Ginger Snapped

...February... Agenda If you know me, you probably know my deep and abiding love for the most important holiday in February. It's a day that we anticipate year round at the Gingerbread House: "Wake up, woodchuck chuckers! It's Groundhog Day!" The gingerbread boys don't share our enthusiasm, but they will someday. How can they not? BING!  Winter has always been a very long season in the places I've lived. Not perhaps Russian-long, but long enough to suspect that there is nothing under the two feet of crusty snow but more ice. Long enough to have forgotten what sunlight feels like. Long enough to think you're bound for the same destiny as the dinosaurs. Truly there have been some years when I felt Phil Connor's words shoot like an arrow into my soul: "It's going to be cold. It's going to be grey. And it's going to last you the rest of your life." Icy slush, cold toes, leaking boots, frozen windshield wipers, runny no...

...January... Agenda Nothing yet. Hah! I love New Year's. I love the open, empty expanse of a brand-new page in life. I tend towards synesthesia, and visualize the year sort of like a ladder. December is very far from January--visually, as well as emotionally and socially. I anticipate hibernation: days spent revising in front of the fire, lemon-poppy seed muffins just out of the oven, a pot of herbal tea at my side, snow falling. It's nice that I live in a fictional world, isn't it? More than likely, I'll be pulling my hair out about  a scene, scarfing leftover Christmas chocolates, drinking day-old bottled water, and pulling a wool blanket tight around my shoulders because I'm freezing. However, hope springs eternal. Maybe there really will be lemon-poppy seed muffins. Back An ice pack. A year ago, I sprained my sacroiliac joint after a weekend of thinking I was invincible: running a 5K, shimmying up a rock wall, heaving 50 lb bags of grain over my shoulde...

...september... ...Agenda: Septemberfest (in which I annually face my fear of heights and climb the rock wall), Country Fair (snapping photos of the gingerbread boys participating in the blueberry pie eating contest, the sack race, and the tractor pull), end of our CSA  (good-bye my weekly five pounds of tomatoes), picking and canning peaches, and the third annual Quirk and Quill writers' retreat ...Nightstand:  An odd assortment.  Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain; Doll Bones; The True-Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp; The Suitors of Yvonne; Very Good, Jeeves; I Am the Cheese ...Stovetop:  Apple sauce and apple butter. Quarts and quarts of it. ...Catalog of Fears:  Dying chickens, spiders, saying the wrong thing, missed flights ...Desk:  Novel #3, CATHEDRAL. Revisions, revisions, revisions. ...Mind:  Memory loss, brain connectivity, creativity, winterizing the chicken coop I look forward to September with all the energy a mother wit...