And we walked off to look for America…

Back from the Midwestern tour of Akron, Cincinnati, and Fredonia, New York…which was great but exhausting and now I am ready to go back to my little quiet life of dodging the Pacific Northwest’s October rain, reading and writing most of the time, getting back to the business of another move (this November) and trying fitfully to send out some poems and my two book manuscripts. I’m completely ready to just sleep for days and days. We came home from our two-week trip to a dead car battery (note to self: disconnect battery when letting it sit for two weeks) and only one rejection slip, which isn’t too bad, considering.
It was wonderful getting to spend time with Mary and Aimee, in person, and meeting their students (consistently impressive, these students, wherever I go! We are raising a generation of superpoets in the universities!) And Aimee will be out here in Seattle at Open Books to read with Oliver de la Paz in another week, on the night of the 25th, so that should be fun as well. I recommend checking out that reading!
I also got to meet the lovely and talented Karen Weyant, who just joined the blogging world.
Got to spend some time with my whole family, including all three of my brothers, my in-laws, including my brother-in-law and his new wife, which was kind of like a mini Thanksgiving/Christmas holiday. My family sort of resembles Salinger’s Glass family, strenuous and eccentric and interesting (ultrasound technologist cowboys! Shao-lin-do fourth-level black belt computer programmers! robot scientists!)
Was disappointed that nowhere on the trip did I get to see anything but green leaves – I was hoping for autumnal hues, at least in New York State! We had a whole week of 90-degree weather before the last few days of mid-sixties, appropriate October weather. But my consolation was that I came home to Seattle to see the leaves turning golden and red, at least between the abundant evergreens. The last of the dahlias are blooming, and the pumpkin patches were crowded yesterday. Drank hot cider and ate a piece of delicious grilled salmon (oh salmon, I missed you!) and cut open one of those best of apples, the Honeycrisp (the team inventing this apple at U of Minnesota got some award because they were able to design an apple with cells twice as big as normal, hence, the crispness.) Thankful to be home. As a Taurus, I’m a bit of a routine-junkie, feel best when I wake up in my own bed, thankful for my husband’s wonderful cooking, our neighborhood farmer’s markets, my cats curled up around me while I type. If only Seattle weren’t so very far from…every other city in America.