Barbara Samuel's Blog: A Writer Afoot, page 2

January Reads

One of my friends (Marie, looking at you) keeps a book log every year. I used to keep one all the time and I’m going to keep track this year. I don’t promise to make long commentary about all of them, but will add a word or two about each one so you can tell […]

Winter Light

Birches in Winter by Mayfield Parrish, from Flickr Creative Commons. One of my goals as I get back to blogging is to celebrate beauty in as many forms as I can. Books, food, animals, writing, love. And paintings. This one is by Mayfield Parrish. He’s a favorite of mine because of the way he used light […]

Rave Review

This kind of review is why writers stick with it. Thanks, Puppitypup. from Amazon 5.0 out of 5 starsFiction/Romance – So Much Deeper than I Expected By puppitypup The Lost Recipe for Happiness. I was blown away by this novel. Somehow I was expecting lighthearted, chick-lit fluff. What I got was story that broke my […]

Flexibility and Growth as an Artist

I am a fan of Gretchen Rubin, whose books on happiness and habits offer a lot of insight into how we can live the best life for ourselves. (She doesn’t get the Rebel personality, but I forgive her for that.) This morning, her Facebook post let me to this blog: The Dangers of Typecasting As […]

On The Goddess Blogs today….

I am in bliss. On every black tarred pavement in every shopping center across the southwest, vendors have set up their chile roasters and spend the day roasting long green chiles for stray motorists who buy them by the bushel to take home and freeze for the long cold winter ahead.  There is nothing I love to smell more than chiles roasting on a summer day. I am a chile fanatic, and this summer I’ve been experimenting with the most dazzling little chile pepper. I must tell you about him, darling creature.  But first–

Everyone has their regional foods, and here in the southwest, we have Mexican food.  Everyone has their opinions on Mexican food, right? These days, everybody eats burritos and tacos.  They have corn tortillas in the supermarkets in the midwest and Maine.

But in the west, we are aware that “Mexican food” is not just one thing.  KEEP READING >>>>>

All Is Well, even if it doesn’t seem like it

It has been a traumatic period in the history of my city.

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A photo I took the Friday before last at the Arcade.

Last Friday night, I watched the water pour through Manitou Springs, over the sidewalks and bridges, through the streets, through a café I love. The water is black and thick with debris and it’s wrecking things.  Things I love.  Things that feel like they define me.

Last summer it was Waldo Canyon. I know there was a lot of coverage of the loss of homes, and that was deeply tragic. But my loss was the hiking trail there. I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately. There was a meadow by the creek where the trails diverged at the circle point. People camped there, though I never did. I would have been too afraid of bears wandering about to get the raspberries that grew thick along the ravine.

I hiked there, though, more times than I can count.  I walked with my friend Renate, a charming German who made me laugh, and Chrysauna, a young teacher with ice blue eyes.  Once, my friend Heather and I had to take the last of the hike at a .10 of a mile an hour pace to let an old dog rest. His paws had grown raw over the hike and he was too big too carry.

Mostly, I remember early mornings in high summer, with hot blue skies and a group of cheerful companions in good boots parking their cars at the lot and tromping up the stairs to the trail, laughing and joking and feeling good about ourselves because we were going to hike.

I loved that trail.  The raspberry bushes, and the place where we stopped behind a bunch of boulders to pee, deep in the shade of Ponderosas.  The switchbacks up the long steep stretch about a third of the way through, and the spot were we always, always stopped to admire Pikes Peak in full revealed glory, one of the best views in the county.  I loved the high view of the city, hazy in the distance, and the spot where we stopped sometimes to eat a snack, on a long log that had fallen sometime ago.  Once, Chrysauna and I got lost and ended up in Crystola, and had to call Christopher Robin to come get us.

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There is some part of me that kept thinking, quite irrationally, that if I had a cheerful attitude that somehow the trail would be restored.  That somehow, some miracle would happen and—It has come home to me lately that I will never hike there again. It is gone. It only exists now in my imagination. It was burned to nothing in that big fire. We are not allowed to go there, and even if we were, I would not know it.This is not easy for me. I know it is not like losing house.  But it’s a pretty gigantic loss to me. It’s personal.

