Lifescapes

Lucia's Garden, Houston

Some days, it rains. And rains. And rains. Especially in Houston. And in Houston, when it rains, streets flood, and people wisely stay home. That happened today, so the signing at Lucia's Garden was very nearly a wash-out. Blessings on the few brave people who splashed their way into town. And blessings on Lucia and Laura, who made a terrific salsa (from the recipe in DAGGER) and some luscious hibiscus punch. I left a stack of signed books (some of which will go with Lucia to the Herb Society meeting in Arizona in May), so if you wanted to be there today and didn't feel like swimming, Lucia has a book for you.

More good intentions. I took some pictures of Lucia's lovely shop (mainly to inspire China, but also for you). But due to operator error (mine), the photos got lost somewhere between the camera and Photoshop (which is a total mystery to me). But Anita asked about the Hat, so here is the Hat, instead. Looks to me like it's a perfect size for a little granddaughter named Becky, although her mother is an expert knitter (far more expert than moi), so knitting for Becky takes a certain amount of chutzpa. This is Dilys' Stained Glass Hat, fun to make, cute to wear. For an adult, I'd add four more rounds to the top (total 144 st). How's that, Anita?

The rest of today: navigated through Houston traffic to locate my Holiday Inn, went out in search of a McD's salad, and have been playing with the computer all afternoon. Now, back to the Hat, and my book (Steven Havill's Bag Limit). A quiet evening.

Oh, and it's stopped raining. So if you're planning on coming to Murder by the Book tomorrow afternoon, you won't have to paddle your kyack. Waders will do. (Just kidding.)

Houston

Hey, I'm online, on the road! Don't laugh, all you tech-folks out there. To you, this is old stuff. You do it all the time--at Starbucks, in some local wifi cafe, in your friendly library. To me, it's a minor cyber miracle. I'm checked into a Holiday Inn, and here's my computer, and my (lo-tech) knitting (a hat--and isn't it cute?) to prove it! If you look closely, you can see the blog post I'm working on. I even found my email. I am feeling inordinately proud of myself.

Bill took me to the Austin airport this morning to pick up the rent car--in a pouring rain, with tornadoes threatening. I grabbed the nearest car (brownish, so I'm calling her Ginger), threw my stuff in, and headed east on 71 to 290. Outran the rain around Giddings, and had a nice drive to Houston, made even nicer because I was listening to Virginia Leishman's delightful reading of The Tale of Hill Top Farm. I absolutely adore it. It's a joy to hear Virginia's veddy British voice reading Beatrix and Dimity and Sarah and Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle and Tom Thumb the mouse. Please ask your library to get it so you can hear it too. If you enjoyed the book, you'll enjoy the recording even more. I promise.

Tomorrow, Lucia's Garden, Houston's premier herb shop. It should be great fun. If you're riding along with me, here's where we're headed. See you there!

Bluebonnets: In bloom this week

The bluebonnets have arrived just as I'm getting ready to be gone for a month, darn it! They're going to be gorgeous this year, so if you were thinking of visiting the Hill Country, now's the right time.

I've been getting my herb-talk stuff together. I'll bet I'm the only mystery author who goes off on tour with a fresh prickly pear pad, a bag of chili coyote gourds, a bunch of yucca leaves, and samples of yucca paper. I know, I know--Diane Mott Davidson brings double chocolate brownies. But I like to be different. Prickly pear and gourds. That's it for this year, gang.

I think I'm about as ready as I'll ever be. Bill says it looks like I'm headed for Patagonia, and he's probably right. Got my tour notebook with a page for every event, maps, hotel info, flight/car rental info--all the stuff that's supposed to get me there without getting too lost. Got my cell phone and camera and all their electronic accessories, so I can make a record of where I've been. Got a new laptop so I can tell you all about it (just hope I can figure out how to use the damn thing). Got a few clothes, jeans, tops, jackets--oh, yeah, socks and undies too. Got my knitting (Jeff's muffler, a hat, socks)--good golly, I couldn't go without my KNITTING! Got a copy of Spanish Dagger. Got my yucca and prickly pear and gourds. Think I'm all set.

All I'm missing is you. Hope to see you somewhere along the route.

Reading note. Writing is an affair of yearning for great voyages and hauling on frayed ropes.--Israel Shenker

   

Texas Mountain Laurel: In Bloom This Week

Texas mountain laurel (Sophora secundiflora) is our Southern substitute for the lilacs I grew up with as a girl in Illinois. I loved lilacs and can smell them still--but not when this beauty is around. It smells exactly like grape Kool-aid, buckets and buckets of it.

