How did I start writing about them? Silly as it sounds, the old TV show, Bonanza kicked it off. I never liked westerns when they were so popular back in the late '50's, early '60's when I was a little girl. But, when I was planning my wedding, in '72, and working, I happened to start watching old reruns of "Bonanza" and "The Virginian" in the late afternoons.
It wasn't the six-guns and story lines that got me...they were pretty hokey most of the time...but it was the family saga. The three brothers and their father interacting together. On "The Virginian", with it's 90 minute time slot, there was even more time to elaborate on the family dynamics. And I loved the outdoorsy flavor, the horses, the clothes, the way of life.
One Friday night, I got out a little steno pad and a pen and began a story about a young girl who lived with her adopted family. I wrote her into the "Bonanza" family, with the three grown brothers and the patriarch. It was just a short story about a conflict between her and her adopted father, how it was resolved and how, to seal the resolution, she was given a locket that had belonged to her biological mother and that her adopted father had kept for her. Not exactly a "Bonanza" plot.
But it was the beginning of the McKennas.
We had an ice storm soon thereafter, I remember. It was about January of '73. We lost power and it was off for days. And nights. In our old house on Concord Road near the Covered Bridge, we had fireplaces and oil lamps and we did okay while others in our community did not. And the second McKenna story came to be.
I remember that I curled up in bed, the oil lamp lit on the table beside me, wrapped up in blankets with a cup of Russian tea and a bottle of olives. I pulled out another steno pad and wrote the night away. I can still smell the oil lamp burning low. Every so often, there would be a faraway "boom!" like a gunshot as another pine tree would snap under the weight of the ice on its branches. Sometimes, the dark would light up as a transformer blew up in a blue-white shower of sparks. Aside from that, it was absolutely uninterrupted bliss as I wrote and wrote.
I let my father read what I had written. He liked it; he thought parts were really funny, he said. I could tell he was proud of it. And of me.
You have to understand that there had been times during my teenage years that my father and I hadn't gotten along too well. He was a writer, too, and we were a lot alike, which I guess explains it.
But, now I was about grown; I was almost 21 and I was to be married in six months. To let him read what I had written, and for him to be proud of me for writing it showed that we were over the hump now. It was the symbolic locket that he gave me, I suppose.
I always loved weather. Nowadays when I hear a winter storm warning, I go right back to that night under the covers with the oil lamp beside me, drinking Russian tea and eating olives, writing about my alter family.
And making my real father proud.