Roller Coaster

Summer is not making a graceful exit this year. Two mornings in a row the past seven days we’ve wakened to temperatures in the low forties, with a lick of frost overnight. Yesterday the temperature rose to nearly eighty. I’ve put most of my summer wardrobe away but I’m keeping a pair of shorts or two on hand in case this continues.

The trees are confused, too. Some are as green as in high summer, some are in gorgeous fall colors, and there are even some who have surrendered all their leaves. I was hoping for a spectacular display for when my friend from Mexico City comes later this month, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.

My writing’s gone all to pieces, as well. I’m not sure what’s happening, but there seem to be holes appearing in the plot I’m working on. I send Betsy over here to discover a clue and find that either the clue isn’t happening or that the ostensible reason she was to go there has evaporated like morning dew. It’s very frustrating and a little scary – the manuscript is due at my publisher in December and I’m dithering. The main story is there and clear, it’s the little details that won’t snap into place. It’s times like this that make me wonder why I think I’m an author. I remember the office jobs I had, where I’d go in to work in the morning to find a stack of things to do, do them, and go home at night with a clear conscience. Of course, back then I’d dream of being a full-time author. I guess we’re never satisfied.

We Have A Winner!

The winner of the Father Hugh of Paddington adventure collection is Sosarahsew from Illinois. I have sent her two booklets, Father Hugh Investigates and The Ordeal of Father Hugh, each with two stories in it. She may notice when she gets them that two of the stories begin almost exactly the same way. That’s because one of them was rejected when I tried to sell it so when I wrote another I used the same beginning because I liked it. It sold.

I have noticed before that I will use a turn of phrase more than once, often unconsciously. That sort of feeds into my theory of invisible antennae writers are born with, so they can tune into stories circling the earth in an invisible Van Allen belt. (Anyone else remember the Van Allen belt that was discovered a little before we ventured into space? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_radiation_belt) That’s why now and again I will write something into a story and exclaim, amazed, “I didn’t know that!”

We had a very violent thunderstorm Monday afternoon. The wind was making the trees thrash and the rain came down in buckets, a real old-fashioned frog strangler, as the country folk used to say. Maybe they still do, I haven’t been to visit my cousins down in east central Illinois in a long while. One of our cats went into hiding and the other came to sit near me, ears twitching nervously. It’s been very hot and humid around here and I have been grateful that both our apartment and our cars have air conditioning. But I’m trying not to complain; in four or five months there will be bitter cold to complain about – the consequence of living inland, well away from the moderating effect of an ocean. Things balance out. It’s been a wild summer, which I hope doesn’t portend a wild winter. But I confess I’m looking forward to autumn.

A friend of mine from Mexico City is going to visit us up here this autumn; I have written so passionately about the brilliant colors the leaves turn that she wants to see them for herself. I’m not sure how we’ll arrange the visit so she sees the colors at their peak; very often that “peak” is just a few days long, and it arrives on different weekends in different years. I guess she’ll just have to pack a bag and leave it by the door to grab as she hastens to the airport when she gets my call.

I know a great many of you find autumn your favorite season. What do you like best about it?

Autumn in L.A.

As I grew up in Pittsburgh, where there actually was an autumn, it was my favorite time of the year. I’ve always disliked hot weather, and fall meant the time things cooled off. Plus, I loved watching the leaves turn color.

My favorite musical was even related, distantly, to fall. I adored THE FANTASTICKS, and especially the song “Try to Remember” which mentions the month of September. Autumn begins toward the end of September, and the month, to me, was the harbinger of school starting again (yes, I enjoyed school, notwithstanding the grumbling I did in my post last week) and the weather changing.

But years ago I moved to Los Angeles. There are essentially two seasons here: the rainy season, and the rest of the year. The rainy season, if there is one in any given year, equates somewhat in time with winter everywhere else. No snow or really cold weather, though--at least not in most years.