The Friday before last, I was restless from working too many hours and I texted a friend to see if she wanted to go to Adam’s Mountain Café with me. We sat on the patio by the creek and watched the creek rush by in its stony channel and ate grilled watermelon salad and a Small Planet burger and even indulged desert. Afterwards, we ambled through the arcade and I stopped to have my ritual sip of water from the ever-flowing fountain.

I have been wandering over to Manitou since I was a small child. It tugs me to its bosom when I am tired or confused or lost, allows me to dance on its streets when I’m celebrating.  It holds my life like a prism, showing now the the wild me, the young me, the weary me, the Colorado native me.  Every time I walk through that arcade, I am five again, with my father’s hand in mine, and I am looking down at the creek visible between the boards beneath my feet. I am sure I could fall through.  My father assures me I will not.

I never have.

The Friday before last with my friend, I resisted buying salt water taffy from Patty’s, and instead bought a copper bracelet to see if it would heal my wrist. I shot Instagram photos of the old-timey signs. I thought, with gratitude, of how much I love the place. The hot sun burning my head. The arcade, the restaurant, the twisting streets.  The hippies, the homeless kids, the tourists, the old timers with their grizzled long hair, the dogs.

Last Friday afternoon, an inch of rain fell on the Waldo Canyon burn scar.  In a half hour, the water came roaring down the canyon, washing over a highway, sweeping cars ahead of its raging force.  Houses were torn off their foundations, 40 cars were swept away. One man died, a woman is still missing. It’s chaotic.

This has all happened before, the fires and the floods.  It will happen again. All of it.  I understand—intellectually—that it’s a normal, natural process.  Emotionally, I feel grief and exhaustion.  Emotionally, I wonder what can really possibly be done to really stop the floods from destroying Manitou. That might seem unnecessarily negative, but those bold facts stand there, staring.  The burn scar is naked and enormous.  There are three canyons that feed into the town. There is no place for the water to go.

Eventually, maybe levees will be built. Eventually, there will be even more ideas that are better than that.  In the meantime, every time there are thunderstorms over the scar, we are collectively looking at Manitou.

When the fires licked so close to the skirts of the town, I chanted under my breath, please not Manitou, please not Manitou, please not Manitou.  And it was spared.  What does not seem plain is how it will fare under this new threat.

The good news is, we are toward the end of the summer.  The monsoons will slow.  And we have all learned, in our beautiful city, that life is more precious than we realized. Things can change in an instant, when a spark ignites a forest. When a rainstorm arrives, as always, on a summer afternoon.

That’s the thing. Life is always random. We just pretend that it is not. Fire brings it home. Floods remind us. But it’s always like this.  Ultimately, life is dangerous and unpredictable.

It is also so unbearably perfect.  I am lucky enough to have the shady, fragrant trails of the Waldo Canyon trail in my mind, living and breathing in my imagination. As long as I live, it will live with me.  Manitou, as it is right now and perhaps always will be, also lives.

Once again, I remember: be here now. What we have is today.  This moment. In my world it is sunny and summer, cool enough with a breeze coming in through the window that I thought about putting on sleeves.  My old cat is sleeping her box.  A big fly is in the window. Clothes are washing.

Be here now.  What is your here and now?

A dog, a ball, and a lake

Over at REINVENTING FABULOUS today….

My brother had a dog named Loki, a black springer spaniel mutt, who loved the water and loved chasing balls. If you combined the two, say a lake and a ball, he would chase that baby for hours.  Hours.  Until his legs were shaking. Until the sun was setting. Until my brother had to leash him to make him stop.

That’s what exercise should feel like.  Believe it or not, there is an exercise out there that will feel that good to you. Our bodies were designed to move and every single one of us has something that will feel like that spaniel and the ball in the lake

As I’ve said before, I was the anti-PE girl.  And I’m still so uncoordinated that I wouldn’t dare pick up a tennis racket or try to throw a baseball. But this afternoon, I headed out to the garden.  I kept thinking I should go swimming because I’ve been doing it a lot and my massage therapist said that my back looks great, and many of us are headed out to the national RWA conference next week, so I wanted something to keep looking good. Calves and back, that’s what I’ve got. (And forearms, baby. Let me flex my forearms for you sometime. Please?) Everything else is showing its age.

