Tag: Spring

Another Day

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As I suspected it would, the sun rose again today.

When it set last night, I had a “no” from the agent. I knew it when I saw the email pop up. A lovely “no.” The very best kind of “no,” all of my writing buddies hasten to reassure me.

She says:

Thanks so much for sending the full manuscript of OBSIDIAN and for giving me time to read it!
I love the world you’ve created here and I definitely recognize your talent. Unfortunately, I am going to pass on the offer of representation. For me, I just didn’t fall in love with the characters enough, or their adventures in your wonderful world. I’m sorry – I wish I had better news for you. I know you have lots of excitement going on right now with your work and I know you’ll be in good hands!
Wishing you the very best in your publishing career!

So, here I am, once again with the walk of shame. I gave her everything I had and it wasn’t enough. I know no one knows what makes someone fall in love. And yet, we’ve all been in those relationships where the guy says “it’s not you, it’s me” — and you know, of course it’s you. There’s some reason they can’t see spending their life with you, popping out little baby novels.

But it means nothing in the end. It doesn’t really matter if it’s your annoying mother or the fact that you have a cowlick that can’t be controlled or a tendency to ramble on about how much it annoys you when people speed up when they see you trying to change lanes. They don’t want to buy the cow and that’s all you need to know. Tasty milk, but no thank you.

So, I got back on the horse. Nudged a couple of agents with fulls and partials. Got on Match.com (Publishers Marketplace) and picked out a couple of sexy-looking possibilities. Gave ’em a wink.

The birds and Isabel say it’s Springtime. Mysterious plants are coming up — mysterious because we only moved here in August and someone else planted these spring bulbs. I’m putting my bets on Daffodils and Hyacinths, by their nubby tops.

And meanwhile a project I’ve been seeding for a while at work may be coming to fruition at a time we really need it. My boss is happy and loves me forever.

Also, Allison, who has the lucrative multi-book contract I covet, just received a 26-page revision letter. Single-spaced. It’s like she’s got the wedding all set, and just found out she’s got to have radical cosmetic surgery first. She’s getting over it now, though we were both shocked to read the comments at first. In the end, she’ll have a much stronger book. But, oh, the pain and suffering.

I’m working on the next novel, which is winding into a dark forest of odd characters and a mixed-race little girl witch. Who knows how I’ll sell this one.

The lovely thing for me is, I don’t have to worry about that.

The Great Backyard Bird and Coyote Watch

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All the animals are out and about now.

Spring may not begin until March — which I quibbled about previously, so I won’t reiterate my arguments, much as I enjoy reiterating my favorite peeves — but the wildlife around Santa Fe is gearing up for warm weather.

Tuesday evening, as dusk fell, a couple of bunnies came out to hit up the game bird block out front. And a jumping mouse hopped by. Then, yesterday morning, I awoke to fog outside the window — and a coyote walking by. Last night, a bobcat came up on the porch to nose around. And sniff around the game bird block.

Predators following prey in the eternal cycle.

The flickers have been diligently hammering on the house. If you’ve never heard a woodpecker at work on your house, well it sounds like the roofing crew showed up again. Maybe just the finish crew. But you could swear someone’s out there pounding nails. If you look behind the suet feeder in this photo, you can see the fresh hole in the portal post that this selfsame bird drilled into it.

I assume that’s her, anyway. She refused to give her name.

Being a woman, I decided food was the answer. The gal at the local Wild Birds Unlimited was dubious.

“Are you sure they’re not looking to carve out a nest?”

“It’s about the size of a quarter,” I say. “If so, they’ve got a ways to go.”

I’d walked in and asked for the Woodpecker’s Friend. Which makes sense to me, but I apparently live in my own delusional world. I’m at peace with that. At any rate, the thing I thought I saw at Christmastime wasn’t what I thought it was and it wasn’t called that anyway. The upshot? I have to be my own woodpecker’s friend. So I got the basic suet frame and the recommended suet and made David install it all over the hole, so the flickers would eat the suet and not the portal.

Right, he thought I was nuts, too.

And for a while, all we got on there were the bushtits. Which turned out to be really neat because they hadn’t visited us other wise.

Then, a couple of days ago: the flickers found the suet. They’ve been happily cracking away on it — and no other part of the house — ever since. I know. I am totally vindicated. I *am* the Woodpecker’s Friend. One day all you people learn not to scoff.


The Great Backyard Bird Count starts on Saturday. No qualifications required to participate. This year, if you tweet, you can use the hashtag #gbbc to report bird sightings. Hey, it does NOT get more fun than that people!

Nobody seems to sponsor the Great Backyard Coyote Count. But we caught one on the night-vision camera last night. It’s actually an amusing sequence as he and the bunnies visit throughout the night. Tonight we’ll see if we can’t snap one of the bobcat and maybe I’ll post the whole sequence tomorrow.

Oh, in this photo? I’m pretty sure he’s looking at Isabel in the window.

She’s hiding in the laundry basket today.

Wisteria Hysteria

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This morning, I finished putting out the plants.

Another annual ritual completed. A labor-intensive one. We have this sunroom, one of the things I love most about this house, where I overwinter all sorts of potted plants. Once I feel more or less confident that the spring snows are over, I begin shifting the plants out to the patio, gradually hardening them off.

For those who aren’t experienced with this, indoor plants transpire more moisture through their leaves, because it’s a moister, more contained environment. When you move a plant outdoors, especially in our arid climate with the intense mountain sun, you have to do it gradually, to allow the plant to acclimatize. The leaves get waxier in some cases, and the transpiration pores shrink. Depending on the plant, they also develop a bit of “sunscreen.” Putting an indoor plant outdoors and leaving it there is akin to sticking a Wyoming person on the beach in Florida for the day. Not pretty.

