It’s September! New school year! New shoes, after a hot barefoot summer! New outfit, for the first day of school! And then––new classes! New subjects, new teachers, new tools! New friends! New lockers, new classrooms, new hallways…. New season—new teammates, new coach, new plays.
Remember all that? Your first day back at school? Back to college, back to university? Do you remember the excitement, the nervousness, the anticipation?
September 1 was Labor Day. And now there will be apples, apple pie and apple crisp. There will be chrysanthemums, spilling out of baskets. Even in central Texas, leaves will change color—as Maxwell Anderson’s lyrics have it, “When the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame.” Here in the Hill Country, sumac and Spanish oak turn red, sweet gum turns yellow. No, not the glory of the maples, but a change in the landscape. Because finally, after the dog days of summer, that’s what September brings: something new.
It’s time to pull up the tired summer flowers and thank them for their service. Time to dig some holes and plant new trees, and order some bulbs. I’ll be planting the Mexican plum seedlings a friend gave me, and ordering narcissus bulbs for indoor blooming.
Then the Hill Country brings its own fall excitement. Dove season began September 1 and a down-the-road neighbor, disturbed by shotgun pellets clattering onto her roof, had to call the sheriff, and have officers explain to a clueless (thoughtless? lawless?) neighbor that it’s contrary to law to allow your ammunition to cross your own fence line. Also unneighborly. But hmm, that could find its way into a future book plot….
Our Hill Country holds surprises. One is the way water hides in the Hill Country—down in secret seeps and creeks, around curves and hollows. And what odd creatures live out here! For example, this fall we’ve seen again the rare and secretive rock squirrel. (We’ve seen a solitary rock squirrel only once every few years.) We’ve heard the great horned owls that call at night, up and down the creek, and the herons who call, flying down the valley. The buzzards drone, annoyingly, from the tops of telephone poles. We treasure glimpses of the shy, gorgeous painted buntings who appear briefly at the bird feeder, then flit away. Porcupines visit. Roadrunners dart across the road.
And the dog days are over. (This year they were July 3-11, and these hot sultry days have borne their name from ancient times ostensibly because it’s when Sirius, the Dog Star that accompanies Orion, rises with the sun.) https://www.almanac.com/content/what-are-dog-days-summer
But during the dog days I took refuge at night, binge-reading two mystery series that were new to me, by British author Peter Grainger: the DC Smith Investigation series and the Kings Lake Investigation. http://bit.ly/4gmPsad
These wry British procedurals are set on the coast of Norfolk, providing a cool and rainy ocean-side backdrop for the appealing characters. At least I could read about rain and cool breezes. But the books offered not only a respite from ridiculous heat, but a welcome respite from writing. I’ve been in the last weeks of finishing Ghost Justice—Book 10 in my Alice MacDonald Mystery Series, set here in the Texas Hill Country. For me that process includes waking in the wee hours with my mind on plot additions and subtractions, dialogue, characters. For such moments—when the characters wake me up at night voicing their further demands (yes, they seem to come to life and require conversation and attention)––I find mysteries provide absorbing distraction.
Helen Currie Foster lives and writes the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series north of Dripping Springs, Texas, loosely supervised by three burros. She’s drawn to the compelling landscape and quirky characters of the Texas Hill Country. She’s also deeply curious about our human history and how, uninvited, the past keeps crashing th eparty. Follow her at http://www.helencurriefoster.com.
Listening, I can just see, just feel, that “old blue shirt” that “suits him just fine.” I can imagine the old boots that let him “work all day” and then go “dance all night.” And of course that friend who “always shows up when the chips are down”––I’m thinking, my bestie. Just hearing about the shirt, the boots, the friend always leaves me with the same settled, restful confidence he’s describing. “Stuff that works!”
“Brown paper packages tied up with string” may have undeniable charm, “stuff that works” means stuff I turn to, go back to, and rely on. Like old travel pants with pockets that zip, soft shirts without a scratchy label, shoes that just carry me along, soles not too thick or thin.
What about you? Things that keep working, that stand the test of time? The pens that always work, the ink you like, the just-right-feel in your hand as you write? The car that always starts, the recipe you can count on?
