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I just looked at the weather cam in Lanesville and it looks like the waves are kicking up. There re rain drops splattering the lens and it says the wind has gusted to forty-three miles per hour. Storms’s a’coming, it seems.

I have been sequestered here in my office all weekend working on Each Angel Burns. I want to get it off to press in the next month and it seems like time is pressing in. It gets like that sometimes — I don’t understand it but there are times when it seems there is just not enough time for all the things that need doing — work, favors for friends, writing, more work, writing down patterns, books, cleaning, a mountain of sewing waiting for me. There just aren’t enough hours in the day.

And, as so often happens when I am deep into writing, there is this strange assault of emotions that seems to gang up on me and pummel me into emotional mincemeat. I know it sounds crazy — at least to anyone who isn’t a fiction writer — but I think my characters take me over sometimes, or try to and they can get to be tough to deal with. The part of the book I am working on right now involves a January snowstorm in Maine, a thing I remember only too well, and two people who are suspecting they may be in love and yet there is all this trouble going on — it gets complicated.

There’s something that happens when storms are getting ready to break. There’s this sort of excitement in the air. Right now the birds in the cemetery are chirping away. My grandmother always said “the birdies are singing for rain”. She claimed that they sang differently when rain was coming. I don’t know if that is true. Right now the wind is blowing the leaves in the trees — possibly my favorite sound in all the world — and the birds are singing and off in the distance a fog horn has begun. I have the radio on and a radio station from California is broadcasting the full version of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. It is a good time to write.

This past week has been unusually sad. Partly it is because it is infused with the memories of a year ago when everything in my life changed. And partly because I have been talking to Sharon whose life has also changed dramatically. She told me yesterday that she spoke with David’s cardiologist and he told her that there is nothing immediately apparent to indicate why he died. They have performed the autopsy but the results won’t be ready for months. In the meantime Sharon is trying valiantly to just get through each day. We talk and we share. My heart breaks as much for her loss as for my own. Here’s the simple truth — it never gets easier. You can go for longer periods without thinking about it, but when you do it’s just as hard.

Strange things fascinate. I’m not a television watcher and, while some of my friends got caught up in the whole Susan Boyle-mania that gripped talent show lovers for awhile, I wasn’t particularly interested one way or the other until…. I watched the YouTube videos and I saw this one:

Words fail me. I can’t imagine anything more beautiful. I don’t know how he made out but, oh my God, he takes my breath away.

So a storm is rolling in and the birds are singing and my book is coming along and there is a performer like Julian Smith in the world who can make your heart break…… and sometimes that’s just what life needs.

Thanks for reading.

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