Pivoting

 

I was 23 years old when I wrote my first book, 25 by the time it was released across the country by a national book publisher. Ah, the good old days! Back then, I wrote first drafts in longhand, then typed them on an IBM Selectric typewriter, edited each page, and typed a final draft, so that everything I wrote was replicated at least twice, sometimes three times.

The submission process back then was similar in some ways to what it is now. Despite what we might see in the movies (proud, independent women marching into editors’ offices and plunking down weighty manuscripts with entreaties that the work be considered), the whole deal begins with a simple letter, dubbed a “query” letter, because it’s basically a question: “Hey there, I wrote this book about this person/thing/idea. Care to read it?”

Pre-computer age, these letters were sent off via USPS in great numbers with, of course, a self-addressed, stamped envelope (the sacred SASE) enclosed for the reply. Then the waiting began. Weeks, often months, sometimes years later (or never), a response would finally arrive: “We regret to inform you” or “Thanks for your recent query letter regarding blah blah blah book. However….” Or (blessedly) “Hello, Kay! I was intrigued by your idea for a book about prepared childbirth. Please send me a proposal.”

The proposal is somewhat like a very lengthy query. In it, the writer is once again asking that the work be considered, but the first three chapters or fifty pages are included, plus an outline of the entire book, plus, in recent years, the author’s marketing strategy, and the author’s bio including previous publishing credits.

Once the proposal (typed and retyped on that trusty machine) was packaged up and sent out (again via USPS, again with a SASE tucked inside), the waiting would begin again… weeks… months… years. No exaggeration. No kidding.

Of course, if one desired to be published by one of The Big Five New York Publishers, one submitted queries to an agent, not the publishers themselves, as the Big Five will not take unsolicited mail from the likes of us lowly urchins pecking away at keyboards for fun or for a living. Ahem.

Nowadays—O joy!—we live in the whizbang era. I can write queries on my laptop, send them out to writer friends for feedback, make changes rapidly, and email them out—for FREE! No stamps, no SASE, no waiting! Well, okay, still waiting… weeks, months, years for a reply. But at least no waiting for the mail to arrive at its destination.

[Side note here about the whizbang era: I once sent a short piece to the Home Forum editor of the Christian Science Monitor (a publication which pays very nicely) to whom I had submitted successfully in the past. I sent this new essay at 5:30a.m., via email. By the time I got to my day job at 7:00a.m. and turned on my computer, the editor had responded with a short email in reply: “Hi Kay, I read your piece over my first cup of coffee this morning and loved it. It’ll be in our October 30^th issue. A check is on its way to you. Thanks for thinking of us.” Holy hot damn. That’ll make your day, won’t it?]

I digress.

One more note about querying publishers or agents: In modern times, this can also be done by (a) spending $250-$500 or so to attend a writers conference and “pitching” one’s idea directly to an agent or publisher face-to-face (known as offering the “elevator pitch”—in other words, if you encountered said person in an elevator, how might you quickly describe your story idea in a way that grabbed the listener’s interest enough to be offered a read—or (b) participating in “pitch wars” on Twitter, during which one tweets out (in 280 characters or less—that’s characters, not words) a synopsis of one’s book idea—for all the world (and hopefully an agent) to see.

I love writers conferences, but can no longer afford them. I am reluctant to share my story ideas with the masses before they are in print, especially in today’s world of I-saw-it-online-so-it-must-be-fair-game-to-copy, so neither of those options will work for me.

All of the above is a verbose, reminiscent preface to make this short announcement (mostly as a follow-up to my post of 27 February of this year): After a good deal of rumination, two brief forays into the modern publishing world (during which I was told the first book in my middle-grade series is “too long” for that age group and also four books in the series is “too many” for a small press), and a couple of great conversations with two writer friends, I have decided that my series will be published “independently” (as we now say to avoid the sad and defeatist label of “self-published”).

What this means for me:

No waiting.

The first book will be released as soon as I can get it formatted and have a cover design professionally created. Booyah.

I have total control over the creative content; I will not need to change the titles of the books in the series (to suit the marketing department of any potential publisher) or the characters’ names, nor will I have to cut the book length from 70,000 to 50,000 because “children don’t want to read long books,” as the industry believes. (I keep suggesting the so-called experts ask kids, but no one is listening to me. Again, I’m just the urchin pecking away….)

It also means that there will be a handful of fellow writers who will shake their heads and cluck their tongues in an exercise of group schadenfreude because “poor Kay couldn’t get her kids’ books published so she did it herself.”

Sigh. It used to bother me that I didn’t get respect among my writer friends. But seriously, if they’ve read my work (and many of them haven’t), and they don’t think I’m “good enough” by now, I can’t help them with that. They are not the readers I’m concerned with, anyway. The ten-year-olds who read this series can let me know if they like the books or not. And I’m pretty sure they will (like them, I mean—but also let me know—because that’s how ten-year-olds roll).

So: Those of you who are mentioned in the books or have become characters in one form or another, you won’t have long to see yourselves in print. Wondering if that’s you? Stay tuned….