Part of the charm of “stuff that works” is reliability – working each and every time.
Time, that deep human preoccupation! Is time reliable? Time messes with us. Time stands still. Time passes. Time flies. Time heals. Time runs out. Time grows short. The time changes…and times change. “Time, like an ever-flowing stream…” Sometimes an hour feels interminable; sometimes an hour passes in a flash. Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity says that even in the universe, time is not constant, but is influenced by gravity. Yikes! (says the English major).
Writers struggle to analyze time’s impact on us. Just a couple of examples––Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time; Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory;Virginia Woolf, particularly the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse. Historians try to make sense of the impact of events over time, like Drew Gilpin Faust in This Republic of Suffering, on death and the Civil War.
Poets remind us of their mortality—and hence our own. Here’s Robert Frost, in Ten Mills, Part II, THE SPAN OF LIFE, from A Further Range (Henry Holt and Company, 1936):
The old dog barks backward without getting up.
I can remember when he was a pup.
Or Billy Collins at the beginning of “Life Expectancy” in Whale Day (2020):
On the morning of a birthday that ended in a zero,
I was looking out at the garden
When it occurred to me that the robin
On her worm-hunt in the dewy grass
Had a good chance of outliving me….
T.S. Eliot begins East Coker : “In my beginning is my end,” then:
…there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
Ad to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.
Sebastian Junger reflects on near-death experiences, including his own: In My Time of Dying (2024).
Of course animals can be aware of time. Right? The three donkeys– Sebastian, Amanda, and Caroline ––appear promptly at the gate in front of the house at 11:30 a.m., and again at 4:30 p.m., which, they are confident, are the hours when carrots ought to be offered. We know animals can mourn the loss of a member of their pod, their herd, their litter. But do they worry about their own mortality? Do our friends the non-human primates? Well, maybe! Um, time will tell! https://bit.ly/4mZqi4k
To be human is to be aware of our own mortality. And for humans, time is both reliable—tick, tock—and unreliable: we cannot know what the future holds. Fiction writers, however, get to make those decisions for their characters. In the mystery genre, we get to decide: who shall live? Who shall die? How, and why?
I’ve wrestled with these questions in my Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery Series: what happens next?Should I not have killed a particular character? Should a new character survive and reappear in the next book? It’s a heavy responsibility! We readers can become quite attached to characters. In the last few weeks, finishing Book 10, I took refuge in Laurie King’s Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series. She created a character I found particularly appealing in The God of the Hive. https://bit.ly/449Lugn
But then? The book made me revisit the pain of losing a beloved character to—well, literary death. Remember Gus in Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove? I still miss Gus… Gus, don’t ride over that hill!
In addition to night-time plunges into Laurie King land, I found banging on the piano a helpful respite from the writing process. But after two broken wrists in the past two years (careless, careless) I’d had to quit the beloved boogie woogie lessons and feared I’d never be able to play those strenuous pieces again.
My brother the physician, when asked by his siblings for advice, often prescribes “a little tincture of time.” It’s amazing how often that prescription works. This past week, after (really quite a lot of) tincture of time, I persuaded our century-old piano once again to play boogie-woogie pieces from the 1942 All Star Boogie Woogie Piano Solos! Pete Johnson, Meade “Lux” Lewis, Pine Top Smith, Hersal Thomas, Albert Ammons. Suddenly—how long is “a little tincture of time”?––finger memory began to return. Not all the way back yet, but still! Maybe I’ll get to resume piano lessons with that Austin treasure of jazz, boogie, country and everything else, Floyd Domino.
Charles Darwin was not known to rush into print. In 1837 in Edinburgh he presented his first paper concerning the action of worms “on the formation of mould,” a topic he studied for over forty years. Not until 1881, after two scientists pooh-poohed his theories, during the Great British Agricultural Depression (1873-1896) he published The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms on the work of earthworms. Curious about their senses, their awarenesss, their work, he studied how worms could tug leaves into their burrows, eat and digest them, and then produce worm casts—millions of tons of richer soil. His query as to whether earthworms were sensitive to light “led me to watch on many successive nights worms kept in pots, which were protected from currents of air by means of glass plates.” His summary after all those years? Darwin doubts “whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world” as earthworms. Producing stuff that works…!
