Grampa Joe

These coat hooks hung in the flour mill that my grandfather opened in Golden, Colorado in about 1925. When bagged flour became common in grocery stores, the mill closed, then reopened as a feed store that served ranchers and poultry farmers and horse breeders for another 30 years. Millet, a common feed grain, is about the size of a ball bearing. Scattered evenly across 20-30 feet of a smooth cement floor, in an enormous room that provides a long approach run, it allows a child to slide/roll/fly/rocket along until she runs out of millet.

Yesterday, on a whim, I tested this general procedure using an old asphalt driveway and a zillion pea-sized drought-year- olives that had fallen from the trees that overhang it. It worked. And it reminded me of these hooks, now on the back of my office door. So they hold Sadima's old shawl now. And her new keys.

The Tannery

This tannery/leather dyeing enterprise is 400 years old. It is a family-run business in Morroco. When you ask to be shown around a little, one of the kids will lead you up long narrow steps to the rooftop, and give you a sprig of mint to hold under your nose. It doesn't help.

There is a tannery in Limori's South-End, too. It is guarded by a vicious dog. He is Sadima's very first friend.

click the picture....

the trees, the trees, the trees....

Trees are everywhere in my world. Yours, too. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the Bodhi tree which shaded Buddah's enlightenment, the Christmas trees, my father's fruit orchards, my screwy Scotch-Irish family tree, the silk oaks, pindo palms, beaucarneas ,and bananas outside my door. The pine trees I grew up with in Colorado and the pine forest where Sadima is hiding. I will be with her there all day, but first...

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This is a baobab tree on Oahu, in a botanical garden. Lynne Wikoff was kind enough to provide contrast in scale. It was amazing to just stand there and look up. This is a smallish Baobab. This is a big one, in Africa, their home. I have a baby baobab. My son started it from seed. It's about six inches tall in a four inch pot. Amazing.

Book-building, again

Fez, Morocco: South-End, Limori
South-End is a dockside slum in Limori, the city where my novel Sacred Scars takes place. This is the second in a trilogy, and the first title (Skin Hunger) took place in the largest part of Limori, the center, with Market Square and the public wells , where most of the shops are.

Limori rises like this, from a bay. The buildings are like this, old, jumbled, brick and mud. Limori has a second, higher hill--Ferrin Hill--that is visible in from the highest parts of South-End as line of tree-covered foothills that shelter the mansions of the wealthy. And beyond that are the black cliffs at the north end of the city.

South-End is where the ships come in with all kinds of goods. Hahp's father's fleet has made a fortune.
Sadima is there now. I am so worried about her. Inside the stone cliffs, Franklin is frantic, torn, caving in on himself. In those same cliffs, 200 years later, Hahp is fighting for his sanity, his life. Gerrard's secrets are keeping them both alive.

And I must go back to work.

If you enlarge the picture, you will get a real sense South End. The piles of stuff in the foreground are heaps of sheep skins. Fez is a tannery town, the home of the worlds oldest university and a thousand other interesting things. Look closer. On the thousand-year-old brick and adobe-wash buildings--there are hundreds of satellite dishes. The King provides internet access.

time, time, time...

These cobbles are in Paris. I have moved them to Limori's slum South-End, a dockside squalorous place--and where Sadima is now.

The writing is flying again. The time line is resolving itself. About 200 years pass in one story and less than 10 in the other. I have been pacing a lot, considering various devices. But the every-other-chapter format is enough. I don't want devices and visible structure to upstage the characters. Not even a little. So I am going straight at it, and I think (hope, want to believe) it's working.

work,work,work, cough, sniffle, work,

Have a flu. BAD one. Started with stomach yuck, became a nasty cough, no energy *at all* for a few days. Not anything like normal yet, day eight. Lots of people have it. I was on a plane, coming back from Orlando, the night all the tornados hit in the midwest. The air traffic controllers took us up to 36,ooo feet. Still bumpy. So we were routed south and spent an extra hour in the viral soup that is airplane-air. I sat next to a nice mother and son. The boy was, maybe ADHD--very energetic, at the least. He was charming, smart company. His mother was really nice, too. Both were coughing every ten seconds...everyone was coughing and sniffling. Sigh. Back to work. Sadima is on the edge of a decision that terrifies me. I didn't think she would do this.