This year's bloom is the best we've had from these trees, which are now about seven feet high. (Mature, they may top out at 20 feet.) There are some thirty of them, planted in clusters of three, along the creek and behind our house. I grew them from seed I collected from tree-grown containers on Sixth Street in Austin, back in 1987, the year we moved out here. There's something especially magical about growing a tree (even a small tree) from seed. I sometimes like to imagine that the tree is grateful to me for giving it root room, finding a safe place for it to reach up to the sky and welcome the birds. But it is rather I who am grateful to this tree for consenting to make its home with me, and grow and bloom where I can breathe in its beauty--and its grape Kool-aid scent.

Sophora secundiflora loves our Edwards Plateau limestone soil, thin and well-drained. It isn't a laurel at all (let alone a "mountain" laurel), but it does have some other interesting names, among them coral bean, mescal bean, and "big-drunk bean." The Indians of the Southern plains brewed up the leaves and the seeds into an intoxicating ritual drink--the seeds contain the alkaloid cytisine--that induced hallucinations. They used the large red seeds or beans as currency (the redder the seed, the more valuable) and strung them as protective necklaces, thought to bring good luck and shield the wearer from physical harm.

Things to do today: admire the big-drunk bean, finish reading the galleys of Hawthorn House (the best of the Cottage Tales, IMHO), spin some alpaca, knit some more of the hat I started last night (photo when there's enough to make sense of its shape), and start thinking about clothes for a month on the road.

Which generally isn't a problem. I travel light on these book tours, which is fine, since I don't stay in one place long enough for people to see me in the same jeans/top/jacket for several days running. It's an amusing problem in  photos, though. Over the years, Peggy has posted gazillions of photos of me with various people. I'm always wearing my favorite khaki jacket and red top, or my denim shirt and white top. I'll bet you think that's all I own. Well, it is, sort of. I'm not a clothes person--when I like something, I wear it forever. But I need to at least make a stab at something different, just so you'll know that those pics weren't all taken on the same day!

Reading note. I am one of those who has no trouble imagining the sentient lives of trees, of their leaves in some fashion communicating or of the massy trunks and heavy branches knowing it is I who have come, as I always come, each morning, to walk beneath them, glad to be alive and glad to be there.--Mary Oliver, "Sister Turtle," in Winter Hours

Blooms

If you've never seen an aloe in bloom, look closely--here it is. My aloe spent the winter in a makeshift greenhouse where it gets plenty of light but not much attention (which means that it rarely gets watered). When I went to fetch it, to tell it that spring had arrived and it was time to wake up and get growing, I found that it had anticipated me. It was already in bloom, for the very first time in its life. This is a six- or seven-year-old plant, growing happily in a large terra cotta frog. Ribbit.

And here's something else that's just starting to bloom: a new writing project. Well, sort of. I haven't actually started it just yet. I've only just begun to start it, if you get my meaning. And since I don't usually go through all this rigamarole when I'm beginning a new project, I thought I'd tell you about it, so you'll be in on it from the word go. Or almost.

Last summer, when Linda Lear and I were discussing her in-progress biography of Beatrix Potter, I suggested that she might want to write a junior biography. The ones I had seen were pretty woeful, incomplete and uninformed by any recent research. And she had a gazillion tons of research material, and interviews, and all that good stuff about Beatrix that could easily translate into a biography for young readers. Linda thought about this for, oh, about 30 seconds, and declined. (I think she felt, understandably, that eight years invested in Beatrix was enough.)

So I told her I'd give some thought to the idea of doing it myself. I did, and kept on thinking, while I finished the Cottage Tale I was working on, and then Nightshade, which was next on the to-do list. And then I got a very good start on the memoir (half-baked now and ripening on the shelf), and went back to thinking about the junior biography. And thinking. And finally I got to the point (when I got back from New Mexico) of writing a three-page proposal for a book called Beatrix Potter: A Magical Life.

But Bill and I haven't had an agent for seven or eight years, and in order to sell this new project, I'd need a new agent, which is much easier said than done. Agents--particularly children's nonfiction agents--don't grow on trees. And you need a specialty agent for something like this: somebody who knows the current market, who has looked at lots of projects like A Magical Life and can judge its marketability, and who understand it and feels enthusiastic. This week, with a referral from Linda Lear to her agent, and a referral from Linda's agent to one of the larger agencies in New York, I've found an agent, a very good one, who's as excited about the project as I am.

I have to tell you that this has happened at a very good time. I'll be gone all next month and won't have a moment to sit around and chew my fingernails and wonder what's happening in New York--I'll be on the road with Spanish Dagger. And maybe, with luck, some discerning editor who is hungry for just this project will snap it right up, so that when I get back, I'll have the delicious pleasure of telling you that the proposal is about to bloom into a book. Ribbit.

Or maybe it won't. Maybe it'll be like that aloe, and sit around for six or seven years before it decides to bloom. You never know in this business. That's part of the excitement. I guess. But I think I'll pass on excitement tonight, and pour myself a glass of celebratory wine and sit down with the rest of the galleys of Hawthorn House (I've got 100 pages to go). And my spinning. Feels right.

