November 4, 2009
Wednesday

Horses are I think lucky . . . horses think good easy things, smooth green and windy things, . . . and they have enough grass to trot in forever and wind to throw their manes high to the sky and cool sweet stream water to drink, and clover.
            — Catherine Petroski, b. [c] 1940
                 American writer, from her story “Beautiful My Mane in the Wind”

I am currently reading the sixth selection from The Fiction Fifty, the books that are, as Heather Sellers advises, like the one I am writing. It’s Aryn Kyle’s The God of Animals, about a 12-year-old girl who lives on a horse ranch in Colorado with her father and her mother. The mother is a shadowy figure, a woman who fell into a depression when Alice was a baby and who no longer leaves her bedroom. Alice’s adored older sister has recently run off with a cowboy, a classmate has drowned in a canal, and her father, in an effort to make ends meet, is catering to people who have more money than horse sense and who board their pet horses with him and take riding lessons.

I am working hot on my novel right now. Today a relationship developed between two characters that I had not expected, and I had to get it down on paper. In addition, I have some other concerns that are making it difficult to jump from the head for fiction (reading and writing) to the head for nonfiction while also staying in the present. To that end, I’m posting this only as a place holder, something that qualifies as an daily item for NaBloPoMo, and withdrawing to think smooth green and windy things. 

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The NaBlos of the Past:

2008: Yes We Did! — My vote might have taken two seconds tops. All I had to do was press the “straight Democratic” panel at the top of the screen and the bar at the bottom that records the vote. (Oh, and yes or no on a referendum about clean water. I had a robocall from Ed Rendell, the governor I love to hate, about that yesterday. Who would vote against clean water?) But I hesitated, feeling suddenly the weight of history. I touched Judy Hirsh’s name lightly, then Joe Biden’s, and finally Barack Obama’s. I took a deep breath then, pressed all the right places, and heard the little bell ring that signaled I had completed the process.

2007: Packing — I’ve been packing for Wyoming — more accurately, I’ve been applying the Think System to packing for Wyoming — since I got back from Vermont nine weeks ago. I’m at the point now where when certain items come through the weekly laundry sessions I put them on top of my large suitcase, which is on the living room floor in front of the fireplace.

2006: Some of My Friends Are Under Rocks — “Mommy, you know so many dead people!” Lynn said once as she followed me through Charles Evans cemetery in Reading in search of the Bissinger plot. Once, on a trip to the resting place of Edgar Allen Poe on the anniversary of his death, she told a journalist, “We came to visit one of Mommy’s friends. He’s under a rock!”

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