Fragments From Floyd

If you've been looking around trying to find something, somewhere, anywhere that will totally distract you away from any real work, then look no further. There is now a freeware version of a drawing-sketching program I mentioned last July called Sketchup. It was so good, it is now owned by Google.

If you have a building project (we actually need to design a little back porch outside the Ann-ex on the back of the house) then this piece of freeware is one remarkable tool you should take a look at. If nothing else, watch the video tutorials--they are wonderfully distracting, and for maybe ten minutes, you'll not have to think about another thing on your to-do list! How cool is that?!

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"In 1959 the official rate of allergy in the U.S. was between 2 to 5% of the public. By 1999 the official rate of allergy had increased to an incredible 38% of Americans. Asthma, which was once considered rare, is now the number one chronic childhood disease in the US."

Wonder why? Part of the answer is that city trees, by virtue of our horticultural choices, are wind-pollinated and almost all male (the pollen-producing plants.) Female trees make those ikky fruits and seeds that bespeckle our immaculate lawns and parks, and we wouldn't want that, now would we? (Birds, squirrels and other tree-feeders might have another opinion.)

This is a very interesting little bit of ethno-botany, and if you are a city-dwelling asthma sufferer, at least you'll know now that it's not your imagination when you take a drive out into the country, and breath easier!

And if you are considering planting trees around home, check out the OPALS Plant Allergy Scale and save your breath.

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It itched a little, and I rubbed a spot under my right arm with my left index finger. Funny. It feels like its barely attached, I thought, of what I assumed was one among a little life-long constellation of axillary nevi. But no, as I looked, this particular mole had legs. And with disgust, I pulled the small but growing tick away from its 180 pound lunch and flushed it to its septic final resting place. Yuk. I called Ann at work to ask where were the Doxycycline tablets we keep for the dog. Supposedly, taken within 24 hrs of a tick bite, this antibiotic prevents tick borne organisms from making you (or your dog) ill. I just now noticed a tickle on my neck that was migrating left to right. You guessed it. Must have come off this sweatshirt I wore while taking striped maple leaf pictures the other day.

It's gonna be a long summer of ectoparasites and blood suckers. Our winter was too wimpy--more like a Deep South winter where mosquitos, chiggers and ticks survive February just fine. We'll tuck our pant legs into our boots when we go berry picking, wear light colored clothing that shows dark crawling spots, avoid the pines up behind the house, and wear repellent as a last resort. And we'll be on alert for moles and freckles with sucking mouthparts.

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Fragments is back online. Film at 11.

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Especially the larger image (click) puts me to mind of some strange space probe in the orbital spheres of another world. The color appears just the way it was, without any changes. The wood, Dennis, I think is most certainly elm, and changes from gray to this bright orange when it gets wet.

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I'm taking the lazy way out this morning, sharing below an email to my rep and friend at Edwards Brothers. If any of you are thinking of having a book printed, GO THERE. You won't be sorry. Email me for more. And by the way, if you've placed an order by check or PayPal for Slow Road Home, I'm sending it your way today!

Good (rainy) morning, MB...

The books arrived exactly on time, and our contractor and his sidekick (who have had to listen to my laments and paeans re the book now, lo, these many months) helped me move the cartons to the porch where I covered them with an old blanket until the rains slacked. Most of them are now happily resting on the new tile floor in wifey's unfinished addition, with baseboards being installed in the room around them.

Yes, I am very happy with the books. We done good! It was an out-of-body experience, opening the first carton, cutting off the shrink wrap, cracking the actual covers to the actual book--the three-dimensional fruition of so very much effort, care, anguish and joy. I spent most of the afternoon signing, boxing and labeling purchased and review copies, and have about 50 to take to the post office today (plus dropping a few at places in the tiny town of Floyd --pop. 400).

To leave the books at the post office, marked with address of readers among both friends and strangers seems like sowing seeds, that will drift far away across the country and the world, to take root and yeild fruit in new readers--not to mention new orders for yet more seeds! It feels less like a business and more like gardening, I suppose: tilling, watering, preparing; then sowing, waiting hopefully, with as much joy in the process as in the harvest. It feels right and I am content.

I have not turned every page yet, but have no serious second thoughts or regrets about page layout. I might have made the font smaller and produced a readable book for less money. I might have cut out the space between paragraphs with the same effect. But I'm just fine with the extra white space and general readability. It looks the way I wanted it to look, and is pleasing to the eye. And dang, it feels good in hand! Very good. It looks professionally done and could not be told from any other bookstore book. I wanted to avoid a book that screamed VANITY PRESS as some POD printers' books certainly do.

It feels really, really good to hold this three-dimensional embodiment of my writing life--a life which itself embodies in turn my inner and outer world here for these past four years. It's been a good life, all in all (as my old friend John Denver used to sing) and I'm very content with this piece of it. Now, we'll see how readers feel about it. Your copy is in the mail (later today!)

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It is, after all, not unlike I have been saying, I thought, only in metaphor. To hold something in the hands so long imagined, embryonic and forming, now finally in the flesh--it is a bit overwhelming. And I am thankful. There are no obvious flaws, and I am proud. It is here, and I am happily sending off the first batch. If you've ordered, it should be heading your way very soon. I look forward to hearing what you think (I think.)

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Book placement is ready for Notebooks in Floyd (also Cafe del Sol) and Ramshead Books in Roanoke. Signing and reading scheduled for Fathers Day (June 18) at Notebooks, and pending at Ramshead.

It was a good omen, perhaps, that the first interview about the book was by someone who had actually read it (in digital pre-press form) and "got it". Leslie Shelor's questions about the book invited responses I was pleased to offer. As I told her, each entry in the book represents the tip of a submerged story--just pull the thread and more will come. Her interview and a book review are both posted now at Blue Ridge Gazette. Go by Leslie's blog as well and see (literally) WHAT'S UP.