Palm tree leaves don’t change color. Neither do the leaves on most other kinds of trees that grow here. There are a few, though, that do. If you’re going to ask me which ones, forget it.

I used to know which maple trees in my yard in the east changed and which colors they’d take on. Here, though, I don’t pay a lot of attention to which trees choose to change color, or even when they elect to do it. I do enjoy watching the jacarandas bloom, then lose blossoms and leaves, but I can’t tell you which months they do so. I believe that liquidambar trees here change colors and shed leaves, too. Some trees imported from elsewhere act similar to the way they do in their native habitats, if they survive. Plus, there’s a big tree in our backyard that we’ve never been able to identify that decides once a year to lose its large number of small leaves.

On the whole, though, treetops tend to remain green. Other growth goes brown, at least on the ground, in the non-rainy season.

This all makes trips in the fall to places where the leaves change even more special. One of these years I’ll do that again.

By the way, the winner of my contest last week was N.L. Gassert. Nadja, if you'll e-mail me at lindaojohnston@rocketmail.com with your address, I'll send your copy of HOWL DEADLY. And although I’m not giving a prize here on KillerHobbies this week, I’m also a guest blogger today on Fresh Fiction--and I am giving away another copy of HOWL DEADLY there. Stop in and see why I write so much about animals: http://freshfiction.com/blog/

Have you ever visited L.A.? What time of year? Did you enjoy the weather?

MAKING SCENTS OF AUTUMN

The photograph is an entry in the State Fair crafts competition.

It has been said, and I believe it is true, that emotions and memories are most strongly evoked by scents, more than any other of the senses. Walk into a school, inhale, and suddenly you’re fifteen again. Or six. Well, I will never be six again in an elementary school, because there is no more chalk powder in the air, or rubber overshoes.

For me, spring begins with the scent of wet, thawed earth as the snow and ice depart. Spring has truly sprung when I smell the first freshly-mowed lawn. Or lilacs in bloom. Summer smells of tomato vines, corn on the cob, watermelon, cantaloupe, new hay, petunias, charcoal starter. (Summer is over when the State Fairgrounds smell of fried onions, deep-fried meat, horses and cows and pigs and chickens, and hot miniature donuts.) Outdoors, the winter air doesn’t smell of much of anything, but it’s cold enough in Minnesota to freeze the hair in your nostrils. Well, there IS the scent of evergreens, but that smell belongs to Christmas, which is a season all its own. Indoors, the smell of fuel oil (from my childhood) and wood smoke. Maybe the scent of the seashore is a winter scent, in a way. If I’m lucky enough to go south on vacation or a book tour, the smell of salt-sea air is, for me, a winter scent that also evokes summer. Whiplash in the nose.

My favorite season, autumn, is full of scents. The most famous one, of course, comes at the very end of autumn, the great smell of Thanksgiving dinner. But building up to it is the dusty-sharp smell of dried leaves crushed underfoot, of fresh apples, autumn vegetables, fruit pies, hearty stews and soups, roast goose (more on that below), that dusty smell when the heat is turned on for the first time, new school books, the old winter coat taken out and readied for winter, hot apple cider with a cinnamon stick in it, Halloween candy, the scent of burning leaves. Nothing else smells like burning oak, maple, and elm leaves. Come October, we’d walk home from school in a haze of sharp-scented smoke. We elder folks can be instantly carried off to our childhood at that scent, a time when everyone raked leaves from their lawn, piled them in the gutter or driveway (or even in the middle of the lawn -- the ashes were good for next year’s grass) and set them on fire. The air was full of that smell for weeks, as house after house had that bonfire lit. Not long ago, when we lived in a townhouse with a fireplace, I would actually go out on the lawn to gather leaves and burn them in the fireplace, looking for just one more trip in memory’s time machine.

Then there’s Michaelmas, September 29. There‘s an old saying: “Who eats goose on the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels will not want for money for a year.” When we were first married, we had a friend who had resurrected that medieval superstition, and would roast several geese and invite everyone she knew to drop by with a dish of something to share, and have a bite or two of goose. When she moved away, we decided to keep the custom ourselves. I wrote a parody of Amazing Grace called Amazing Goose, which we sing, but we also say a perfectly serious prayer to Michael the Archangel. It won’t make you rich, we believe, but it stops the fiscal emergencies. It’s like, before Michaelmas goose, you get three hundred dollars in the bank and your car has a four hundred dollar breakdown. After Michaelmas, you get three hundred dollars in the bank and your car has a two hundred and seventy-five dollar breakdown. I stuff our geese (when we having a big party, like this year, I roast multiple geese) with chopped tart apples, lots (LOTS) of peeled garlic, and green grapes, and roast them in an extra-hot oven. Mmmmmm, that wonderful smell! Michaelmas has become a holiday as traditional as Thanksgiving in our house. It falls on a Wednesday this year. I will send the recipe and the words to anyone who wants them.

By the way, the winner of my “crystal spheres” contest is Judy Harper of Birmingham, Alabama. Congratulations, Judy! I’ll be sending her a bookmark with her name ornamented with fancy stitches.

And the Living is Easy

I don’t much like summer -- it’s too cold. Indoors, that is. Movie theaters and grocery stores really push down on the thermostat, often to the point where I wish I’d brought a sweater along. But my husband likes it really cool, too, in our apartment. Half the reason I take a nice, hot shower every day is to get warm.

One reason to like summer, on the other hand, is that travel is much easier. No icy roads, no nightfall at five o’clock. So it’s not all bad.

My routine doesn’t much change in the summer. I only rarely make needlework items as Christmas gifts -- my eyes are approaching a stage where I will need cataract surgery one of these days, and so my projects are aimed more learning how a particular form of needlework is done than doing it well, and the result is often not good enough to give as a gift. Well, with one hoped-for exception: I took a class on making Romanian Point Lace in Salt Lake City last month, and I bought a kit to make a Christmas present of it for the woman who bravely and gamely came with me on my Great Train Journey. Nine stops in nineteen days, whew!

I think most crafters ply their craft “out of season.” If you’re going to stitch a Christmas stocking for a grandchild, you must start it long, long before the stores put out their Christmas stuff -- in, say, May or June. (At the rate I work, it would be ready not by this Christmas, but the next!)

My writing routine is basic: sit in the chair, boot up, and write. So the weather outdoors doesn’t affect that part of it. My office doesn’t even have a window, which makes it easier to write a snowstorm into a book in July. But see paragraph two, above, for the part about traveling to interview someone or look at something as research.

Like many other people, my favorite season is autumn; that’s when the flowery promise of spring is kept. I seem to have more energy in the fall, and my outlook is optimistic for some reason. How about you?

Random Thoughts

The golf game last Thursday was a disaster, I was off my game nearly the whole round. The ninth hole was my best, it was like I finally woke up. On the other hand I played yesterday and actually made par on the fourth hole – I couldn’t believe it. My first par. On the green in two and so close to the hole it just went straight in when I tapped it. Of course on an earlier hole I shot a twelve – seven strokes to get the ball in the cup. I don’t know why that happens. It’s one example of why I love golf and another of why I hate this maddening game - in the same round!

Buttons and Bones continues to trot along. It’s very satisfying when a story just about writes itself, I put my fingers on the keys and things start to happen. It’s almost like what people who don’t write think it’s like for people who do.

Have any of you ever seen pole bending at a horse show? They had a competition of it at our State Fair and it just happened to occur when a friend and I went into the arena to watch the horse judging. Pole bending is a timed event during which a horse and rider run up a row of six poles about twenty feet apart, weaving in and out as they go. They make an impossibly sharp turn at the far end and weave their way back down again. The competition we saw was for female riders fourteen and under – I think one rider was only six years old and I know another was only eight. One child rode a very tiny pony lickety split and finished third. The poles are set on small, round bases and they tip over very easily – the lightest touch from a horse going by would set a pole wobbling. If it fell over, the rider was eliminated. The fastest times were just over eleven seconds – first and second place riders were thousandths of a second apart – the slowest something over seventeen seconds. I could probably do it in a minute and a half. What was interesting was how many of the horses came into the arena dancing with eagerness to have a go.

Right on schedule, some of our maple trees are starting to show their brilliant fall colors. Autumn is my favorite season, even though I know it means winter is coming hard on its heels. I’m not as eager to embrace it as I’ve been other years, because we didn’t have a roasting-hot summer, but a rather cool one.
Attendance at our State Fair set records on several days because the weather was so pleasant. Normally sticky-hot, there were early mornings when a jacket was actually welcome.

My eyes are just about healed. The right eye is about as good as it can get, the left is still lagging, but much improved. I am so relieved and grateful!
　

Autumn

I’m safely back at home – again. This time I was in Hiawatha, Iowa. That’s a suburb of Cedar Rapids. I went down Friday, gave a talk at their library Saturday and came home the same day. They have a nice library, and we had a good turnout, especially for a magnificent Saturday early afternoon. It was sunny and in the low seventies, which is as good as it gets in later October. If it had been me, I would have been out walking in such weather, raking leaves, or watching children play in the park. But about two dozen showed up to listen to me blather on about what fun it is to write about murder. A representative from Barnes & Noble was there selling books, and I noticed as I signed a copy of the first one in the Betsy Devonshire series, Crewel World, that it was in its fifteenth printing. Delighted, that’s what I am!

I love autumn. It’s my favorite season. I once thought that was uncommon, because so many people greet spring with such enthusiasm. The end of harsh winter, the tender green of new growth, every living plant in flower – there is much to recommend spring. And autumn, with its promise of harsh winter back again, the sun fading south, the leaves skittering down the street sounding the death rattle of the year, can seem downright sad. But there’s the crisp air, the tart apples, the heaps of produce – spring’s promise is kept in autumn – the cozy drawing in, the hearty soups, the brilliance of the dying leaves. Don’t you sometimes wish humans could put on such a beautiful display at the end of their lives? Wouldn’t it be fun to suddenly drop the gray and find under it a rich purple or brilliant blue or bright green? Of course that would mean the end is near, so maybe not so much.

I thought we’d have a bad autumn for color this year. In the city, some of our trees are
already naked, a few are glowing orange, and others are still green. Usually our interim seasons (spring and fall) move fast. One weekend the pools are open, the next weekend the leaves are spectacular, the third weekend we can park only on the odd-numbered side of the streets so snow removal can commence. The last few years we’ve had drawn-out autumns, when you don’t have to keep careful track of leaf colors’ progress down the state in order not to miss the one Saturday you can take an autumn drive up the St. Croix to see the colors and buy apples from a roadside stand.

I thought we weren’t going to see autumn out in that blaze of color. But on my drive down Interstate 35 into Iowa the color was lovely, especially on the low shrubs that line the freeway. I think they are the variety called “burning bush” and that’s a great name for shrubs that turn such bright reds, oranges and yellows in the fall. But oh, the hills too! They looked like giant bouquets, the evergreens standing among the maples, aspens, and oaks serving as the greenery tucked among the flowers. This year even the elms and oaks are bright.

I’m going to Galena, Illinois, this weekend. It is small, full of quaint , antique buildings, very touristy – and one of America’s most haunted cities. Virtually every old building has a story of ghostly children’s laughter, a silent figure in a doorway or window, or a mischievous sprite who keeps turning on the lights. So, naturally enough, the town loves Halloween. They have a parade the Saturday in October closest to October 31, which is this coming one. I want to have the climax of the book I will write next set there on that weekend, so I simply must go there for another look. And so long as I am there, I’ll do a signing at Mike and Kathy’s Timeless Needle shop. I’m taking my friend and needlework pattern designer Denise along. A really fun trip, and tax deductible, too.

How I suffer for my art!