What Makes You Happy (September Edition) and Submission Season Returns (with Wildfire Smoke)

Two poets and their husbands in a field of zinnias, Woodinville (Rose, Kelli, Glenn, and me)

What Makes You Happy (September Edition)

September can be a bittersweet month here in the Northwest. Perfect clear, cool blue skies are sometimes followed with (like today) an orange sky thick with wildfire smoke. You take time to get together with friends at a flower farm, even though you are worried about friends and family with biopsies waiting, new covid infections, and of course, you might also be worried about the state of the world.

I read an interesting article and interview about a book by a former Google data scientist (the Master’s degree my husband is getting from Pepperdine is in data science) that discussed what really makes people happy. I was shocked, and also not shocked, by some of the facts. Spending time with people you love, your significant other, friends—that makes you happy. Also on the list: gardening, fishing, listening to music. A lot of that stuff is free.

Glenn and I at Matthew’s Winery garden

However, also interesting to note, the happiest income starts at $75K a year and perfects itself at, by this data scientist’s estimate, 8 million dollars, a sum that is pretty far from most of our stretch goals for income. The things that make you least happy also won’t surprise you: work, especially with people you don’t like, commuting, social media. The most happy we’ll be is doing something we love with people we love, most often by a large body of water on a sunny warm day. Makes sense!

So, one of the things I’ve started prioritizing above, yes, even my writing work and things like dental and medical work (which take up a surprising amount of the life of any sick person, and definitely cost a lot AND don’t make you happy) is: spending time with people I love doing things I love. This week I took Glenn around Woodinville one cool sunny day to Molbak’s to check out the fall gardening stuff (and brought home flowers to plant) and a winery to see how its pandemic garden was doing (terrific!). A great way to spend an afternoon getting into the fall spirit.

I also had a good poet friend, Kelli Russell Agodon, and her husband Rose, over this week to celebrate her book being a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, and after champagne and cupcakes and a cheese and fruit plate, took the whole group over to my local lavender and flower farm, which closes tomorrow for the year. Sunflowers were still up, as were zinnias and dahlias. Mt Rainier was shining, and charms of goldfinches, red finches, and red-winged blackbirds soared over our heads as we stood among flowers and listened to the hum of the very happy bees. All of us stood in wonder at the mountain, the sun, the flowers and birds, just awestruck by the beauty of it. That flower farm was definitely one of my “happy places,” and I realized it isn’t just me—everyone I took to visit it was charmed by the return to nature, the smell of lavender in the air, the simple act of walking among sunflower fields. I will be so excited when it returns next year, with even bigger lavender plants!

Full Moon with orange wildfire smoke haze

Submission Season Returns (with Wildfire Smoke)

Alas, every day could not be as perfect as that one – the next day after our visit a strange orange haze settled over us, the full moon shining spookily overhead. Some of my poet friends in WA and OR were evacuated today as wildfires sort of ringed the Seattle and Portland areas. It was also almost 90 today, on top of dangerous particulate levels (above 150) so—I was consigned to the indoors, with Glenn going to get the mail and do errands in a KN95 mask—sure, for covid, but also, for evil smoke.

On the positive side of being cooped up for two days, I got to watch the new Ring of Power series (beautiful production), the new Thor movie (silly at the beginning with a lot of laughs and screaming goats, sentimental and sad at the end?) and get a bunch of submissions in as the literary magazine submission season starts up again for the school year. So many places are closed for the summer, and I’ve been less motivated lately than I should have been, so it was good for a bunch of us to give ourselves the goal of doing a submission a day during September.

Scrub jay in Flower Box

One of the other benefits of getting together with writer friends (besides the overall happiness thing re: above) is that you can discuss your worries (in my case, author photos, promotion, cover art) and it really helps your anxiety. So not only do friends help with the happiness levels, but they can help you feel more normal and less stressed about things like your upcoming book. And you can discuss grants, which literary magazines are open for subs, and congratulate each other for your wins and console each other over your losses.

When Martha came over last week, she left me a few literary magazines to look through, and Kelli brought me Denise Duhamel’s new book, which I’m looking forward to reading, along with Jenn Givhan’s newest, Belly to the Brutal. So, I do have a bunch of good reading material while I’m cooped up, along with looking forward to the upcoming new Woodinville book club at J. Bookwalter’s starting Wednesday with a discussion of Barbara Bourland’s Fake Like Me. I’ll have to give my report on that event next week! Hopefully I’ll be a good book club host, and this will help build more literary community in Woodinville and on the Eastside in general.

Mt Rainier with flower field in Woodinville

I’ll leave you with this last picture of Mt Rainier with a field of zinnias, dahlias, and sunflowers to remind you (and myself) how beautiful the Pacific Northwest can be (especially when we’re not having wildfires.)

*All flower fields pictured (except for the Matthew’s winery garden shot and my back deck) are from the J.B. Family Grower’s Lavender and Flower Farm in Woodinville, closing this Sunday for the season. They will be opening a sunflower and corn maze with their pumpkin farm in a few weeks in another location in Woodinville, so we can look forward to seeing that.