I've hit a glitch in sending the book to England. The only choices for mailing start at an additional fee of about $10 charged to the seller. Less expensive (and slow) media rates are available, but not through PayPal. I'll have to sort this out. Anybody have experience shipping to Europe via PayPal?

I attended a meeting of the Valley Writers in Roanoke last week. One of the members, Becky Mushko, an publishing writer from Franklin County, suggested I might want to look attending the Appalachian Writers Association conference in Bristol. Funny thing: turns out the keynote speaker is my friend Jack Higgs, who has been so supportive of the writing, and first planted the seed that there might be a book in there somewhere. He wrote a very kind and extensive endorsement for the book, only a short snippet of which appears inside the front cover.

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There is a delicate soft promise in the first leaves of spring, each leaf a miniature of its final shape, a relative giant many times larger, just a few weeks into summer. Photographically, it is hard to do justice to this beauty and symmetry, to isolate one or a few apart from the rest in focus and with their best profile at ground level. Still, it makes for an interesting project, and I'd be happy to have a quartet of framed enlargments on a wall somewhere: tulip poplar; striped maple...I need to find two more, and soon. Spring is getting past me, again, all to quickly.

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Wouldn't you know: some things fall together, while others fall apart. The site is fubared temporarily. We're working on it. The books are being delivered in the next hour! Email me til I get comments working again. Sorry about the untidy house at FFF but we've lived through this before. Hang tight, y'all.

UPDATE: sidebar is back. Last three days posts are not. I'll repost, but the dates will be screwy. Just look the other way as we sweep some blogging dustbunnies under the rug.

Oh! Gotta run--the New Room construction crew is showing up and I have to get their vehicles out of the driveway. And Ann says we are NOT going to store books in her new room so guess where she has chosen instead: the Very Back Room--UPSTAIRS. Let's see: 800 pounds of books x 12 feet of lift x 48 trips up and down makes for one nice little workout for two sets of vintage knees--the equivalent of a few hours on the Stairmaster--the Lactic Acid Express, delayed muscle soreness here we come!

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Yes, I know this isn't green. See the larger color version by clicking on the B & W.

Now this:

Fragments, in yet another spasm of growth and unbridled vigor (and as a prophylactic move to protect against the social disease of comment spam), my longsuffering web-host, the digital alchemist Doug will be moving the ponderous and barely Moveable Beast to a new server separated by a moat full of sharks and alligators from the mainland where hackers and spammers thrive. During the next 24 hours, comments will be disabled. If after that time, I have disappeared from the face of the blogosphere, well, hang on. I'll be back. And with some important news!

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It was called something like "The Fun Palace" and I had my doubts on the way over the mountain from Sylva to Franklin. Her momma hyped it all the way there and Abby entered the huge indoor one-story "amusement park" with great expectations, I with an equal dread. Measured by decibels and razzle, the place was dazzling, but the mostly small kids there during regular school hours seemed more dazed than entertained.

As it turned out, we didn't stay. We hadn't converted our cash into the appropriate tokens, we learned, once Abby settled on one sideshow she wanted to sample. We decided we had had enough already, and left. Abby said matter-of-factly "That was boring. I thought it was the FUN Palace. It was the Boring Palace."

Her mom knew of a park (the old fashioned kind with grass below, sky above) --a place with no neon or noise, and no tokens needed. Ann encouraged Abby to "look for treasures!" (since she'd found some kind of plastic bauble and tossed it off in the grass for Abby to find.) It wasn't long before she had found a tail-less kite complete with string, and we watched her run back and forth in the grass under the April sky with the blue kite spinning near the ground behind her, her imagination and her muscles at play.

I remembered the little girl sitting in the dark din of video distraction under a metal roof, back in the Boring Palace, and wished that she were here.

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These, we brought with us from Walnut Knob, and after almost seven years, they still come up every year. The opening of their subtle pastel bells mark the full advent of spring for us, and we go every day to check on them as they emerge from cold shade at the edge of the meadow.

And I needed to fix my mind on something lovely this early morning, because I'm starting out with a bad case of Bad Attitude. I have a home patient evaluation in an unfamiliar place an hour's drive from here--a drive that includes about 10 miles of I-81, and that is NOT an experience I ever look forward to. It is likely to be raining, adding to the joy.

Overall, I'm happy for the entry back into clinical practice (almost four months now) but there are times when I have to use uncommon force of will to be appropriately empathetic and outward-focused, especially when so many plates are spinning back in my other life I leave at home. I have had to become compartmentalized in a way the past few years have not demanded, and I go into my box reluctantly some days. This is one of them. Sigh.

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Small blips on the personal almanac: an important day for Phred the Photographer. On April 20, 2000, I opened the box and was amazed at how small it was (to have cost so much!) and I sat down and read the manual cover to cover--the anticipation being half the enjoyment of a special tool or toy. I used my Nikon CoolPix 950 for four years, until one tiny part failed, and replacing it equalled the cost of the camera.

On April 20, 2004, I got the Nikon D70--after much anguishing, blog reader advice and research, and after waiting 6 weeks for the new camera, still on back-order. And I've been mostly happy with my decision, but if I had it to do over again, I might have followed Maestro Thompson into Canon territory. I'm not totally pleased with some things--low light noise, being one of them--but am pretty confident there won't be any other April advents of new cameras in years to come. This is my last camera, and I'm happy to have it. I'll have a few shots on it to show you when we return back up to Middle Earth--maybe by the weekend.

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I am writing from the in-laws in Cullowhee (and the obvious and frequent rejoinder is CulloWHERE?) near the Smoky Mountains--from very near the place we lived when my daughter met her husband while in high school here in the late 80s. I am looking out from K and K's deck over the campus of Western North Carolina University, and I must tell you--there is more of it than there used to be. The school is growing in both enrollment, facilities and academic status, and is no longer a wannabe in the NC university system. Even so, there is no HERE here.