For so many of us, books are the “stuff that works.” Hurrah for reading!
Award-winning author Helen Currie Foster lives and writes the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series north of Dripping Springs, Texas, loosely supervised by the three burros. She’s drawn to the compelling landscape and quirky characters of the Texas Hill Country. She remains deeply curious about our human history and how, uninvited, the past keeps crashing our party. Follow her at http://www.helencurriefoster.com and on Amazon, and find the books at Austin’s BookPeople!
Not enough rain fell this year to allow the brilliant cerulean fields of Hill Country bluebonnets we usually expect, but the hardy lupines are busy making seedpods. “Maybe next year,” they say. Now instead we have the bright yellow coreopsis lanceolata, nodding their heads with any breeze,
the wine-cups with their indescribable color—a member of the mallow family, not quite fuchsia, not maroon, just—heart-stopping,
the milkweed flower globes beloved of monarch butter-flies, and others. Heaven includes a few prairie celestials, magically opening in early in the afternoon, then vanishing by dusk.
Also, “Sweet Mademoiselle,” planted a couple of years ago, and who has never bloomed, produced her first rose!
Meanwhile, the ever-interloping cactus hope to assuage my fury at them (remember those secretly spreading roots and the huge basal “plates” that help the Cactus Conspiracy spread?) by popping open their yellow flowers. I am not fooled. I’ll continue to battle them with shovel and hoe. And a picker-upper.
See? Perfectly possible. It’s still wild out here in the Hill Country, even as suburbs press upon us. At dusk I often find myself glancing at the edge of the drop-off behind the house, wondering if I’ll see a pair of ears. You can say mountain lion, puma, cougar…they’re secretive, strong, and active in the spring.
But the big cat I once saw on Bell Springs Road west of here was likely a large bobcat. I was alone, driving home from the post office. Up ahead a golden vision, spotted, walked slowly to the edge of the asphalt. I stopped. The cat stood, gazed at me, and after a breathless (for me) interval, gracefully turned and vanished through a fence into thick cedar. A magical moment. Every time I drive that road, I hold my breath, longing for one more sighting of something looking like this:
ANCIENT BONES? I wrote about old bones in my Ghost Bones (2024)—and now have learned that our Hays County police deal with ancient bones more often than you’d think. One resident recently called to report she’d found a skull in her firepit. The skull, with its lower jaw present, was obviously fairly old, but in an unexplained death Hays County is not permitted to send a body to the Travis County Medical Examiner without including the name of the person whose skull it is. (Hays County doesn’t have its own medical examiner.) So this skull traveled instead to Texas State anthropologists who reported, after testing, that the skull apparently belonged to a long, long-ago teenager who’d gone through hard times, as was evident from the “enamel lines” (a bit like tree rings) in the teeth.
But how it wound up in that firepit? So far as I know, that’s still a mystery. We forget—until reminded by a skull in a firepit—how long humans have roamed these hills, drawn by hunger and thirst to spring water and the hunt for food.
We also forget the age and history of this landscape. Some trees have sheltered native Americans, deer, and buffalo. The Columbus Live Oak near the Colorado River in Columbus is estimated to be over 500 years old. Others may be as old as 1,000 years.
I revere the live oak in our front yard as if it were a beloved ancient relative and a symbol of stability and the power of trees. If anything were to happen to it—woe! I tried to estimate its age—using the calculator instruction to measure girth in inches at 4.5 feet, divide by pi, then multiply by a “growth factor” of 4, which gave me 127 years old. Perhaps this tree was a sapling in 1900, before either World War, before the Viet Nam war, before our current fraught politics. On a nearby hill there’s an ancient patch of even bigger live oaks. Perhaps those particular oaks depend on the odd little ribbon of wet white clay that lies about five feet underground and has been there—who knows how long. But the feeling of walking in beneath these old live oaks can confer a sense of being in the protection of one’s elders.
