Back Home and Gearing Up for Fall

Back in the Northwest, safely tucked away in an apartment with a view of treetops from every room in the middle of Washington wine country, which has grown from just a couple of wineries to about twenty tasting rooms crowding each other (but, unfortunately, still no grocery stores in a twenty-minute radius! What’s that about?) Our apartment office advertises things like “Goat gouda making class” and “Wine and cheese pairings” so it seems very fancy, like a little urban condo building in the middle of all these farms with shetland ponies and designer lettuce. The suburbs of Seattle are so weird. That’s what I like about them.
Yesterday, instead of spending all day unpacking like we should have, we took advantage of the slightly warmer temps (61 degrees!) and watery, cloud-ridden sunlight to go out and enjoy some of the surroundings – going to the bookstore, looking at boots (boots are the best thing about fall, along with caramel apples, although I’m not sure I should be buying more boots) and wandering around the local corn maze/pumpkin patch, where we picked out a giant pumpkin for our balcony, a tiny pumpkin and gourd for our mantle, and a 600-pound glass jar of local blackberry honey. (The Northwest still has blackberries on the vine, and some of the pumpkins were still an unripe stripey green, even this late in October.)
So, to get back to writing…I’ve had several e-mail rejections (sigh) and one acceptance – and the acceptance was for my first piece of creative non-fiction, a kind of short-story/lyric essay, so I’m excited about that. I mean, I’ve done journalism before, but this is definitely a different kind of monster, so I was nervous about sending it out.
I’ve been catching up on sleep – eighteen hours of driving with very little sleep in between, and including a trip that involved a large white cow on a five-lane highway that Glenn almost hit with the moving truck and then us getting seperated in the Oregon mountains and then me getting lost from a malfunctioning GPS in what I’d term the “Killbilly” area of Oregon, where there were only vacant motel parking lots and crack houses for miles around – meant that I need some extra rest. Kelli’s recent blog post is right – everyone is a nicer person when they have more than four hours of sleep. I’ll experiment and tell you, but I’m betting I’ll be more cogent and kind with a decent night’s rest.
There are so many poetry to-dos on the horizon, I feel like I’m going into social activity planning overdrive after being somewhat isolated out in Napa for a year. I even feel like maybe throwing a party! I haven’t made it into Open Books yet, but that is definitely on the agenda soon. Now, back to trying to find…everything that’s been stuffed into the bottom of a box somewhere…and some appropriate clothing. Somehow, when it’s fifty and raining, you can’t wear your little slip dress/strappy sandal combos anymore…it’s unearthing boots and sweaters that haven’t seen the light of day for over two years!