Reading note. When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation. --Jorge Luis Borges

Multi-tasking

                                                                                                    I've had a very lovely day, reading galleys for Hawthorn House and spinning Jane's alpaca/wool/silk. I'm probably slower at doing each task, since I'm doing both at the same time, but it's a relaxing division of attention--read a bit, spin a bit, then read again. I'm far enough away from this book (it was finished last summer) to be reading it with a fresh eye, and appreciating it with a fresh mind. It's my favorite so far of the Cottage Tales--enough good lines to make me smile, even make me laugh, especially in the animal scenes. Fun for me, and I hope for you, when you get to read it.

Also today, a nice review from Booklist of What Wildness is This, posted on Amazon's page. It's good to see some of the review journals taking an interest in the book. Plus some garden work, a bit of Internet mapping (the last of the maps for the tour), and some negotiation on a new writing project--something different--that I hope to be able to tell you about before too long. Not sure where it's going, and it's certainly had its ups and downs and ins and outs and moments of "what the hell am I doing THIS for?" I finally have the feeling it's going somewhere. But not yet. Not just yet.

Back to Hawthorn House and my spindle.

Reading note. My students assume that when well-respected writers sit down to write their books, they know pretty much what is going to happen . . . and this is why their books turn out so beautifully and why their lives are so easy and joyful, their self-esteem so great, their childlike senses of trust and wonder so intact. Well. I do not know anyone fitting this description at all. Everyone I know flails around, kvetching and growing despondent, on the way to finding a plot and structure that work. You are welcome to join the club.--Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

If you're anxiously waiting forThe Tale of Hawthorn House, you're going to have to wait until Shadow gets through with the first-pass galley pages. She's sitting on them, no doubt considering the complexities of plot and characterization.

When she's finished, I get to read these pages--nice job for tomorrow, when it's supposed to be raining. Today, I've been finishing up some odd jobs that have to be done before I pack up and head out next week. I've also been cutting back the salvias in the garden, which should have been done last fall, but wasn't.

Cutting back the salvias this spring has its benefits. I get to be surprised by all the odd volunteers coming up in strange places, like the fennel that hopped the path and is now feathering up prettily in the bed that is already full of blue mist flower seedlings (Eupatorium coelestinum) that are dearly beloved by the Queens (those beautiful butterflies). I'm also surprised by the plants popping up early, like the lantana and the Indigo Spires, both of which usually begin to stretch up out of the soil next month. But since this was a very warm winter, why should I be surprised? Sadly, another evidence of global warming.

I hung a couple of purple martin houses today, too. Okay, martin scouts, you can put out the word. The apartments are ready. Where are the birds? Well, click here, and you'll see where they are. I watched Winged Migration again last night, and have been quiveringly alive all day to the mysteries of migrating birds, so beautiful, so strong, so intent on getting where they need to go. A lesson for all of us.

Reading note. The only sure antidote to oblivion is creation. So I loop my sentences around the trunks of maples, hook them into the parched soil, anchor them to rock, to moon and stars, wrap them tenderly around the ankles of those I love. From down in the pit I give a tug, to make sure my rope of words is firmly hooked into the world, then up I climb.--Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put: Making a Home in A Restless World

Spindling Again 2

Here's the current state of the spinning/knitting project. This is a reverse cable scarf (cables both sides) with seed stitch edges and ends, made from that bag of delicious New Zealand alpaca/wool/silk that Jane sent me. Spins and plies like a dream, very soft and silky. I'm spinning and knitting as I go along, to break up the monotony. Not exactly brain-dead knitting, because I have to keep track of the cable rows, but very mantra-like and relaxing after a day's work.

I really prefer the spindle to the wheel (even if my wheel were working properly, which it isn't). For one thing, the wheel goes so fast that I don't have time to appreciate the fiber as it twists into yarn. For another, the spindle is so much more ancient than the wheel, which isn't documented until the thirteenth century. Turning the spindle, feeling its heft in my hand, admiring the twist of the yarn, I often reflect that I am a member of that clan of spindlers that invented this marvelous tool some nine thousand years ago. Makes me feel humble and special at the same time. How's that for paradox?

When I'm not spindling (or writing or working in the garden), I'm googling my maps for next month's book tour, so I don't get lost. Somebody wrote to ask me how come I'm doing this myself, rather than the publicist doing it. There's a long answer and a short one. Short: I'm not crazy about bookstore tours, which is all the publicist can do. (That's just the nature of the publicity departments of the NY publishers.) Nothing against bookstores, mind you, especially the independents, who are always glad to see authors. But I prefer to meet China's readers in their native habitats: libraries, garden guilds, herb societies. So I set up the tour myself, with the connivance of the publicist, who aids and abets. And since I'm doing the driving (rather than taking planes and being picked up by escorts and driven here and there), I do the mapping. If I've mapped myself into your area, do come. I'd love to meet you.