There is no real town of Cullowhee. The nearest place for restaurants, shops and such used to be 6 miles north in the congested two street downtown of Sylva. Now, the ugliest of strip malls, big box stores and same-old fast food franchises have filled both sides of the road between Cullowhat and Sylva--roads that were gridlocked when we lived here in '89, and with thousands more WNC students year round, and tens of thousands of Smokies visitors in all seasons but winter.

This beautiful place is an anthill stirred with a stick, even mid-week and off-peak. And there are lessons to be learned here by the little berg of Floyd: ugly and over-built is forever. (Beyond the man-made un-naturalness, nature here is still magnificent here!) That which makes a place unique and gives it identity can be lost so easily by yielding to the great homogenizing consumer juggernaut of "convenience" and "jobs no matter what". At least in Floyd, our visitor population is mostly just passing through on their way somewhere else, while students--not forever--are for at least 9 months every year.

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It has been leaving this world for some time now. More decay than repair, more neglect than attention and entropy always moving towards disorder, the old homeplace we pass is passing, dust to dust, to termite and mold.

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A branch plucked from the path we walked yesterday shows the cursed Hemlock Wooly Adelgid still sucking the life from what eastern hemlocks still live in this valley--in the same manner by which they are wiping out this magnificent tree species from northeastern Georgia to southeastern Maine and west to eastern Tennessee. This is a forest tragedy mourned on this page often before, but I don't think I ever showed you the victim--perhaps my favorite evergreen species--and the unlikely white-cotton agents of decline. (Click image for enlarged view.)

This will be a light blogging week as we will be down visiting in the western mountains of North Carolina for a few days. Unfortunately during this time, the tile will be going down in the new room and we won't be around to oooh and ahhhh, angst or supervise. The dog will be at Puppy Camp, and by the time we get home, the grass will need mowing again. Yesterday--just yesterday--the tulip poplar leaves emerged, tiny folded replicas of their adult shapes, and the striped maple buds appeared like tiny clasped hands just before they spread like angel wings. I'll have to post again a favorite image of striped maple leaves at this stage from two years ago.

I'll check email from time to time (tapping into the wireless at Western Carolina U) but might not post again until the weekend. But then again, I have a couple of images stored up, so we'll see.

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Friday, I went across to the other side of the county to work with some musician friends. They need CD cover graphics for a new retrospective that will collect two of their previous works on one disk. I took 100 shots, and we'll see if any of them suit. The one above is not one of those I put up in the gallery for them, but I sort of like it: the foreground with the irrelevant and disinterested dog and the grass in color in focus; the musicians understated, in the background, sepia toned, back in time.

Saturday, we had some new friends (and their Easter-visiting daughters and friend) over for a walkabout, and dessert on the upstairs porch. One of the daughters asked me about my writing. I mentioned the radio essays, then how I envied Garrison Keillor the pregnant pauses that are always digitally removed from my little pieces to cram them into available space. And with one thing leading to another, we began to demonstrate our abilities to make animal noises, a la Fred Farrell--a bunch of grownups eating cake and immitating mating wapiti and lovesick moose on the banks of Goose Creek. I think I'm right that this was a HeresHome first.

Yesterday, we visited another couple who we've known for some time--met, I think, at a Spoken Word event more than a year ago. They've only recently been to our place, and yesterday, we saw theirs for the first time. There, we walked the half mile trail that S has carved out of the piney woods and enjoyed a glass of wine at the end of a full day and a busy week. Life is good.

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As much as anything, the blog here has been a four year weather report--of ordinary lulls and storms that come, of remarkable events, and remarkable non-events--like drought. Last April, we had regular rains to the point that the garden never quite dried out enough to till until mid-May. This spring, should I run the tiller over the garden, I'd best have on a respirator for the dust. We're 40% behind on rainfall already, this early in the year. I've never seen such a string of weather alerts for FIRE hazard, with the bone-dry conditions combined with the constant winds we've been having. I don't think we've had a spring so windy since we've been down here on the creeks. A line of thunderstorms is about a half-hour away now, sweeeping east towards us, and I confess, I think about that single lightning strike on the ridge west of us that would start this unbroken swath of tinder aflame.

Thinking about it, though, unlike many forests I've wandered, I have not seen fire sign on our oldest trees within a half mile of the house in any direction. On the other hand, there was once a house just around the bend. The owner came home from town one night after a bad thunderstorm. He got out of his car with a sack of groceries; walked up to the house in the pitch black dark; and beyond the concrete steps, there was no house. Ann and I went there yesterday to pick the jonquils that still bloom beside the foundation.

But it's not just gardens that stand to suffer from another drought this year. Floyd County's water resources are limited by rains that replenish the fractured rock where ground water is stored in this Blue Ridge geology. In the drought of 2002, hundreds of wells went dry and never came back; the replacement wells had to go much deeper to find water.

Checking again, the solid green on the radar is breaking up, the closer it gets to us. The promise of rain once more is a cruel tease, and we'll have another day or week or more of dusty clouds when the few cars come down Goose Creek. The creek will flow a little lower, and the ground water will discharge into the streams by the millions of gallons, headed to the coast, with nothing to replace it. Not today, anyway.

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It was last early summer--almost a year ago now--that I saw the bear loping across the pasture. Not a wee bear--probably 300 pounds or better. But I continued to taunt Ann, who carried the Big Gun with her every walk after that for six months. "A black bear is NOT going to attack anybody. Not gonna happen."

Oops. So I was wrong.

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Just shows to go ya: yesterday, early morning, I made the comparison of this book writing, printing and publishing process to giving birth. Yesterday afternoon, the metaphor took a strange twist: the water broke.