So, welcome to the Hill Country in spring—southeasterly winds from the Gulf, blowing the flowers back and forth; reasonably moderate temperatures; fields and trees as green as green, as far as you can see. At the bird feeder, more color! Purple house finch, yellow-throated vireo, lesser goldfinch with brilliant gold breasts, vermilion cardinals, black-crested titmouse, white-winged dove—and the shy and tiny, but utterly gorgeous, painted bunting. (Reportedly it loves millet.) They provide not just color but music, from the titmouse, the tiny but high-volume Carolina wren, plaintive doves, whistling cardinals, and, at night, chuck-will’s-widow.
Not for long, of course. In winter ice can wreak havoc on trees and people. Summer sun? Scorching. Autumn? Nothing like the colors of New England, but hey—the sumac turns red. So welcome, Spring, with your bluebonnets and live oaks, with bird music and color, and with your reminder of the power and beauty of nature!
***
Progress report: madly working on Book 10 of the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series, set in the Hill Country. Have ordered “Forest Bathing” by Dr. Qing Li. Would enjoy hearing what you all are reading too, and any reports of “forest bathing”!
Helen Currie Foster lives and writes the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series north of Dripping Springs, Texas, loosely supervised by three burros. She’s drawn to the compelling landscape and quirky characters of the Texas Hill Country. She remains deeply curious about our human history and how, uninvited, the past keeps crashing the party.
The mystery is solved! In my search for what I recalled as “the “Blitzkuchen” once served at Schwamkrug’s outside New Braunfels, in the Texas Hill Country, I had the name wrong. It’s a blitz torte, not a blitz kuchen! Several readers sent recipes from German cookbooks indicating that “Blitzkuchen” is a quick cake, usually one layer only. My memory, though? A tall two-layer confection, baked with meringue and almond flakes on top and between the layers! And in my memory, more meringue on the outside, plus some moistness in the filling.
Online I found Oma Gerhild’s “Oma’s Blitz Torte Recipe ––Lightning Cake.” https://www.quick-german-recipes.com/german-blitz-torte-recipe.html Each almond-flavored layer is baked with meringue and sliced almonds on top of the batter. The recipe offers either custard filling or whipped cream filling. I opted to finish off with whipped cream with powdered sugar and vanilla, not just inside, but around the cake (and in blobs all around the kitchen).
FINALLY! First, that lovely almond taste. Plus, everyone at the table now wore an attractive little white mustache of whipped cream. You don’t get that with a madeleine and a cup of tea, do you, M. Proust?
As October runs into November, Texas Hill Country towns are celebrating Oktoberfest, or, in New Braunfels, Wurstfest. Normally by now our trees would show some fall color––nothing like New England, of course. The cypresses by Lake Austin are turning bronze. Out here north of Dripping Springs, the possum haws are showing their red berries. The cedar elms turned bright yellow, then slowly lost their leaves. The live oaks, thankfully, stay green.
But this year? Drought brings bad news for trees. Cypress-lined creeks are dry…the cypresses’ arched roots groping into the earth for water. Downhill at our place Barton Creek is dry, and I mean dry, with only occasional small pools. Up on the limestone plateau the leaves on some smaller saplings just turned brown and fluttered to the ground, with the tree already looking dead. We’re watering, but in Stage 2 drought restrictions. Will our wells run dry? Have we drained the Trinity aquifers that lie hundreds of feet below?
So, to general geopolitical angst, I’ve added…tree worry.
