After an inch-plus of rain, the fall garden is beginning to look almost lush. So far, we haven't gotten the huge downpours (15" and more) that hit Salado and the area north and west of Georgetown, but we're grateful. It's good timing for the winter pasture grasses, which need rain now if the livestock (cows, sheep, and yes, the deer) are to have anything to eat this winter. Also bodes well for next spring's wildflowers, which need September/October rains to germinate and December rains to feed growth. It's all in the timing, m'dears.
And the timing of these rains--courtesy of a large low-pressure area that has parked itself over Central Texas--is just about perfect. Not a drought-breaker yet, at least not here. But if El Nino can produce a couple more of these storms this fall, we'll be okay. It was a joy yesterday to see puddles in MeadowMarsh, the swampy area along the edge of the woods. As the dogs and I took our evening walk, they ran through the water, splashing. We're all joyful.
File this in the best-laid plans department. I was looking forward to a weekend with the copy-edited manuscript of next year's China Bayles book, Holly Blues. Unfortunately, it arrived on Friday--in the form of an electronic file, instead of print pages. I'm learning Word Track Changes, which is okay, not hard, and has its advantages (especially in terms of efficiency and cost). But I've always loved making pencil changes on the typescript, curled up on the bed or in my favorite chair. Now I'm working at the computer, which means seeing the book again on the screen--so screen-based errors will be as invisible to me now as they were before. (They jump out at me on the print page.) A few people have told me how easy this is, and it is--when you're dealing with short stuff. This is a 287-page book, and that's a whole different animal.
Companion photos for Together, Alone. It's so expensive to reproduce photos in books that I decided not to use them in the memoir, which came out late last month. Instead, I'm building albums of "companion photos" on my website. The first of these is available now. Go here and look for the album. We'll post another of these albums soon.
And Sharon Galligar Chance posted a lovely review of the memoir on her blog today. She's reading the book for SCN's Memoir Challenge. If you don't know about this challenge, check it out. We need to know the true stories of women's lives (not a fictional representation of women, and certainly not fictional representations of women by male authors, bless their hearts). That's what memoir, at its best, is all about. True stories of real lives.
Reading Note: Sometimes of late years I find myself thinking the most beautiful sight in the world might be the birds taking over New York after the last man has run away to the hills. I will never live to see it, of course, but I know just how it will sound because I've lived up high and I know the sort of watch birds keep on us. I've listened to sparrows tapping tentatively on the outside of air conditioners when they thought no one was listening, and I know how other birds test the vibrations that come up to them through the television aerials. 'Is he gone?' they ask, and the vibrations come up from below, 'Not yet, not yet.'"--Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey