Confessions of a Snack Snatcher

A few years ago, my husband, Richard, and I were driving through Sonoma Valley, California, on a winery crawl. I spotted something in my peripheral vision.

"STOP THE CAR!"

Richard pulled over and I jumped out and headed for the shrubbery. Richard took this photo a moment later.

Blackberries! Let's get a closer look at that technique.

I adore berries, especially ones I pick myself. In a previous life, I was part of a hunter-gatherer clan. I would openly mock the hunters ("One measly deer! Look at my baskets of googooberries!") and go into a deep depression when there was nothing to gather other than wool. I grew up in Vermont and would spent most of August on an old logging road, fighting my way through the brambles, filling bucket after bucket with blackberries. I pushed deeper and deeper into the woods, venturing far from home in search of new stands to harvest, a diminutive Vasco da Gama bent on filling the ship's hulls with fruit for her queen. Or to sell at a roadside stand for a buck a pint. 

Here I am taking a break from berry picking to exercise my faithful steed.

I can't help myself even now. Our little piece of paradise in Virginia is solid berries at the moment, and they beckon me. Yesterday I picked three quarts of wineberries and blackberries. Wineberries are new to me. They were introduced from Japan and were supposed to hybridize with the local raspberries. But the wineberries weren't looking for a little casual pollen exchange. They wanted, and achieved, domination. They look innocent, all jewel-toned and shiny, but watch out. 

I made jamelly. That's jam without the seeds, or jelly with the pulp, depending on how you look at it. Aren't they gorgeous? They haven't quite set yet, but I'm hopeful. 

Although berries are my favorite, I brake for all manner of roadside snacks. While out on a run this spring, I spotted some wild asparagus. Richard said, "Are you really going to run home carrying three asparagus stalks?" After fifteen years, he has to ask?

The attraction is, in part, the directness of the experience. Our usual way of obtaining food is to get an education, land a job, collect a paycheck and spend it at the grocery store. Phew! Nothing like crossing your yard to pick some berries (or harvest something from your garden) to cut to the chase. 

Happy berry picking, everyone!

Next time: The Kitchen Reveal!

In Which I Answer Questions about Writing because No One Asked

When the illustrious and generous Eileen Goudge tagged me for a blog roll, how could decline? She answered these same questions, so check out her post, and those she tagged, and tagged her, and I tagged, and...What? You haven't got all day? Okay, then, start here and see how it goes. The laundry can wait. And the kids can drive themselves. You'd be surprised.

1. WHAT AM I WORKING ON?  Yesterday I sent my agent what I hope is the final version of my second novel, Middle of Somewhere. What a pain in the arse that one has turned out to be. So what I’m working on now is absolutely nothing. Knowing me, that will last through the weekend—maybe. I started a new novel when I thought my second one was done and dusted (joke’s on me), so I’ll get back to work on that. It’s a coming-of-age story set in Vermont in the 1970s. I’d tell you more but if I did, I’d then have to kill you. And nobody wants that.

2. HOW DOES MY WORK DIFFER FROM OTHERS OF ITS GENRE? It’s written by me! Seriously, I’m with a women’s fiction imprint, which is fantastic, but my style is…oh, I hate this question. I can be both irreverent and poetic, and my writing reflects that.

3. WHY DO I WRITE WHAT I DO? I get an idea and begin writing. There are stories waiting to be told hiding absolutely everywhere. For House Broken, the idea was of a woman who believed behavior followed principles, and that people, like animals, were shaped by their environment and their natures to do what they do, for better or for worse. Usually for worse. I followed the scent from there.

4. HOW DOES MY WRITING PROCESS WORK? I’m not sure I’ve been around long enough as a writer to have a process. I tend to write clean first drafts. House Broken is pretty much how it came out the first time through. Took me four months. The second one? Not such a straight line. I’m open to whatever it takes, though, and I’m lucky to have an agent and an editor who are behind me either way.

5. AND THE OTHER PART OF THIS QUESTION, HOW DOES MY WRITING PROCESS NOT WORK? If I am stuck, it’s because I don’t understand something: a character’s motivation, the point of a scene, the relationship between characters, the meaning of life. For me it doesn’t work to sit there and push through it. I do something else: take a walk, garden, scribble in a notebook, talk to my husband about it until he wishes he never met me. I don’t panic. I’m too old for that.

I’ve tagged a wonderful writer to follow me: Ann Garvin, dog-lover and talented author of The Dog Year and On Maggie’s Watch. I’m eager to hear what she has to say, and I think you should be, too!

Garden Brag, I mean, Update

It's been a bit hectic around here, what with one daughter turning 21 and the other packing up and heading off to Europe for six months. Oh, and I had to review the copy edits on HOUSE BROKEN. Terrified of sending it to press with a booboo, I had a hard time letting it out of my hands! 

Which is all to say that I will write a proper post later this week. For now, I thought we could monitor my Mothers' Day garden. 

Here it is on the day it was born. On three say, "Awwww!"

A month later, everything had gotten a grip.

We had radishes, lettuce, Swiss chard, arugula and basil. June was sweltering, so the lettuce didn't last long and the arugula got so strong we could've used it as paint remover.

Today we had our first tomato for lunch. There's no photo of it because we ate it. Here's what the garden looks like now. 

We're harvesting peppers, chard, beets, cilantro and, of course, zucchini. I'm doing battle with the Japanese beetles that are threatening the beans. So far, I'm winning. I've had to cut back the tomatillos because they were crowding out the onions, but other than that, everyone is playing nicely. And, as you can see, it's a no-bunny zone. They are EVERYWHERE. 

Hope you had a fantastic Fourth!

Welcome to Mayberry

Charming. Quiet. Quaint. Historic. 

No, we are not talking about me. Especially not the quiet part. We are talking about Lexington, Virginia. Now technically we live in Glasgow, but when we first moved to the area we rented a house in Lexington for a year, and that's still where we do our business. Why not in Glasgow? Here's what you can find there.

Yup. Plus a Dollar Store, but that's a whole 'nother post. 

So, back to Lexington. Here are a couple of the houses in town.

Nice, huh? The town is home to Washington and Lee University (known locally as "Dubya 'n' Ell") and the Virginia Military Institute, and is a popular place to be buried if you outdid yourself in the Civil War. You'll find Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson here. And that's about it. 

Our rental was tucked away off Main Street, not that traffic was an issue. A bad commute here is when you stand at the light in town for more than three minutes. We were given keys to our rental but didn't need them. Houses are bought and sold here without the exchange of keys. I think they just say, "It's yours now." You might not get keys, but if you're lucky as we were, you'll get a wishing well.

You pay extra for caution tape. 

It was a fine place to live while we were getting our feet under us. I've never lived anywhere I could walk to town--what a treat! We had been concerned that living in a college town would mean lots of noise Wednesday through Sunday nights (yes, they start on Wednesdays now), but the parties are out in the county and did not infringe on peace in Mayberry, as we came to call it.

The people here are so happy we chose their town. They say so all the time, and stop to chat at every chance. Visiting time must be figured into the duration of every transaction. An extra ten minutes at the post office, at the bookstore, at the grocery checkout. Even the Comcast guy wanted to tell me about his wife's back and the ten-point buck he saw but didn't manage to shoot. I don't mind in the least. After all, I've got my own tidbits to share. You never saw Andy or Aunt Bea hurrying anyone through a conversation, did you?

Follow the Yellow Brick Road, or I-80.

When my husband and I talked abut leaving California for Virginia, we considered walking. No, seriously. What could be a more deliberate way to leave one coast for the other than marking the entire distance, step by step. We do love to walk.

Sadly, we didn't have the time. We toyed with the idea of combining walking and train-riding, mostly as a way to speed things up and avoid trudging across Nebraska. But in the end we did what most people do: Road Trip! 

Most of our belongings were already on their own road trip, so we packed the Subaru with only the necessities: some clothes, important papers, our laptops, two cases of wine and a ceramic pig. 

He's Mexican by birth and become our mascot after our last dog died. He came to us house broken.

We set off in early April and left California behind the first day. The weather was glorious. This is near Salt Lake.

We soon established a routine, sharing a Subway foot-long veggie sandwich for lunch every day and a bottle of pinot noir with dinner every night. We also made a friend in Wyoming.

Not long after that, it became less scenic and, clear sky junkies that we are, we thought about turning the car around. This was in Nebraska.

A lovely spring day!

We spent the last night of our five-day road trip in Lexington, Kentucky, the place where horses deign to allow humans to care for them. If you have a chance, spend a day or two in this pretty city. 

The next day we set off for our new hometown of Lexington--Virginia, this time. We'd only been there once, in January, when there was snow on the ground and the trees were sticks. I admitted to Richard that I barely remembered it. He shrugged. We could always move. Such free spirits!

Almost there...

We drove through the town. Our jaws dropped and our hearts soared. It was beautiful. I'd never seen so many blooming shrubs and trees in my life. In the countryside, dogwoods and redbuds flowered everywhere. 

A year later, I'm more in love with this place than ever. Every morning when I wake up, I feel like Dorothy stepping into Oz. And, yes, I'm glad I didn't have to walk here.

Folding the Map

Last year, my husband, Richard, and I moved from California to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Everyone asks us how we came to choose the remote little town we now call home.

"Wait," you're thinking. "Why the heck did you leave California?" Lots of reasons, but mostly because we'd been there a long time and it was costing way too much money. Our daughters had headed off to college and we wanted to turn a page. Or fold a map.

We were asking a lot of our new home. We wanted land, space to stretch out, to grow vegetables, plant fruit tress and give Richard a reason to fire up his chainsaw now and again. We wanted hills, if not mountains. (I wanted a river, too.) And we wanted something that California was short on: seasons. Of course, that's part of what makes California a hard place to leave. All that glorious sunshine, months and months and months of it. We were clear sky junkies.

No surprise, then, that we talked a lot about weather. We'd visited a good portion of the U.S. but because we are both trained as scientists, we tried to forget that it was 100 degrees the entire week of July we were in Massachusetts and put our trust in data. We studied climate maps: rainfall maps, percent cloudy days maps, misery index maps, trying to figure out where we could land softly and happily.

(I'm going to stop right now and say that there is so much beauty in this country, we'd have been hard-pressed to make a bad decision. We just needed some way to decide!)

We read enough about the weather to qualify for an advanced degree in meteorology. Finally, we took one of the maps (maybe it displayed days spent shoveling) and began folding it. We folded down the West Coast (been there, done that, and too rainy in the north). We made a crease along I-40 and excluded the Far North (too cold), and another along I-80 to the south (too hot). The swath in the middle lacked mountains, so we folded back everything to the west of the Appalachians. We weren't going to get our acres in the mid-Atlantic, either, at least not that we could afford. 

What we were left with was less of a map than a lump of origami executed by an excitable monkey. But at least we knew our state: Virginia. Not in the broad level plain running to the sea, but in the valley cupped between the Allegheny and Blue Mountains.

Home.

We are lucky to have portable jobs and the flexibility to choose where we live. If you could up sticks and live anywhere (in the U.S. or elsewhere), where would it be? Or are you already there?