman about my novel-in-progress and about my male character from Boston. And we were talking about Boston, blah blah blah small talk, but then all of a sudden she mentioned how bad Boston was for flooding...

It would have been undignified to scream Eureka! and kiss this woman in public, but I very nearly did.

My book centers around an extremely rare 100 year flood in the mountains, and here I find out that for my male protagonist, flooding would have been a common occurance. This opened up a whole new avenue of thinking--added depth and breadth to the story--and whole new aspects to John's character that I had never considered.

Which tied in beautifully with one of a hundred simple little ideas that sprang up unobtrusively in a journal entry...

Way back when I was researching young adult literature for my Master's thesis, I read a book about a Newfoundland (dog) that saved a group of stranded passengers on a sinking ship by swimming a rope out to the boat so the people on land could fashion a breeches buoy (An apparatus used for rescues and transfers at sea, consisting of sturdy canvas breeches attached at the waist to a ring buoy that is suspended from a pulley running along a rope from ship to shore or from ship to ship--for the uninitiated). Now, I had never heard of such a thing before I read that book, because coming from western NC, you'd be lucky to see a boat any bigger than a canoe, and you'd certainly never need to know what to do to prevent someone from drowning in a shipwreck...But like most things I find fascinating, I let it hang out so I could think about some more.

And, lo and behold, it popped up again as I was wondering how you could cross a swollen creek with several small children. I thought of the breeches buoy from 10 years ago, and thought it would be really handy if someone thought to make one at that moment. And then I thought that John, who'd lived on a seaport his whole life, might think to do it. But I wasn't sure and was still letting the idea simmer.

So I said to the woman, "Do you know what a breeches buoy is?" all the while watching my mother's face wrinkle up in a what-the-heck-are-you-talking-about expression. And the woman's face lights up and she says, "Oh, sure I do!" So I press further, "And were they commonly used in the Boston area to save people?" "Oh yeah. All the time."

And so I resisted the urge to kiss this complete stranger again.

This is why it pays to strike up conversations with strangers. It's kind of like Google. You never know what kind of hits you're going to get, but sometimes you find exactly what you were looking for.

Talking "Mountain"

Lately I've been researching Southern Appalachian speech and have been reinfusing my brain with the words and phrases I used to hear so often growing up.

I'll admit, when I was younger, I probably spoke with a more colorful accent. But public education neutralized my vocabulary, and living abroad and learning new languages killed my tendency to throw in a dipthong every time I used a vowel. I had to lose my mountain accent so my English could be understood better by non-native speakers.

It is still possible to pinpoint that I'm a mountain girl though, if you listen closely enough.

Tom says that I speak fairly accent-less English. Being from New Jersey, he can barely understand the South Carolina locals, but it sounds perfectly normal to me. But then again, Tom does laugh at my pronunciation of dah-awg (he says dough-g). :-) And he has noticed that the more I become impassioned, the more my words shift into "twang-mode".

But he says he doesn't hear my accent often, which makes me sad now that I think about it. It's a long, lost friend that I miss but can't connect with anymore.

I really didn't realize how much of my speech I had lost(the final death knell was probably living with him--you can only get so many curious looks from your husband before you automatically revert to expressions he'll understand) until I read him a list of (completely familiar to me) Appalachian phrases I'd found on the internet and asked him if he'd ever heard me use any of them. He had not.

I'm convinced he hasn't been paying attention.

That, or I automatically don't use those expressions with him, but do use them around people I know will understand them.

For example, I'm pretty sure that I say, "They went to Greenville or Spartanburg one" fairly regularly.

I tell people "how the hogs ate the cabbage."

I'm frequently fixin' to do something.

I refer to dinner as supper. I crack the window. I've been known to say "I'll be back directly," "nekkid as a jaybird," "chewed up and spit out," "something the cat drug in," and "mean as a skunk."

And I know what "he's so bowlegged, he couldn't hem up a hog in a ditch" means. (When I said that one, Tom looked at me like I was speaking Greek.)

I know my South Carolina friends understand me perfectly, even though they don't speak exactly like I do. Until I moved down here, I didn't hear "ya'll" nearly as often as I heard "you'uns" and I'll admit, even after six years here, I frequently feel unsettled by South Carolina's gentile southern drawl. Like the gentle hills of the upstate, it is a fluid and rolling type of speech. I miss rugged, craggy mountain talk. Which is another reason I don't often let fly with a twang or two. It would make the 50 some-odd miles between here and Asheville feel more like 500, and I have a hard enough time fitting in here as it is. I mean, you can't even get hushpuppies with your barbeque here. You get a slice of white bread.