My rep from Edwards Brothers called to check in on me. She had passed me along to the press folks a few weeks back, so just wanted to be sure I was still feeling good about the book project. Yes, mostly, I told her, but frankly, I'm disappointed that the April 14 print date didn't work out.

"Oh, we are three 24-hour press days behind. A water main under the main printing press room broke and filled it with several inches of water. The building foundation had to be inspected to be sure it could continue to support the big presses, and adjacent workers had to leave while flooring repairs were made because there was asbestos somehow in the flooring."

Wait a minute: I thought when the water broke, that moved the birthing process along FASTER! Stop the presses! My metaphors are breaking up!

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While the grass has already spurted up higher than the mower can cut, the garden fence needs mending where the deer have done body-slams against the wire over winter, and the windows need the washing away of six months of Goose Creek dust, the book project continues to whine for its share of attention. Why can't they make an April and May in a BiggieSize! so that there is enough time to get everything done! I love spring, but it comes too fast, and asks too much!

Some new twists along this purported slow road:

~ As of yesterday, it looks like the books will ship on April 28. This is good, but sooner would be better. There is a book fair in Roanoke for which the deadline for review copies is May 5. Might not make that one. Good news, too, that it might well be that the tile will be down in the new addition in time to hold a pallet of books! Now I know why "we" needed that new room.

~ Thanks to readers near and far, some ideas for possible placement in Roanoke, Lynchburg, Richmond and along the parkway--and even in England--are waiting for the books in hand to act on. Do keep sending tips about book stores, interest groups, libraries and other venues in your area where Slow Road might find the appropriate audience. Thanks, y'all!

~ Here's a site that is using pbwiki to create a database of published authors. The Book Web Warehouse provides authors with their own web pages to promote their books. There is even a "readers comments" page associated with the author pages so readers can discuss the book. Of course, my links point back to the pbwiki I have had set up now for some time, with a few bells and whistles added recently, including the potential for unlimited COMMENTS on each page of the site (see the COMMENTS button in the banner.)

~ Serving Suggestion: send the link or the file for the Slow Road bookmark (image, left) to someone you know who might like to know about the book; or print it out (I created it three-on-a-page to go on card stock and fit in a brochure display) and hand it to a co-worker, neighbor or family member. Heck, hand them to total strangers and make a friend, I dunno.

~ Anybody ever sold anything using Google Base? For the heck of it, I set up the book there. I have no idea that this will reach anyone at all (how many folks go shopping for "Virginia, essay, memoir, Floyd, blueridge" (my keywords) and buy a book from an unknown author? I guess we'll find out, but I think I pretty much know the answer.

~ Contractions. I feel like I'm birthing a baby and it just won't quite come. Conception and gestation are past. We've gone full-term and it is due time for delivery--to see if the little embryo has grown to a neonate with all her little fingers and toes; to see if she looks anything at all like I hoped she would; to know if she will be bane or blessing to this quiet life. Her godparents, the Muses of Floyd County, hope she does them proud. But we'll welcome her, regardless, the offspring of one man and the place he has grown to love.

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One picture will have to take the place of my thousand morning words. I've agreed to work a Thursday to take the place of my usual Friday: the clniic will be closed for Good Friday. So what's this? I'm working two days out of three? I feel the tug of current that is the fast lane, and I won't go there willingly. For me, going back to serene images like this one is a good way to remember to move efficiently but without hurry, in a slow state of mind through the demands of a busy day. [click for larger image]

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I look out over the pasture and hillsides from the front porch, and other than the undercoat of new green poking up through last year's dieback of field grasses, there is not much to see yet. But then, I look back in my image archives at what has been happening in the springs of years past--just weeks from this date--and get a taste for all the color and form soon to burst from the monochrome of early spring.

I have this recurrent fantasy, induced decades ago in no small part by Mr. Disney's World of Nature slow-mo episodes, of being able to watch a day or a month of spring evolve in a condensed time-lapse view. Anywhere I turn my magic viewer, I can see just that one frame--that bloodroot, shoot of tulip poplar, gray and barren hillside, or the entire valley--and set the machine to play it back at whatever rate and duration I choose. Oh look! There's a reverse on this thing too! Let's watch springtime retreating back into the cold ground of winter. Kewl!

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~ There was Stupendous Man. And Spaceman Spiff. But my favorite of all Calvin and Hobbs alter-egos was "UnderwearMan!" I got some new ones for my birthday yesterday! Move over, Calvin. And I don't mean Klein.

~ The lost proofs were found on Friday, so the book goes soon (today?) "from proof to plate" which I assume means it has one last meal before becoming pressed.

~ I learned yesterday (thanks, Ian!) that PayPal will send the book to England for only an additional $0.21 postage for "boundary fee" or some-such. That's great!

~ I have decided the old dent-and-rust-bucket of a truck I've been driving since 1996 should go to pasture soon--literally. We will keep the 4WD truck for hauling wood and for the few occasions when this kind of traction is needed in the winter. It will bed over in the pasture behind the barn when not in use. And I will look for a small high-milage replacement I can pay for out of my little paycheck.

~ Ann says my wardrobe looks like something off of Happy Days. If I'm going to be appearing in public places, I need, first of all, new shoes. And there they were: some now BORN dressies that actually fit. They look like leather skis, dear, but that isn't your fault. Size 12. I feel like a circus clown.

~ Hey Dr. R, you figured out what kind of wood that is? The trees that died all of a sudden two springs ago I have been calling ash. No, treeman Craig said, he thinks they are elm. So now, we'll get a polished piece and perhaps even a thin section of this stuff and see if we can make a definitive ID. Whatever it is, we'll be burning a lot of it next winter.

~ I have done a poor job keeping up with pictures of the new addition. We are a week away from the laying of the tile (a nice irregular-edged sand colored thing we will lay in staggered pattern) and the new room will be complete, if very echo-y and empty for want of any money left for furniture. I figure it will be a great place to store a huge block of shrink-wrapped books. NOW I know why we needed another room on a house that seemed to be big enough already.