Trees in books play such a role in our imaginations. After reading Johann David Wyss’s Swiss Family Robinson (1812)—where the shipwrecked family builds a tree-house on their desert island––I always wanted to live in a tree-house! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swiss_Family_Robinson We’re drawn to forests, home of the trees—scary, but sometimes the safest place. In The Sword in the Stone by T. H. White (1939), first of the four volumes that make up The Once and Future King, the Wart (the young Arthur, under Merlin’s tutelage) and Kay meet Little John who tells them about Robin Wood (explaining why it’s not “Robin Hood” and why he lives in the woods (or “‘oods”):
“They’m free pleaces, the ‘oods, and fine pleaces. Let thee sleep in ‘em, come summer, come winter, withouten brick nor thatch, and huntin’ ‘em for thy commons lest thee starve; and smell to ‘em with the good earth in the springtime; and number of ‘em as they brings forward their comely bright leaves, according to order…”
There the boys, the future King and Sir Kay, approach “the monarch of the forest. It was a lime tree as great as that which used to grow at Moor Park in Herefordshire, no less than one hundred feet in height and seventeen feet in girth, a yard above the ground….” Headquarters for Robin Wood and Maid Marian! And there begins a great and perilous adventure for Kay and Wart, who break into the castle of Morgan le Fay, Queen of Air and Darkness—to rescue prisoners paralyzed by magic. (Speaking of paralyzed victims of witches—note how C.S. Lewis later describes turned-to-stone courtyard figures in his first foray into fantasy, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950).)
One writer, Elisabeth Brewer, notes that “The Sword in the Stone shows a passion for trees that White shared with Tolkien. https://bit.ly/3Ceqk. How about the Ents we meet in Fangorn Forest, in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth? Trees that walk…and tend other trees. Not all trees are benign––including the wicked old willow which captures Frodo and friends (rescued by Tom Bombadil).
I’m reading a fascinating graphic (yes, graphic!) book about Tolkien and his close friend C.S. Lewis: The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, by John Hendrix. https://bit.ly/4hqiyFr
Tolkien and Lewis met in 1929 in Oxford, where they were, famously, members of a writers’ group, the Inklings, and shared many hours at The Eagle and Child. That’s not all they shared. In 1916, both men experienced horrific warfare on the Western Front in France. Young and just married, Tolkien fought in the trenches, then contracted life-threatening trench fever. At nineteen, Lewis was wounded by shrapnel (from friendly fire) on the Somme, and carried shrapnel in his body the rest of his life. Hendrix’s wonderful book uncovers the sort of salvation two disillusioned veterans found in the healing power of imagination, including Norse mythology and the European fairy tale. Tolkien knew of Yggdrasil, the sacred ash tree central to Norse mythology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil; https://dc.swosu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2130&context=mythlore
And how the worlds created by Lewis and Tolkien fired our imaginations! The fantasy world of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia emerged when The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was published (1950). Tolkien’s The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, was first published in 1937 but became a pop-culture phenomenon only in 1960’s, when the paperback edition became available. https://time.com/4941811/hobbit-anniversary-1937-reviews/
Both Lewis and Tolkien had copies of The Sword in the Stone early on. Indeed, in 1939 it was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. T. H. White 1964 obituary, https://nyti.ms/4hlasht. Curiously, Hendrix’s book on Tolkien and Lewis doesn’t mention T. H. White, perhaps because Hendrix focuses on the impact of war; T.H. White 1906-1964) was born too late to serve in World War I. Nor was he an Oxonian. While C.S. Lewis reportedly disparaged The Sword in the Stone in 1940, he later invited T. H. White to the Inklings if he ever visited Oxford. https://bit.ly/4f4wcww (“Dickieson post”). Perhaps Hendrix doesn’t mention T. H. White because unlike Tolkien and Lewis, though he creates a fantasy world, White grounds The Once and Future King firmly in England.
But Elisabeth Brewer commented in T.H. White’s The Once and Future King that The Sword in the Stone shows a passion for trees that White shared with Tolkien. (Dickieson post.)
What about powerful trees in more recent books? Consider the Whomping Willow, in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Wizard of Azkaban? https://bit.ly/4f1koex Magic—but terrorizing—it reveals the secret passage which ultimately allows Harry and friends to discover––well, remember? Indeed, Harry reminds us of T. H. White’s Wart, both with an earnest determination to do right, and a magical tutor.
Maybe children are especially open to tree power because they still climb trees. My dad swooped us off to grad school in Atlanta, and then to Charlotte, before we moved back to Texas. In the southeast I discovered the power of pine trees. We children built an admirable and secret treehouse in the woods, where we surveyed the world from on high. No parents came near to scold or warn: deep in the trees we ruled our own domain. Later in Carolina at eleven, I could climb the neighbors’ big back yard pine all the way to the top. The tree swayed slowly back and forth, but I could see the entire neighborhood and beyond. Tree power.