If that's not a metaphor for the differences between me and the non-mountain world, I don't know what is.

How Things Come Together

I was talking to my chiropractor (of all people) about what it's like inside a writer's mind, and how, sometimes, things just creep into your subconscious where they hang around bugging you until you can sort them out.

Here's an example:

I had written a fragment of a scene where Ivy is mad at John because of a misunderstanding. In my head, she is perfectly justified in her outrage because she knows something that John does not, but I didn't know what that might be. I also knew that Ivy was going to be practicing some kind of mountain medicine that John couldn't appreciate, but hadn't the first clue what the treatment would be because I hadn't decided on the ailment she was treating yet.

This is a typical conundrum for a writer. I'll back myself into a corner and until I figure out the whys and wherefores, I'm stuck. I can't write a blessed thing.

But things have a way of working themselves out.

Yesterday, I was googling common Southern Appalachian expressions and came across a reference to people saying someone was "bad to drink". I went on my merry way, and kept writing down other phrases, when all of a sudden in the back of my head, the wheels started turning.

I've been reading trudging through Thomas Wolfe's O Lost! this week, and in the book, the father character is a raging alcoholic who becomes verbally abusive and violent towards his family. And as I'm thinking about this character, who is indeed "bad to drink" I picture Ivy shaking her head, hands on her hips saying (to me, presumably) "I'd take care of him. Give him some kind of tonic that would make him sick as a dog whenever he touched alcohol. Go figure out what I'd give him..."

So I start researching home remedies for alcoholism... And lo and behold, what is one of the most common remedies to treat alcoholism? Kudzu Root! And what grows plentifully in the south? KUDZU! So then I research a little more, and what side effect might one experience after imbibing too much Kudzu Root? Chronic constipation!

Wheels start turning faster... So if there's a character who beats his wife and children when he drinks, Ivy might surreptitiously be making him a tonic for his stomach troubles (he's sure to have them if he's a heavy drinker), that keeps him off the bottle, and makes him constipated. Ivy has a good excuse to try giving him more and more "tonic", but then the new doctor comes to town, has no idea about this man's past history with the bottle, and tells this man that Ivy's tonic is useless, pours it out, and gives him something more effective for his stomach, and suddenly all the pieces of my plot come together. :-)

I can't tell you how exilerating it feels when this happens. This is why I write.

What Did You Do Today?

It's never a good idea to ask this of a stay-at-home mom and expect to be told anything exciting as a result.

One of my single (and childless) friends asked me this very question this morning, and I was embarrassed to admit that so far, my morning had consisted of getting Sam to preschool, then taking John with me to Target to buy him some training pants.

I left out the part about waking up to Ice Age: The Meltdown, making toaster waffles for breakfast, negotiating with Sam about which shoes to wear to school, and refereeing a squabble over how many Fruit Loops Sam should share with John and who would get to hold the cup of Fruit Loops after Sam exited the car.

That was my morning in a nutshell. Heady stuff there...

And yet, when I got home, and after I put John to bed and dumped his new training pants in the wash (to hopefully shrink them--baby boy is only in the 6th percentile for weight), my life got interesting because once again, I felt a compulsion to write and my brain was almost instantly transported up to Bear Wallow.

Now I'm a novelist, with interesting things to talk about.

Like, for example, this new method of writing. I haven't even once sat down at the computer and tried to bang out a chronological story. In fact, I rarely sit down at the computer at all. Mostly, scenes have been popping into my head and I'll write down whatever comes to mind in my notebook while I sit with the boys in the playroom.

Then, during their naps, I'll slip downstairs to the computer and type out what I've already written freehand. I had so many snippets that I began to put them in chronological order. Then, out of nowhere, I had a fully fleshed out beginning, middle, and end. So whenever I get a new scene, I stick it in the appropriate chronology, and move on.

Yesterday during the boys' afternoon nap, I typed out my ending. Then after they woke up, while they were playing, I wrote a scene that became the catalyst for the ending.

And when I want to write, and I'm stuck, I just number my page from 1-100 and jot ideas down. Sometimes they go together (they usually do), but sometimes it's a thought pertaining to something I've already written. And then I go add all of that to the body of the novel. And the book is slowly coming together.

This is quite possibly the craziest writing experience I've ever had. This is not what writing is supposed to feel like. This is not how writing is supposed to me done. I don't feel like I'm in the driver's seat with this one at all. And now I've got this niggling voice in the back of my head (my Muse, most likely) sayng absolutely insane things like "When you're done writing this one, you'll have to go back and re-write Home Improvement the same way."

And the funny thing is, I really don't feel like I have a choice anymore.

A Tentative Title

This morning, the Muse whispered in my ear again... This time it was a suggestion for a title.