~ Rambling here? Moi? Actually, I'm just getting warmed up, thinking that if my fingers are moving that they might accidentally stumble across a topic for the newspaper column I need to have done by Thursday (for a deadline the following Monday). I can't keep on recyling things from what now will become the book. The pressure is on. Let's see. How about something about domestic tranquility or the battle of the sexes? Nope, already done that. A dog story? Natch. Something will come to me.

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Labrador Retrievers: Members of the breed are known for their mild dispositions and for their willing compliance with their owner's wishes. They are said to demand participation in all household routines. And in addition, this one individual out of the breed who lives with us is characterized by his unswerving insistence on arbitration of each and every real or perceived interpersonal conflict under his family's roof. He is a Labrador Resolver.

That's right: Tsuga considers himself a necessary intermediary in almost all conversations between the two humans in this household. Even routine conversations make him anxious, especially when I give up my animated gesticulations in the telling of a tale. But let the exchange take on tones of conflict and strife--as happens not infrequently in a home where two adults have more projects than energy, more elder-angst than answers--and the dog becomes something of a cross between a football referree with a whistle and a flag in his pocket, a marriage counselor with a hand on both combatant's chests as they arch defiantly over her desk, and a flower child pacifist who would say "Can't we all just get along here, people?" I tell Ann: "something has come between us" and it's always this wagging eighty pounds of neutrality and saliva that is our dog.

I have had a revelation with regard to the power of this dog's inner drives toward reconciliation. I am pretty sure that the threat of unarbitrated discord is so strong a motivator for the dog's presence that, next time he runs off somewhere and we can't locate him, we will simply stand on the front porch, wife and I, and pretend (or heck, maybe not pretend) to be arguing over potato versus potahto, and voila! The dog will have no choice but to come from even the most alluring dead carcass down the pasture, pulled by the genetically-endowed need to keep the Bickerson's at arm's length.

For more Things That Dogs Teach Their People, listen to Jim Minick's WVTF essay about his dogs. This is the essay Jim recorded (and I got to hear played back in the studio) when he and I both ended up over in Roanoke one morning a few weeks back.

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So what do you make of this? Licensed retailer or NO SALE? This is from Penn State University Press site, so seems legit enough.

Q: I've been invited to a workshop. The organizers want me to sell my book there. Can I take a small inventory of my book with me to sell?

A: We appreciate your entrepreneurial spirit, but unless you are a licensed retailer, selling isn't allowed. The same holds true for the organizers. This is a perfect situation for you to hand out those flyers in large numbers we'll print more if you need them. We will be happy to outfit you with plenty of catalogs and flyers for just such events. Often, we have extra jackets and covers printed for our books. Let us know if you want a handful of these to show off.

Or is this a case of "if you sell them, wedon't get our cut" kind of deal?

I've been invited to a workshop. The organizers want me to sell my book there. Can I take a small inventory of my book with me to sell?

We appreciate your entrepreneurial spirit, but unless you are a licensed retailer, selling isn't allowed. The same holds true for the organizers. This is a perfect situation for you to hand out those flyers in large numbers we'll print more if you need them. We will be happy to outfit you with plenty of catalogs and flyers for just such events. Often, we have extra jackets and covers printed for our books. Let us know if you want a handful of these to show off.

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It is the week leading in the Christian calendar to Easter--a commemoration marking an event that, if true, changes everything. It's celebration, however, has, like so many Holy-days, become expropriated by Hallmark and Russell Stover and the likes as a way to sell us something. And the marketable symbols of the season are not artifacts of faith but of fancy: the bunny and the egg.

The egg is so rich with symbolism of cycles and new beginnings that it's incorporation into springtime rites is easy to imagine. But how in the world did a rabbit become the purveyor of marshmallow and chocolate this time of year? What of the poor hen who laid the eggs after which our Sunday sunrise confections are modeled? Why not the Easter Chicken?

It turns out that to find the roots of the rabbit in Easter, you must go to the ancient German Rhine and their Ostarafest which probably included in its springtime rites the goddess Ostra (Austra meaning east, hence, Easter) meeting the sunrise pulled by a train of rabbits--the Osterhaas. It was likely the Pennsylvania-Dutch who brought the Osterhaas with them from their homeland to this country. link

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If you've hung out here any at all since January, you know I cobbling together a book from what have been Fragments posts over the past almost four years. The title is "Slow Road Home: a Blue Ridge Book of Days". On the website for the book, I have described the origins of the title, and already talked a bit about the "slow road." I thought maybe I would say a few words about the subtitle here, if any are interested.

First, "book of days" was a term I used in "On Eagle Wings"--the longest, most memoirish piece in the book. It was a phrase I used in the sense of "scrapbook" that just seemed to fit the growing story that Ann and I were living, and about which I was writing. The weblog, I suppose, had served me since 2002 for storing saved moments and days, long before I had an idea of ever assembling a book from the saved word-snapshots of our lives.

But what, then, to call the assorted and varied snippets of day-to-day life on Goose Creek when the book was needing a name? If the collection had been only pictures, it could have been called an album; if only personal reflections, a journal. If it was less personal and more about the weather, the garden and nature, perhaps it would have been an almanac. But the terms didn't suit, and I wouldn't have liked any of them in my title. Instead, I found that the weblog and then the book were large enough containers to hold whatever came from each day's efforts to clip, snip and preserve them--it was a book made up of days.

But it turns out, the phrase has been used before, with some similarities to what has become Slow Road Home.

Chamber's Book of Days (1869) has the typically long subtitle of the times that describes the book as a "Miscellany of Popular Antiquities in Connection with the Calendar, including Anecdote, Biography and History, Curiosities of Literature and Oddities of Human Life and Character". I suppose this 135 year old Book of Days is not all that different in scope from the assembled fragments in Slow Road Home, while that latter is far more personal and local in scope.