What I did instead of swim was drift out to the garden.  READ MORE  >>>>>

The True Story of Mattie Groves

A Lunch Hour Love Story by Barbara Samuel.

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ALL NEW!  A haunting and romantic novella to read on your lunch hour, or in the car pool line, or while you’re waiting for swim practice to end…..

A ROMANTIC BALLAD….A HAUNTING MEMORY….

When Rose Lennox arrives in a medieval village in Scotland to help authenticate the grisly find of two lovers in a grave, she is both drawn and repelled by builder Robert Ayer. Big and brooding, darkly handsome, both hostile and hungry, Robert seems to call forth something in Rose that she never knew existed.

As the mystery surrounding the find deepens and Rose falls more and more under the spell of the village, it becomes urgent to discover the truth.  Did Rose love Robert in another life? Did he love her….or kill her?

Order now!  

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Fare thee well, James

I’m trying to remember to post when I have blogs elsewhere, which is quite a lot more than it is here these days.  (The Goddess Blogs, Writer Unboxed, Reinventing Fabulous)….

By now you’ve all heard the news about actor James Gandolfini, who died of an apparent heart attack in Rome.  Weirdly fitting that he was on his way to Sicily.

I don’t get much into celebrity watching, the lives and deaths and weddings and babies of famous folk, but I am quite sad about the passing of Gandolfini.  There was something real and true and clean about him, a deep understanding of the vulnerability of the human condition that made his acting one of the best things we’ve ever seen. Continue reading at The Goddess Blogs

Possibilities

I haven’t had enough artist’s dates recently.  Every time I imagine taking the afternoon off to enjoy something–a friend, a meander through a bookstore, a movie–I start fretting about what I’ll have to give up to get that. Work or exercise mainly.  I won’t give up the afternoons with Amara, which are artist’s dates in many ways, and there is a garden to put in now that the ground is warming.  Gardening can be an artist’s date, of course, especially a little later in the season when I’m buried in flowers and emerging vegetables.

Hilary, the wild-mind, tattooed bad girl who does most of the heavy lifting, has been rebelling as a result of this neglect. I realized it over the weekend and made a resolve to do more for her–let her direct us to shoot photos in the morning before we start writing, arrange some flowers, spend an afternoon a week out doing something like wandering the shops on the westside or having tapas with a friend or…whatever.

Yesterday, I went to Pueblo to see my parents.  It’s been way, way, way too long since I’ve seen them–another example of my neglect of the rest of my life–and we went to lunch on the Riverwalk (actually, we ate at Angelos, which is the site of a pinnacle scene in The Garden of Happy Endings), then meandered back to the car along Union Avenue.  There is a massive and wonderful antique shop there.  We stopped.  All of us look at different things, though at first my mother and I look at each other’s stuff, then we wander into our own worlds.  I never know what will catch my eye, if anything.  I’m pretty ruthless about bringing too much stuff into my house.

Almost as soon as I walked in yesterday, this caught my eye.

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A window. The screen is still intact, and despite the worn look of the paint, it’s quite solid, $25, with 20% off, making it $20. I was smitten, but forced myself to walk away until I’d gone through the whole place.  When I circled back, I still wanted it, my mind offering possibilities–it could be a mini greenhouse. I could put a light inside and photos on the windows and hang it in my dark basement.  It could form the structure for a collage.  It could even be a backdrop for photos, studio-like, if I set it up right.

Whatever. I thought about whether it would even fit in my Mini, especially since my mom was riding in the backseat. Maybe not–but I could always have my father bring it to me.  I just knew that it would be one of those things I’d think about later, wishing I’d given myself permission to play.  Check out the chain.

So I paid a whopping $20. It fit just fine in the back of the Mini, especially once I dropped my parents off and could put the seats down.

And I’ve been happy about it ever since.  I might paint it a very light aqua and cream or just clean it up and distress it.  Or put shelves in.  Whatever. Hilary is happy and occupied, playing with ideas and possibilities. Giving her this little present is exactly what she deserves.

Oh, I also bought some charming little bottles for flower vases, but wordpress is not letting me post a photo.  Who knows why.

A great artist’s date–and I spent time with my parents, too!