Here's how it happened. I was thinking about Bearwallow Mountain, since my thoughts are drifting there more and more lately. And I was thinking about the theme of being home that I'm trying to weave into my novel. At which point the Muse suggested I use the word home in the title.

So I started mulling. There's an old Appalachian folk song that Ivy sings to John called 900 Miles. The lyrics are, in part, "If this train runs me right, I'll be home Saturday night, 'cause I'm 900 miles from my home..."

Just on a whim, I mapquested the distance from Boston (where John comes from) to Bear Wallow (where Ivy's from), and it's just a little over 900 miles... And I thought to myself, this can't be a coincidence. Things are just falling into place too perfectly to pass up this opportunity.

So, for now anyway, my tentative title is 900 Miles to Appalachia.

What do you think?

Unkeeping A Journal - Part 1

I'm the sort of writer whose ideas are in a constant state of percolation. I'll be driving my mini-van, listening to The Wiggles, answering a constant stream of "whys" from the backseat, and all of a sudden a snippet of conversation will pop into my head, where it will sit until I'm in the grocery store, and I imagine a dialogue around that snippet of conversation, where it will sit until I'm in the middle of a debate with Tom about what to have for dinner when the setting for the dialogue with the snippet of conversation will pop into my head. Then I'll let it percolate some more while I work out all the sensory details and plot points. And then, when everything finally starts to come together in my own mind, I *try* to write it all down.

It's not the most effective means of novel writing. Invariably, I lose my momentum halfway through and end up wracking my brain trying to remember what I'd been stewing over.

In this month's Writer's Digest, there's an article that caught my attention about "unkeeping" a journal, and using it as a repository for all those snippets that fall into your head and end up lost to time. Since there are no rules, because technically, you aren't *keeping* a journal, you can use it to play around with your writing, brainstorm out loud, and amuse yourself by transcribing the conversations around you, funny things children say, and any interesting stories that interest you. All excellent ideas.

Some of the suggestions didn't really appeal to me. I'm not going to interview myself, pretending I'm a bestselling author, for example. And I don't exactly see the point in brainstorming titles for a children's book about two dogs. But a couple of pages into the article, one of the suggestions really caught my eye.

It's an exercise called Outrunning The Critic. What you're supposed to do is write 100 short sentences about a character, central concept, or scene in a story, and write those sentences without lifting your pen from the paper. I read that and went, "Huh. I should try that."

I had a scene percolating in my head--a very pivotal, very long scene that I didn't want to start yet. It was just too daunting. It takes place at a square dance and it had already taken three hours of watching square dance and clogging videos on You Tube to get the first page of the scene started. But the boys were playing trains in the playroom, and they wanted me in there with them, so I grabbed my new journal, numbered the lines from 1 to 100 and jotted down thoughts as they came to me.

Even though there were times that John was leaping on me and literally swinging off my pen-wielding arm (in danger of getting his little eyes stabbed out, by the way, which I suppose is an occupational hazard when your mother is a novelist) I got my 100 short sentences written in pretty short order. It was surprising to see how truly fleshed out that portion of the chapter already was in my head, and how little I really needed to fill in.

Since I don't like to "write" until the scene is complete in my head, but 100 sentences feels like a substantial amount of ideas for getting started, I was able to subvert that part of myself that says "Sorry. Not enough here to write it down." The best part is, in transcribing those 100 sentences into the body of my text, I see it is a hugely substantial gain after all. It didn't feel like I was making progress because it was too easy, but even so, I was.

This is definetely a technique I'll try again (there's a lot of scene left to write, and I'm still dreading writing it).

*****

On another note entirely, I'm trying to come up with at least a working title for my book. "Untitled" as a header looks so insubstantial on every page. Just like you want to know the status immediately of any possible romantic relationship, I want to know what to call this thing now that it and I are spending every waking moment with each other.

My book takes place in the Appalachian Mountains in 1916. Ivy Garren lives on Bear Wallow Mountain and tends to the sick there with all manner of folk remedies. She's well respected in her neck of the woods until John Emerson, an arrogant (but intoxicatingly handsome) doctor newly graduated from Harvard Medical School starts his own practice in town and starts stirring up trouble. This is the summer a horrible flood wrecks havoc in the mountains and Ivy and John must come together to save their neighbors.

I'm bouncing around ideas about water, flooding, mountains, storms, etc. but so far the best I've come up with are things like "Mountain Storm," and "Hearts Aflooded" and I'm not digging it. I can just picture the cover art now *shudder*. Ivy, half falling out of her dress, while a shirtless John pulls her against his chisled chest with a stethoscope...