I wanted the book title in some way to reflect that it was rooted in place, so the addition of Blue Ridge to Book of Days, I think, does that for the name of the book. When referring to it, I find I simply use the main title, but I'm glad the subtitle is there on the cover, to give a potential reader a little more information about what's inside, while leaving them pleasantly puzzled, perhaps, wondering "just what is a Book of Days?"

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It forms the dominant cover along Nameless Creek and its wooded flanks. Spicebush is a rank shurb that grows up from a base of a dozen or more one-to-two-inch trunks. They splay out in all directions, so that these rangy treelets that have volunteered along the creek cross arms in impenetrable thickets. They have taken over the collapsed rock wall that edges our pasture and the creek.

All winter long, the bare branches cross our path, twigs brittle and covered with tiny dots. It has no practical use from a forestry point of view, but the wildlife consider it both food and shelter. And as if it were new each time, I often scratch and sniff a spicebush twig during those times when color and smell have left our valley for months on end. Its camphorous, medicinal smell is my winter aroma therapy, smelling salts that revive my memory of what this place will become, come spring.

When the tiny yellow flowers begin to emerge in late March, they are hardly worthy of note until the sun slants through them, their pale petals backlit against the shadows still out of reach of morning as it rises. Here, in this glorious shot from one year ago this week, I am reminded of the need to rekindle the eye for magic--the beautiful ordinary; to find the "tree with the lights in it", another has called it. Go look for it today.

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I thought she was about to belt out the closing bars of warbling mezzo-soprano and we'd be done with this book assembly thing. But no. If it absolutely, positively must get there overnight, don't use US Postal Service overnight mail. My proofs, on whose return waits the passage of my book files from proof to plate, were not delivered "next day." Tracking says an attempt was make. What? All 100 employees at Edwards Brothers left for lunch? But for want of a nail...and so on. And why, can somebody tell me, do things like this almost always happen as the week ends and everybody has Friday on their minds?

Meanwhile, I spent two hours yesterday in Floyd (while the Subaru's winter shoes were replaced with some nice all-season slippers) walking to every possible venue in town to find placement of the book. What pleasant work, even if it brings home how very small a pond will be the "home base" for this item. I stopped by The Meadows, bought a shirt (Ann says my current wardrobe says Happy Days all over it) and will set up a book display there with one book and cards with order info. Oddfellas: leave a display of business cards. Harvest Moon: I'm not sure; their book display is rather hidden and understated. New Mountain Mercantile: nice, prominent display, but they ask 40% commission. The library wants a copy. Notebooks, the book store where the old Harvest Moon was, seems good for placement and would be a nice setting for a book signing as well. And Cafe del Sol is a sure bet; I'll be able to share space with David St. Lawrence, but can't compete with his handmade solid wood book holder. I'm sure we'll find a way to live happily on a shelf or two, and Sally was very open to that.

Last night, we heard Sharyn McCrumb speak in town at the Presbyterian Church. Afterward, I had a very brief chance to tell her about the epiphany I had when she spoke here almost four years ago. It was during her talk in the very same church in 2002 that I realized I DID have roots after all: the mountain south. I was born flatlands south, and it never felt like a good fit. I was restless until I moved north, and higher in elevation, back in 1975, a son of mountains. McCrumb in her writing makes much of the separate history of lowland and highland south, their settlement by English or Scotch-Irish-Welsh founders, their culture and the resulting politics and attitudes. I fit with the highlanders, and had a chance to tell her so, plus, I handed her the three pages from the book where I tell this story--along with a Slow Road Home flyer and a business card--which in all likelihood, she will never look at again.

In the realm of record-keeping and plans for shipping, I'm keeping up. I decided against Access and am using separate Excel spreadsheets for income, expenses, orders I fill from home, paypal orders and consignment. I found out last night about some mailers that a local bookstore owner, Sara LaPointe, uses: they cost about 40 cents apiece. I've been encouraged by Sean Pecor, a man who knows his business, to not take a loss in shipping and handling, and on calculating the actual costs, have added the same S & H as one would expect to pay for a similar product via Amazon, etc. I have to figure in mileage, too, since I'll be making two or more trips a week to the closest post office--which, by the way, really is in a little crossroads called CHECK. This throws a whole new light on the phrase "the check is in the mail."

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It has been, in the words of a former coworker, a "brisky" spring so far. That's cool and WINDY. So windy, in fact, that we worry every time we leave the house down our forested road of leaning trees that we will not be able to get back home because of trees across the road. The saving grace (and also the worry for the gardening summer and area wells and springs) is that we have had scant moisture this winter, so tree roots have a firmer grip against the wind than if the soil was soaked and pliant. But this risk of barricade was on my mind one day this week as I dropped down into the valley, rounding one blind curve, then another and was half way home.

And I came round a curve headed into the straightway (the 100 yards of unwindy road in the 1.7 miles between hardtop and our house) and there it was: a huge tree, horizontal across the road, its branches holding the thick trunk at about limbo height. Now I must tell you: the sinking feeling that comes in such a situation on our road is not that you won't get home when you thought you would, in time to eat before rushing out to an evening meeting (as was the case.)

The horror comes from the realization that there is NO PLACE to turn around until you have reversed a quarter mile of winding, climbing single lane road that falls off sharply into the creek. And so, first hooking the seat behind me with my left arm, then my right, then my left (with neck breaks in between) I got turned around and headed back to Huffville, then Lick Ridge, then Griffith Creek and finally back down to Goose Creek.

And it was here that I came up behind the Service Gas tanker heading up the road in the direction of a couple of homes where I thought he must be stopping. Past them was our house (we use another gas company) and then in another two minutes drive up and beyond our place, the driver and his 2000 gallons of propane would encounter the downed tree at the top of a blind curve, with the creek a steep drop off to the side. But perhaps he was going to stop, deliver at a neighbor's, and turn around and go back the way he'd come. I drove behind him for a minute with this assumption and hope. But no.

