Brave Deeds of Derring Do**

How very strange that taking a plane trip should count as an act of courage! But these are strange times. I got back on Friday from a plane trip! I considered it a brave and daring act.

 

 

I flew to DCA to visit my daughter's family. There were so many firsts on that trips. Well, the firsts since last March anyway. On the way there, I had a three hour layover in Detroit. I ate at the Longhorn Steakhouse in the airport --another feat of bravery, and something I hadn’t done since March of 2020. It was odd seeing all the bare naked unmasked faces. It felt like we were all looking around at each other. That peach tea, loaded potato soup, and chicken Caesar salad tasted a lot better that I ever thought they could.

 

 

 

When I got there, my daughter met me and we had a big hug. Another first-for-the-year. Then the grandkids! I hadn't seen those two grandsons in over a year. I got lots of snuggles and hugs and they fed me TONS of food. I think I gained 10 pounds. I insisted they give me hugs, and snuggled were all them. We have a couple of traditions which they had not forgotten one little bit. They crawl into bed with me in the morning and the little one chatters on and on while we huddle beneath the covers.

 

 

 

The other tradition is something we call Birdies. I don’t remember exactly how it started. I think I was trying to teach the older boy about birds, and what they eat. Maybe we were on the blowup bed when we had the conversation. At any rate, the “game” is that I’m the mama birdie and they are the babies. They hatch out of their eggs and I forage in the blankets for worms for them, if we’re robins. If we’re cardinals, I have to get bugs and seeds.

 

 

I flew home on Friday, having a stressful time of almost-missed flights, but I mad it. The next day Delta started filling the empty rows and middle seats that were left vacant on my flights. It'll be a while before I attempt that again, because of that. There are no requirements to be vaccinated or even test negative to fly domestically. I’m very glad I squeaked that trip in.

 

I feel like we’re traveling out of COVID, bit by bit!

 

 

Oh yes, I did one hour of editing on the trip one afternoon.

 

** late 16th century: from late Middle English dorryng do ‘daring to do’, used by Chaucer, and, in a passage by Lydgate based on Chaucer's work, misprinted in 16th-century editions as derrynge do ; this was misinterpreted by Spenser to mean ‘manhood, chivalry’, and subsequently taken up and popularized by Sir Walter Scott.

From https://languages.oup.com/google-dictionary-en/

 

 

All images from pixabay.com

Guest Today, Laurel Peterson Around the World

I welcome Laurel Peterson here today. She's a fellow Barking Rain Press author with an unusual book (see below).

WHAT TRAVEL OFFERS US: AROUND THE WORLD IN MY HEAD
by Laurel Peterson

Thanks so much for having here, Kaye. I’m delighted to be part of your blog for the day.

A writer—too vague, I know, but I can’t remember who said it—said that one can spend a lot of money justifying one’s travel as a tax write-off. He was talking about researching his books, and I know what he means! My husband and I once spent a weekend in Atlantic City so I could research a book that was never published. On the other hand, I have written a collection of poems about art I’ve seen in Sydney, Paris, and Madrid museums that’s coming out from Futurecycle Press next year (http://www.futurecycle.org/index.php/en/).


The protagonist of my mystery novel Shadow Notes, Clara Montague, has spent fifteen years traveling around the world, looking at gardens because she is a landscape architect like her father, and because she and her mother had an (epic) argument after her father’s death. While sending her off into the world solved some narrative problems for me, it also offered an opportunity to use the places I’ve been (and the places I want to go) in my books. And no matter where I travel, I am drawn to the landscapes and the different ways in which people use their patches of earth. Starting locally, above are the rather perfect herb gardens at the Cloisters in New York City, which overlook a wide sweep of the Hudson River.

Last year, we were fortunate enough to be in France, where people garden like this:  

The window box is in Paris. The other is the cutting garden at the Chateau D’Useé or Sleeping Beauty’s castle (where supposedly the story was written) in the Loire Valley. I love the color combination in the window box, and the idea of having an entire row of calla lilies just to cut for flowers for the house? Heaven!

But travel is expensive, so I indulge my obsession by reading books about travel: I’ve just finished Robert MacFarlane’s The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot¸ although I can’t imagine Clara, a luxury hotel kind of girl if there ever was one, trudging through the wilderness and sleeping in sheep shelters. (Where’s the blow-dryer??) But MacFarlane opens up the world on an essential level, a level that makes me think about soil composition (chalk, granite, clay), snow, ice, and the paths formed by generations of walkers across the land. He suggests that “the places we inhabit shape the people we are”—rather than the other way around. Certainly, the places I’ve travelled have shaped me, hopefully making me more tolerant, curious and observant, and reminding me (and Clara) that those people are really my people.

Related to that, I think the greatest charm of travel is that it makes me other; I don’t belong so there’s a sense of disorientation, of discovery, that just around the corner I am going to see something I have never seen before—and how cool is that? If I can communicate that internal emotional journey for my readers, I think I have succeeded. And perhaps, saved myself a bundle of money, tax-write off or no.

