I also saw four white egrets – a bird I thought I had left behind in California, but that I was happy to see this far north – a tree with wild turkeys on all its branches – and I had my first ever experience with someone stealing gas out of my car. (Forest Grove is, besides being a cute little college town, a huge meth center full of tweakers. I remember walking past a police shootout at a meth bust one time on the way to class some seven or eight years ago.)

And now, for Kelli’s big news. Her second book, Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room, which I had the pleasure of reading when it was still in manuscript form, has just won the Foreward Magazine Gold Book of the Year Award. Go over to Facebook or her blog and congratulate her!