Suspense. Ice Tea. Duck Babies. Swimming Bears.

This past week, we took our small trailer even further north of Moosehead Lake to camp up on the Penobscot Corridor.

This corridor is part of Maine’s amazing suite of public lands, many with well-cared-for remote campgrounds. No water. No electric hookup. No dump station. And no large rigs with generators that sound like burping-farting monsters that make it hard to concentrate on one’s reading or encouraging wildlife to appear.

First the wildlife: armadas of baby Merganser ducks with a few adult minders (more of that below); all kinds of loons (juveniles without parents gang up together and flap their wings across the water, getting ready to fly; other pairs cry out to discourage great blue herons from coves they favor.) A huge swoop of small, white gulls sipping hatching caddis flies from the air as the insects hatch off water below. A young bear swimming to . . .
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A Good Cry & the Do-It-Yourself MFA

At a library author talk this past week, I was asked how I wrote a novel when I’d only written non-fiction for work.

I said I burst into tears, got up and paced the room, made a mantra of the names of women friends who said I had a voice and should write, repeated that names mantra over and over . . . and I sat back down and started typing. Crying but typing.

But I also told them about my do-it-yourself MFA (Master of Fine Arts). (Still ongoing . . . )

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Kamikaze Gardening. Antler Camp. Black Flies.

At my Moosehead Lake home (camp) I’ve been Kamikaze Gardening.

Kamikaze Gardening is my term for intensely swooping down to remorselessly attack every garden job before black flies drive me indoors. (They know we gardeners are in a time crunch that fits their arrival and dining habits.)  I am planting, weeding, composting, sprinkling Milorganite to discourage deer foraging, and this year, furiously hoeing out an invasive that’s choking out flowers I know I can save from the deer.

Good to Know: black flies only breed in clean running water. If we have hordes of them, it means we are actually lucky to live here. (Sometimes that consoles. Often it does not.)

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Smart fish. Tiny home.

My husband and I have been on the road for almost a month, exploring creeks for wild trout (very smart fish), and staying in North Carolina national park and forest service campsites. I’m used to Maine camping in remote places, so sharing a campground with other travelers (sometimes over forty of them in tents, small campers, and very large generator-chugging RV’s) has been a new experience.

But first, the important stuff. As if there weren’t enough barriers to writing a novel in a small camper-trailer, this morning I mistakenly took the dog’s Benadryl tablets instead of my meds. The fog descended. I have yet to stop staring at a spider that seems to be staring back at me.

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