After he passed the last possible delivery place, I knew I would have to do something to avert disaster: a tanker trunk on its side in the headwaters of the Roanoke River was not a front-page feature story I wanted to read about in the Floyd Press. Coming in the direction he was, with the sun full in his face, he might not see the tree in time, there just around a sharp curve at the crest of a hill. This could be ugly.

And so I pulled up a close as I dare to his rear bumper, honked my horn politely, and waved. Good, his window is down: he'll hear me. A cloud of dust swirled off the bone-dry road, the tan billows illuminated by the low, late afternoon sun. The man drove on as if he didn't hear my signal. I honked longer and more frequently. The man didn't look back.

By now, we had reached the deserted level stretch that I knew would be my last hope of stopping him. I flashed my lights while I honked and waved as I flashed frantically, motioning for him to pull over. Perhaps he thought this wild behavior in his rear-view mirror was a high-jacking about to take place--those crazy Floyd County weirdoes! And so he drove on, making his escape to the west, dust rising in Saharan proportions as our two vehicles raced along, back bumper to front. Honk-wave-flash, then off he drove, disappearing around the curve as I pulled into our driveway, resigned to let him meet his fate. Another two minutes, he would understand.

Forty five minutes later, I knew he’d learned what all the fuss was about. When he rumbled back by the house in a cloud of dust heading east, I was sitting on the front steps reading the mail. I looked up from my magazine and gave him a friendly Floyd County high-jacker hand wave. Hey Charlie: if you think this is a short cut, on these brisky days of early spring, you might want to equip that tanker with a chain saw.

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These 32 pages of proofs I have laid out before me this morning are the first "tasting" --of the material, mass and volume reality finally transformed, almost, from so many moments of living in this skin, this valley; of so many keystrokes and passes of so many editor-eyes. Close. I am very close--to completing something I wondered if I would ever have the courage and perseverance to do. And but for the help and encouragement and catalysts of my reader-friends at Fragments, this would never have happened. Were there no such thing as weblogs, and had I not been drawn toward writing for the first time in blogger back exactly four years ago this month, there would have been no writing to read or pixels of barns or spiderwebs to view. Funny how it all comes together in hindsight, isn't it?

But not to rest: we have some minor changes to be made yet. And thank God for proofs, to see what does not appear on the monitor.

Overall, I am pleased. The cover image is sharp and saturated and the mat laminate, while a bit glossier than I'd prefer, gives the paper a nice heft and brilliance. But the subtitle and author's name seem too large in proportion to the book size, like a Reader's Digest Large Print edition. I will shrink that down a bit.

Inside text, also, seems large at 11 points. And I intended to err toward the large, easy reading side of the spectrum. I could have produced the book at less expense with wider margins, smaller font and by avoiding white space between paragraphs. But I wanted breaks to slow the reading down, to separate each chunk of paragraph from the next (especially in the more aesthetically rich parts) so each thought stood on its own. Perhaps, if there's a second printing, I will reduce the font to 10, which the first part before the preface is. It reads okay, I think, even for older eyes.

And a major thing to catch before printing 1000: the margins of the book (from the preface, on) are different from the opening pages (these two sections being on two different templates in InDesign.) I don't know if I would have caught this without holding the proofs open like a book. Simply fixed, I'll need to make the binding margin 1" so text can be read easily as it flows toward the center. Currently, it is at 0.75" and hard to read. Easy fix. Now if I can just get a quick response from my contact person at Edwards Brothers, we'll be good to go, and I should get a firm ship and delivery date very soon!

I'll try to post an image of the proofs being perused by the author at his desk, later today. But no promises. I'm up to my elbows in alligators, and so what the heck am I doing taking five minutes to blog? Get thee behind me, Moveable Type. I have work to do!

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~ It is motion that they see more than shape, contrast of light against dark. If you stay perfectly still, you disappear to them, and they come out of hiding and do what they do when no one is there to see. The phoebees begin to feed along the trunks of rhododendrons near the ground. Chipmunks and voles make quick sortees between rock crevice and root shadow. And in Nameless Creek, the fish return to their choreographed undulations facing into the current all together, where just moments ago at the passing of my shadow, each in its private terror darted forward and back, then left, then right in a panic of maindless self-protection. When the threat is passed, crayfish hiding under stones creep cautiously into the dappled sun where the current paints waves of gray on the silty bottom. They glide sideways like tiny tanks, armored red-brown, each a walking Swiss Army knife of legged tools: forceps, fork, knife and scissors.

~ From somewhere downstream, and for the first time today, a Louisianna Water Thrust calls unseen. I know now that for every hundred calls I hear, I will see only one. That is the way they want it, the way they are designed, their patterns so like the mottled light along the creek, where a thousand points of reflected light from its surface confuse the eye. These birds live in that confusion, and throw their voices deceptively.

~ You couldn't tell it is warmer to stick your hand in the creek water as your fingers prickle and sting. How could the season have warmed springfed waters at all so early? And yet, the rocks along the bottom of the stream are uniformly yellow-green with a slime of algae, already feeding a legion of hungry stoneflies, caddisflies and helgrammites that have lived on nothing at all over the frozen months of winter. It is probably daylength rather than warmth that triggers this algal feast. It is sunlight that makes life of any kind possible on this unlikely planet. It is sunlight that warms me now, that makes me so content in this moment, in this place: a moment illuminated from ninety three million miles away.

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Sloppy Kisser ~ It was a night of wild dreams. Someone (a SHE, of course, gossamer-gowned and beautiful) was kissing my hand, and was growing more passionate every instant, it seemed, and I wondered if others were watching. And then, an explosion, a flash. And I woke up, with Tsuga licking my right hand as the lightning pulsed to the south. Tsuga, go lie down and stop interefering. Fairwell, my beauty, and I will leave one hand above the sheets, should you come again.