So the first day, you put the plant out for an hour or so and bring it back in. Becauase I have way too many plants, on this schedule, by the time I got them all out, it was just about time to bring them back in again. The second day they can stay out for three to four hours. The third day, yesterday, they stayed out all day and came in at night.

Finally this morning I set them out in the permanent summer spots. No more dragging back and forth. There they’ll stay, unless we get a freak snow storm, which hopefully I’ll know about before it hits.

It doesn’t escape me that this is another last, the last time I’ll perform this ritual in this house. With our move in mid- to late August, the plants will all be still in their places. On my list: find out if I can bring plants into Canada. It sounds silly — maybe not worrying about whether a carpet is happy silly — but some of these plants I’ve had for twenty years. The bougainvillea that David and I bought in the first apartment we shared, back in 1991. There’s my hibiscus, inherited from Val when she moved to Seattle, grown from her grandmother’s plant in Casper more than twenty years ago. I really want to take the orchid David gave me for Valentine’s in ’95 — I’d love to give it a climate where it might do more than subsist.

Perhaps I’ll have a big plant sale. Maybe I’ll just give them all away to good homes and start new.

I won’t have this ritual in Victoria, I think. Freezes there are less rare. I don’t know if people leave plants out all year and only bring them in when there’s threat of frost. Something I’ll learn.

I do know this: the first thing I’m going to do is plant wisteria. Always wanted wisteria.

Bob-bob-bobbing along

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I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

The Robins are really going crazy right now. They sing late into the dusk. Their shrill whistles pierce the pre-dawn sky. Robins hop around in the muddy gutters and in the birdbath filled with snowmelt. Everything is ready to pop. All we need is a few straight days of warm weather and the buds will explode into leaves and petals. This is how we go from winter to summer, in one fell swoop. The robins know it.

Really, it’s early yet to expect much. We can get snow all through May and into the first week of June. Yes, we’ve gotten snow after that, but it’s a remarkable occurrence. But everyone is getting restless here, wanting the warm weather. Like the robins, students crowd the university open spaces, determinedly wearing shorts.

People look around and want more. Fancies are turning not just to thoughts of love, but to dreams and desires. This is the season for graduation, for spending tax returns, for making plans to fill the long summer months ahead, thinking that this year they won’t vanish in a blip.

This is the time of infinite possibility.

Don’t Know When I’ll Be Back Again

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Yesterday morning, I propped open our hotel room door to enjoy the sunshine and warm air while I packed. When I wandered out to the balcony, a crane gracefully stalked past, heading through the parking lot to the sidewalk that leads to a little lagoon. Just another pedestrian. Today, the same time of day, but 2,000 miles to the northwest and about 7,000 feet higher up, all I see is the snow falling.

Don’t get me wrong — it’s very pretty. But this time of year, during winterspring, it gets old.

I started reading Lisa Daily’s book “Fifteen Minutes of Shame” on the plane home. She gave a couple of really useful workshops on publicity at the convention. I’m also liking her book — kind of a Jennifer Weiner chick-lit deal. But I really loved that her character flew from Sarasota, Florida to Chicago and emerged into a 23 degree snowstorm in open-toed shoes, with her winter coat packed at the bottom of her suitcase. The character reflects that although she looks at the snowflakes on the weather map, she still has a hard time really believing it will be like that.

I see this a lot. Since I spend more time in airports than any human being should. At baggage claim in Denver, travelers in shorts and sandals will stand at the belts while the suitcases gaily circle around, staring in dismay out the glass doors at the snow billowing outside. Maybe not dismay, but consternation. As if they don’t quite understand how both of their realities can be true: both the one they left only a few hours before and the one they stand in now.

It makes me think air travel is fundamentally unnatural. There is perhaps something about the way we understand time and place that conflicts with the speed of air travel.

Once, when I was in college, I took a morning flight from St. Louis to Denver for a job interview. Then I flew back to St. Louis that evening, because I had exams in the morning. For a day or two afterward I felt disoriented, as if I’d lost a day. Something about the back and forth left me only halfway present, the rest of myself somehow scattered in between the two cities, only gradually catching up again.

I see there’s a new pill for jet lag. What can we do about the self-lag?

Late Season Storm

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I read this book when I was a little girl, called “Spring Begins in March,” by Jean Little. I would go on author kicks then (I suppose I still do) and read everything on the library shelf by an author. In this book, the girl gets a cold and is not liking the wintery weather. Her mother comforts her and tells her to hang on, that Spring doesn’t begin until March. By the end of the book, it’s turned to March and it is, indeed, Spring.

This bemused me then, as a Colorado girl. No one there in their right minds looks for Spring in February. The hopeful look for it in April. The experienced hold out for May and the jaded wait forlornly until June. Arguably the Rocky Mountain West has no Spring. We go pretty much from winter to summer. In fact, Spring was my least favorite season for most of my life, including now, since I live in Wyoming, because it is just the last nasty, dirty, slushy, miserable phase of winter. Only when I went to college in St. Louis did I discover that Spring can be a season all its own, with gentle warmth and nature in bloom.

This is on my mind this morning with the snow blanketing Alabama and Georgia, and moving to points north. In what they call a “late season storm.” I suppose we all speak from our own perspectives, and the more populated areas of the country speak with louder voices. But the news is jarring to those of us still in full winter. Though here it’s been “unseasonably warm.” I wonder if the meterologists and newcasters have a big book of seasons, perhaps with a map of the country with complex graphs, showing what the season is supposed to be like. Perhaps it has transparent overlays, with anecdotal evidence for what March was like in granny’s day.

I take the agnostic approach: Spring begins when it damn well wants to.