The way live oaks vary their leaves makes identification tough. On the Edwards Plateau, the species passes into the “shrubby Texas Live Oak”—shorter with smaller trunks: “…[I]ntermediate forms occur between the variety and the species and the distinctions are often difficult,” per Robert Vines, Trees, Shrubs and Woody Vines of the Southwest (1960). Well, thanks.
Now, in drought, with grass turned grayish tan, with dirt powder-dry beneath our feet, we treasure the blessed green of live oaks, often home to swings and hammocks, and providing wide shade to houses, pastures, and somnolent cattle.
Trees inspire us. We know Shakespeare’s song: “Under the greenwood tree, who loves to lie with me…” (As You Like It). The first poem in Wendell Berry’s A Timbered Choir begins, “I go among trees and sit still.”
Mary Oliver’s “Honey Locust” begins,
“Who can tell how lovely in June is the
honey locust tree, or why
A tree should be so sweet and live
in this world?”
Robert Frost knows his trees: The Road Not Taken, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, Tree at My Window, Spring Pools, so many. Of course, his Birches:
“When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them…”
Frost makes it easy to imagine “some boy” swinging the birches—or Frost imagining that, as he marched through a yellow wood.
And then e.e. cummings, My Father Moved Through Dooms of Love—I like this verse:
“My father moved through theys of we,
Singing each new leaf out of each tree
(and every child was sure that spring
Danced when she heard my father sing)”
And Gerard Manley Hopkins, Spring and Fall:
“Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?”
Yes, trees: later in the poem we find when “worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie.”
The forecast calls for rain. Please cross your fingers.
Helen Currie Foster lives and writes the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery Series north of Dripping Springs, Texas, loosely supervised by three burros. She’s drawn to the compelling landscape and quirky characters of the Texas Hill Country. She’s also deeply curious about our human history and how, uninvited, the past keeps crashing the party. Currently she’s working on Book 10. Her protagonist, Alice, gets into legal drama, and matters of the heart. And yes, Alice does have a treehouse.
I’ve got a secret. So many books I have NOT read. You’d be shocked. No, really. My husband (retired business professor) admires Tolstoy, especially Anna Karenina. He’s read most of Dickens and every word of Moby Dick–several times. When we were dating he bought Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (English translation) because he’d seen it on my shelf. He knows I’m hung up on Virginia Woolf; he’s read Three Guineas. He’s read reams of history—shelves and shelves, plus tome after tome on Richard Feynman and everything that’s going on with astronomy and quantum physics. He forges onward, aiming for the stars at the edge of the universe.
I, however, the English major, the mystery writer? I who should have read All The Books? I confess a powerful secret vice: rereading my favorites, particularly Virginia Woolf. Every year, To the Lighthouse sneaks back into my hand. Why? Why not concentrate only on the new novels, the best-sellers?
Because I have to reread that moment in Part III when, years later, after world war and illness have claimed her beloved friend Mrs. Ramsay and so many of the Ramsay family, the spinster Lily Briscoe returns to the Ramsays’ summer home on the Isle of Skye. https://bit.ly/3zHF77w
Out on the lawn, facing the old white house, she sets up again the unfinished oil painting she began all those years earlier—the painting that had posed such a challenge in Part I as her mind reverberated with the repeated mantra from Professor Ramsay’s obnoxious male philosophy student: “Women can’t paint, can’t write.” During the long day, full of changing light on the sea, and repeated interruptions by other characters, Woolf returns us over and over to Lily, staring at her painting, seeing again the remembered shapes of Mrs. Ramsay and her son James all those years ago. And her artistic effort? Here’s the end of the book:
“It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? She asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.”