Reading note. Literature is like any other trade; you will never sell anything unless you go to the right shop.--George Bernard Shaw

Coral honeysuckle: In bloom this week

The dog's pen is decorated with these coral beauties today, and we're all celebrating. We had four inches of rain last night! Never mind the lightning and thunder that came with it (poor Lady--another evening of shakes and teeth chattering), or the wind that pulled down a branch or two. Rain! It rained! Our small lake is up by five or six feet, the creek is flowing bank-full, and there's water moving through the little weir pool that the ducks and geese hollowed out so many years ago. The bluebonnets are delighted. (And yes, you can start planning your Texas wildflower visit in April--it rained all the way south to Fredericksburg, and north to Dallas.) More tonight, maybe, and tomorrow. We're ecstatic. Well, I am. Bill has gone to New Mexico for a couple of weeks, with the two boy dogs. Lady and Shadow and I are having a girls' holiday all by ourselves.

And I'm back to writing again, which probably accounts for about fifty percent of my very good mood (also, I should note that I was not picked to be on the jury this morning, which accounts for the other fifty percent). The next project on the desk is the sixth fifth (oops! getting a year ahead of myself here) Cottage Tale, called The Tale of Briar Bank. I got busy and set up all the front-end stuff, which always gets me revved up: title page, acknowledgments, cast of characters. I've been making notes on the book and have a pretty good idea of who's in it and what happens. Maybe tomorrow I'll actually get to write the first chapter, which should make me feel really, really good. There's nothing like slipping back into a comfortable, friendly fictional world.

I found a website this weekend that just enchanted me: www.librarything.com. It's a place where you can catalog all the books in your library, with tags, so you can sort and arrange them however you want. But it's also a book community, where people who share similar books/interests can connect. As you know, I'm a nut for these online communities, and this one appeals to me. So I took some time this weekend to begin cataloging my books (something I've been wanting to do forever). Figure I won't do it all at once, maybe just a shelf at a time, and use the opportunity to sort through and get rid of books I'm no longer using. Which is a huge challenge for me, since all my books are dear friends. But the shelves are triple stacked and there's not room for another bookshelf. Something's gotta go.

In the meantime, I think I'll take off my shoes and go wade in the creek.

Reading note: The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes.--Agatha Christie. [Or wading in the creek.--Susan]

Rosemary, bees, and the 2007 bee die-off

Rosemary's blue, dilly-dilly. The rosemary beside the back deck is covered with tiny blue blossoms. Very pretty. As delightful as the aroma of rosemary in the tea in my teacup, at my elbow as I write this.

But something is missing from this photo. I haven't seen the bees this spring, and I'm wondering what's happened to them. When the rosemary blooms, they're usually right here, pollen buckets at the ready, eager to dive into those blossoms.

Where are the bees? Where are they? Come on, girls, it's time to go to work!

My bee-anxiety was not diminished when I read about a nationwide bee die-off. Colonies of bees all over the country are dying, and nobody knows what's causing it. Pesticide, perhaps? An unidentified virus?

I don't know of any commercial beekeepers in this part of Burnet County, and I've always assumed that the bees I see in my garden are wild bees. So now I'm wondering whether this new, catastrophic colony decline is mirrored in the wild population, at least in this part of Texas.

Bill and I used to keep honeybees, years ago--our girls, we called them--but we gave it up when the Africanized bees began to move into the Central Texas area, colonizing hives. We didn't want to try to cope. But we still love the bees, love to watch their comings and goings, their diligence and devotion to duty. I watch bees attentively, with curiousity and care and concern--not because I'm a honey lover (although I am) but because I know what unsung heroines these creatures are, how much they do for us and how little we understand their role in our human affairs. And having been a beekeeper myself, I've kept track of the problems beekeepers have--attacks by the varroa mite and takeovers by African queens.

But these problems mainly affect colony bees, honeybees, and not the wild bees. Is the die-off of 2007 affecting them, as well?

I'm sorry to add to your list of things to worry about (heaven knows we have plenty of them), but picture this. Grocery shelves without honey. Apples, cranberries, blueberries, strawberries, watermelons, peaches--without pollinators. Annual plants in your garden without fertile seeds for next year's crop of volunteers. "Agronomists estimate that Americans owe one in three bites of food to bees," I read just this morning. One in three bites! It's a reminder of how intimately we are all related, how profoundly we are connected in the warp and weft of the natural world--and how much we depend on creatures that are usually beneath our notice.

We need to notice. It's probably too early in the year for you Northerners to begin looking for bees. But if you live in the Southern tier of states, you'd start to notice them along about now, wouldn't you? Go out and look in your garden. I hope you'll see bees.

Reading note:
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.
--Emily Dickinson

The revery alone may have to do, Emily.