Why do you travel? How do your travels relate to your writing—or do they? I’d love to hear from you, and thanks for reading.

www.laurelpeterson.com
Follow me on Twitter: @laurelwriter49 and on Facebook.
Shadow Notes is available on Amazon: http://barkbks.me/1TdRXOA
or from Barking Rain Press: http://barkingrainpress.org/shadow-notes

Meet Laurel and find out a bit about her new book.

SHADOW NOTES

by Laurel S. Peterson

      

Clara Montague’s mother Constance never liked—or listened—to her but now they have to get along or they will both end up dead. Clara suspects she and her mother share intuitive powers, but Constance always denied it. When Clara was twenty, she dreamed her father would have a heart attack. Constance claimed she was hysterical. Then he died.

           

Furious, Clara leaves for fifteen years, but when she dreams Constance is in danger, she returns home. Then, Constance’s therapist is murdered and Constance is arrested.

           

Starting to explore her mother’s past, Clara discovers books on trauma, and then there’s a second murder. Can Clara find the connection between the murders and her mother’s past that will save her mother and finally heal their relationship?   

Laurel S. Peterson is a Professor of English at Norwalk Community College. Her mystery novel,Shadow Notes, was released by Barking Rain Press in May 2016. In addition to writing mysteries, she has published two poetry chapbooks, That’s the Way the Music Sounds, from Finishing Line Press (2009) andTalking to the Mirror from The Last Automat Press (2010), and a full length collection, “Do You Expect Your Art to Answer You?” will be released by Futurecycle Press in 2017. In 2016 – 2017, she is serving as the town of Norwalk’s Poet Laureate. She also co-edited a collection of essays on women’s justice titled(Re)Interpretations: The Shapes of Justice in Women’s Experience (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009).

James M. Jackson's Travels

I'd like to welcome Jim Jackson to my travels today, telling about HIS recent travels. Jim and I share a publisher and have shared our manuscripts for many years, so I'm happy to give him space to tell you what's happening with him. Be sure and check the links at the end of this post! Now, here's Jim:

To promote the April 8^th publication of CABIN FEVER, I signed up for Left Coast Crime (LCC) this year. Since we are currently without pets and Jan and I have enjoyed train travel, we decided LCC was a great excuse for a train trip. 

If you don’t care about our itinerary, skip the next two paragraphs.

Briefly, our trip included six trains; we took sleepers the whole way. The first stage was overnight from Savannah to Washington, DC, arriving early in the morning. We walked all over the city and returned to Union Station in time to catch a late afternoon train to Chicago, which again arrived in the morning. Since we’d rather be outside than in, even with cool temperatures and a brisk wind, we walked down to Lake Michigan and back before catching a mid-afternoon train from Chicago through the Rockies. Two plus days later brought us to Emeryville, CA (outside San Francisco). We rented a car and drove to Monterey for LCC. After the conference we took a day afterwards for hiking in Yosemite before returning to Emeryville to start the second half of our trip.

From Emeryville we took a daylong train to Los Angeles, stayed overnight in LA and spent the following day walking around the LA Zoo. That night we boarded our train to New Orleans, which arrived two nights later. After a whole day enjoying New Orleans, we caught our last train of the trip the following morning and got off in Birmingham, where we rented a car and drove home to Savannah.

The total trip lasted fifteen days, and we thoroughly enjoyed it. One aspect of train trips I appreciate is that they take me through the back yards of these United States. Some backyards can be depressing: filled with trash, generations of rusting autos, graffiti-tagged corrugated fences, backs of derelict buildings. I remember on trips decades ago seeing vast piles of tires. Those disappeared once we understood their recycling value; perhaps we’ll find ways to recycle the rest of the junk we throw away.

Other aspects of America’s backyard are awesome (I stole that word back from my grandchildren). Some great naturalist (i.e. I can’t remember who or the exact quote) said that the only way to explore a place sufficiently well to know it, is to travel by foot. To really understand a particular locale, he’s probably correct, but to obtain an overview, trains are great. You sit higher up than when driving and don’t have to worry about traffic and such. The plains are vast, the mountains soar, the valleys burst with flowered fruit trees.

With all those beauties, where did my heart beat fastest? Watching a mountain creek or river work its way down a narrow valley. Seeing ducks or swans swimming undisturbed in a remote lake. And above all, watching a deciduous woods slip past my window bathed in the slanted daylight of the hours just after dawn or before dusk.

BIO AND LINKS:

JAMES M JACKSON authors the Seamus McCree mysteries, BAD POLICY (2013) and CABIN FEVER (April 2014). BAD POLICY won the Evan Marshall Fiction Makeover Contest whose criteria were the freshness and commerciality of the story and quality of the writing. Known as James Montgomery Jackson on his tax return and to his mother whenever she was really mad at him, Jim splits his time between the Upper Peninsula of Michigan woods and Georgia’s low country. He has also published an acclaimed book on contract bridge, ONE TRICK AT A TIME: How to start winning at bridge (Master Point Press 2012).

His website is http://jamesmjackson.com. Jim has updated purchase links to online sellers at http://jamesmjackson.com/Novels/cabin-fever.html