Why do I return to that? So much of the book is touching, gripping, and even hilarious, including the thoughts of Professor Ramsay, a philosophy professor who’s both overbearing and insecure. He delights in his own “splendid mind”: “For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. …Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q.” Then he falters. “But after Q? What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance.” He braces himself, clenches himself. “Q he was sure of. Q he could demonstrate. If Q then is Q—R—” Then “he heard people saying—he was a failure—that R was beyond him. He would never reach R.”
What an image—the alphabet, R glimmering red in the distance, then fading, fading! And then of course there’s the famous dinner party featuring Mrs. Ramsay’s boeuf en daube. Surely, just reading this, you smell the simmered sauce, the wine, the bay leaf? The thought crossed my mind that if Professor Ramsay had been offered a sip of the Talisker malt whiskey for which Skye is famous, he’d have felt a bit better. https://www.malts.com/en/talisker (The distillery gives a great tour, too.)
But Lily’s painting? This spinster friend of Mrs. Ramsay, with her amateur brushstrokes? The tale of Lily’s painting, her decision and indecision as she holds her brush, grabbed me all those years ago, and refuses to let go. The same question must hit every musician—“Is this the last note? Did that chord resolve properly? Does it make you feel beauty and longing, or does it just hang there, unfinished?” Every cook: “A pinch of salt? What about some coriander? To garlic or not to garlic?” Every filmmaker: “Do they walk into the sunset? Or fade out? Or kiss?” And every writer? “Is this character real? Is this setting compelling? Does the plot work? And will anyone care?”
Lily’s painting embodies desire to capture memory, resistance, light and color, and more than that. Isn’t it her experience? A moment of creation, of recapture, of making a line on a canvas and then feeling completion? She’s had her vision. If you know of another book where we readers feel such a moment of revelation from the frustrating process of creation—let me know.
Oh, don’t get me wrong. My Kindle received today the brand-new Martin Walker (A Grave in the Woods) and I can’t wait. bit.ly/3Xzqawt Like the other women in his (busy) life, I love to accompany Inspector Bruno, in his fictional Perigord village of St. Denis, partly because of his cooking. Thank you, Martin Walker, for describing the ham hanging from the kitchen ceiling, the cheerful chickens, and the paté with its duck fat on top, waiting in Bruno’s fridge, and the way Bruno sings La Marseillaise to count how long until he must sizzle the foie de gras before he deglazes the pan. I look forward to new recipes and to finding out who’s buried in the woods.
And a sad farewell: I’ve decided to forgive Elly Griffiths for saying goodbye to Ruth Galloway in her last book in that series, The Last Remains, even though I have loved watching Ruth clamber down into a trench to dig up ancient bones in East Anglia. amzn.to/3ZxU5rv I’ve also savored every page of Alan Bradley’s latest (last?) Flavia de Luce – What Time the Sexton’s Spade Doth Rust – as he allows this delightful protagonist to feel herself beginning to grow up—not too much, not too fast, just enough. https://bit.ly/4dla13A
And I did just finish We Solve Murders, Richard Osman’s first book in a new series. bit.ly/4ezjIwh Have to confess I found myself missing Joyce, Ibrahim, Ron, Elizabeth and the other characters of his Thursday Murder Club books. My strong belief is I must careabout a mystery protagonist and so far I haven’t completely bought in to his new cadre–though I do like Steve. We’ll see. I’d be interested in your reactions.
So that’s four new mysteries, just in September. I’m also rereading Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, and finding even more, yes, even more to love about how she brings those characters to vivid life, and how she describes the way we humans think and react to each other.
And out here with the three burros I’m writing the tenth in my Coffee Creek series featuring Alice MacDonald Greer and the gorgeous landscape of the Texas Hill Country, with its pristine (well, so far) bluegreen streams. Water’s for fighting over, right?
But when the going gets tough, you may find me sidling back to the revolving bookcase, on the shelf where Virginia Woolf and all the old faves hang out.
Helen Currie Foster lives and writes north of Dripping Springs, Texas, loosely supervised by three burros. She’s drawn to the compelling landscape and quirky characters of the Texas Hill Country. She’s also deeply curious about our human history and how, uninvited, the past keeps crashing the party. Latest in her award-winning series: Ghost Bones.
Austin Mystery Writers 