Places Along the Road ~ Some early peeks about the book and the writing process that preceded it are showing up--over at Colleen's Loose Leaf Notes and by way of Leslie at Greenberry. Thank you very much, ladies. I hope to have more firm dates for availability soon.

HandyDandy ~ There are SO many Web2 utilities now, it makes your head swim. I've tried and kept, but more commonly, tried and deleted quite a few of them. One I'm using rather regularly is a temporary bookmarks keeper called ListMixer. From what you save, you can easily add it permanently, if you decide to keep it, to Spurl, Furl, Del.ico.us, and others.

I Are One ~ Thot this was interesting: "The first reference (to the term "hillbilly" appeared in 1900 in the New York Journal. The paper described the species as "a free and untrammeled white citizen of Alabama, who lives in the hills, has no means to speak of, dresses as he can, talks as he pleases, drinks whiskey when he gets it, and fires off his revolver as the fancy takes him." ... As for pronunciation, it’s "Ap-pa-LATCH-a" in the southern mountains, but more commonly "Ap-pa-LAY-cha" in the rest of the country, particularly north of the Mason-Dixon Line. link

WhatchaMaCallIt ~ The flexible tube attached to the house that powers the lawn sprinklers that you got into your bathing suit to play in: it was called a hosepipe. I used this term in my adult life, and my listeners did a big HUH? Sure, hosepipe, I said. They'd never heard the term. Well, turns out it must be a remnant of southern migration by our British ancestors. See "Hosepipe ban hits millions of UK homes." Anybody else in the US use this term?

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In this in-between stage that is neither book writing or book editing or book marketing and promotion (this neither-nor state being some of the source of the "momentary fog" mentioned in the previous post) I am thinking about how to use the images from home on the slow road to enhance the visibility and appeal of the book.

If I'm going to be doing events at book fairs and such, I need some things to sit on the desk to show off the book. Darn, I should have picked up some of the plexiglass stands at Staples that hold various sized documents more or less vertically for display. There are so many prints from my archives that would accommodate a little snippet of text from the book to caption the subject of spider webs, summer creeks,leaves in fall or winter snow.

Eventually, perhaps, this addition of the images in the promotional materials will lead to a second effort at publication that will be predominantly images, but with (hopefully by then, familiar) text from the book in a combination of visual and verbal. "You've read the book, now see the images that prompted the prose from Goose Creek." What do you think? (Not that I need another project at the moment. I need the one underway to get back that way very soon--then, lurch into the next life-absorbing project.)

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Maybe, after a few more circuits through the downstairs this morning, a few more empty short sits staring into the dark from the front steps, I will sort it out. Or perhaps not. I don't even know what "it" is, really, just a momentary fog of complicated unknowing.

Round I go, a day for walking circles, not for finding rest. The stuck wheels of purpose and relationship demand the lubricant of attention while walking. Nowhere.

When emotional heat can't be dissipated through the keyboard, I pace. I pace when there is no listener for the reverberating monologue, when the additions and subtractions of those back and forth calculations will not be resolved like a mathematical formula, equal on both sides, completed. Pacing is a form of doing something when there is nothing to be done.

Maybe it's a good problem when life becomes less automatic and predictable, more itchy and lumpy and uncomfortable so that we can't sit still. When we get uncomfortable enough with where, what and who we are, we move. Ruts are very comfortable places.

Some writers can write their way out of stuck times of insoluble conflict or slack sails, write their best and most authetic stuff, in the midst of personal turmoil and ennui. They let their fingers do the walking, going somewhere with words, pacing themselves. They relish the angst, feed off the lack of clarity and a clear path, and write their way through it, energized by it, finding their way to firm ground from the lost bog.

I'm willing to compromise: I think I will take my notepad in my pocket. I will walk to the top of the ridge just as the sun strikes across the crest and the first warmth finds the pines. I will settle under a large white pine with a smooth trunk against my back, a soft bed of needles underneath me, and a good view of the valley. And I will let my fingers pace the lines of the page, back and forth, and have that conversation that wants a hearing that my feet cannot coax to the surface.

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Win a few, lose a few. So it goes in the world of ability and disability, with the latter gaining ground and holding firmer as the years, muscle contractions and joint flexions add up.

By the standards of some of my physical therapy patients who have, as we say in the trade, been "rode hard and put up wet" or who are otherwise 4P individuals (Pathetically Poor Pieces of Protoplasm, another P word sometimes substituted for the first term), well, I'm not so bad off, I suppose. I'm still able to do most of what needs to be done. But not all.

It has been a month since the trees were dropped in the pasture, but by the first hour of working to get it cut up and split, my balking sacroiliac joint was out and that was the end of it.

Win a few: I remembered a stretch that often would help reposition the sacrum on the ilium. (See the picture for the TFL stretch here.) And sure enough--sometimes--it cuts the pain by half or more.

Lose a few: we had an optional continuing ed meeting last night after work. A couple of therapists shared what they had learned recently at a yoga workshop. Some of the held postures take a considerable amount of core strength and flexibility. I found that I still am okay in that regard. But more than half of the positions require your upper body weight to be supported on your hands against the floor. Nope. Can't go there. The warranty expired on the wrists a while back. A few I could do with my hand in a fist, supported on my knuckles. But mostly, I ended up watching younger bodies do things that are impossible for me now.

Win a few: the yoga fixed me, back-wise. I can barely feel the SI pain. Those trees are still out there. Will I torque things out of whack again with a few strokes of the splitting maul this morning? Likely. Will the hands work to pick up the heavy chunks of oak, or will I have to use my teeth? Ah, it's a great time to be silver. Such adventure! You never know if the engine will start until you yank the crank a few times. Let's go get at it.

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