Conversations with My Cat

 

Friends, it has been over a month since I posted here. Usually, my absence from the blog means that I am sad or ruminating or preoccupied with mental health challenges. Not this time. This time it has been because I have been giddily happy—surprised, amazed, and tearfully grateful for what the Universe has recently brought into my life—all of which will, eventually, be expressed in words in this space (if I can find sufficient words to capture those feelings).

In the meantime, we interrupt these (mostly) serious posts regarding social justice, women’s rights, suicide prevention, and nature walks to bring you:

Conversations with My Cat

I have recently been told that Jenny the Cat is “squishy cute.” I cannot disagree. It has also been suggested (though not by the same person) that, no, not everyone has conversations with their pets the way I do. How can this be? If your cat speaks to you, do you not answer in kind? If your dog questions your punctuality in doling out dinner or treats, do you not offer some lame excuse regarding “the next commercial” or “Hang on! I’m not ready to get up out of this chair yet”? Indeed you do. I do concede, your conversations may not be as in depth as mine…. But see for yourself. Below is a composite of a typical day in conversation with Jenny.

4:30a.m.

Jenny: Mom! Mom! Wake up time? Wake up time?

Me: Jen, come here. Get on the bed. Let’s cuddle. Your boy is still sleeping.

[Most nights, Jenny prefers to sleep in the guest room, not on the bed with me. Don’t ask me why (and don’t suggest that I snore). She also mirrors the movements of Thomas. If he gets up, she does. If he sleeps longer, she will wait on my bed until he gets up before venturing out to the kitchen. Silly girl.]

Jenny: RRRrrrRRRrrrRRRrrrRRRrrr

[In contrast to Purrl, who would purr if I so much as said her name, Jenny is not as demonstrative—except in the morning when we cuddle, and at night when it’s time for bed.]

5:00a.m.

Jenny: Mom! Mom! Outside? Outside!

[And so the demands begin… and will continue until the dogs are fed and walked and the sun has risen sufficiently to allow her out to the back yard. In the meantime….]

6:00a.m.

Jenny: Mom! Mom! Treats? Treats?!?

Me: Yes, Jen, hang on. Thomas gets his treats first because he went walking. And what did you do? Tell me again why you get treats, dearest? For watching out the window while we walked? For meeting us at the door? I’m not sure what this reward is for, but here you go, little girl.

6:05a.m.

Jenny: Mom! Mom! Outside!

Me: Ok, Ok, good grief. Go on out there. Do not bring a mouse back with you.

6:30a.m.

Jenny: [Running to the living room and opening her jaws to deposit a live mouse on the floor, which promptly skitters under my writing desk] Mom! Mom! Baby!

Me: Jen! Good grief! You didn’t hurt him, did you?

[She never does. She brings them in and chases them around until they’re exhausted enough for me to scoop into an empty oatmeal can. The last mouse she brought in was more afraid of me than it was her, and when I tried to get it, the poor thing ran to where Jenny lay on the floor like a sphinx, and it cowered against her chest. Her response? She just sat there, harboring the fugitive with a smug grin on her face. Cats. Sheesh.]

9:00a.m.

Naptime begins… and goes on and on throughout the day, with occasional interludes for cat treats (if the dogs get one) and exchanges such as these:

1:00p.m.

Jenny: Mom. [Waking me from a nap]

Me: [Whispering, so as not to wake Thomas] Up here, baby. Jump up on the bed.

Jenny: Mom. Sleepy. [Flopping over next to my side and going back to sleep]

5:00p.m.

Me: Jen! You’re up! Hi, baby. Wanna cuddle with Mom? Wanna eat your dinner?

Jenny:  [Silence, as she strolls haughtily past me and through the open door to the back yard]

[I can’t blame her. I don’t like to chat when I wake from my nap, either.]

6:00p.m. [As Jenny jumps onto the kitchen table, flopping over next to where I am sitting, trying to have a phone conversation with The Very Special Man in My Life]

Jenny: Mom. Talking?

Me: Yes, honey. Shhhh….

Jenny: Mom. Pet Jenny.

Me: Of course. Shhhh….

Jenny: Mom! Mom! Look!

Me: Good grief. What?

Jenny: [Looking out the window] Bird!

Me: I see it.

Very Special Man: Is that Jenny? What’s she saying?

[Note: This is how you know a man is very special, when he understands that if the cat is talking, she must be saying something of import.]

6:30p.m. [As I attempt to resume my conversation with the human]

Jenny: [Puffing up to twice her size] Mom! Mom! Look!

Me: What, Jen?

Jenny: DOG! [Her eyes track Ace, the large collie who lives down the street and passes our house every single day at this time on his way to the dog park with one of his humans.]

Me: Yes, Jen. It’s Ace. Again. You’re safe, baby. Might be a good idea to stay in now—

Jenny: [Jumping down from the table] Outside!

7:00p.m.

Me: [Calling into the back yard] Jen! Time to come in now!

Jenny: [Grumbling as she trots back along the walkway toward the door] Why? Why? Why come in? Now? Right now? Why?

Me: [Shaking the can with cat treats] Come on, stop complaining. I’ll give you a treat for coming in.

Jenny: Treat?!?

8:00p.m.

Jenny: Mom! Mom! Bedtime!

Me: I know, dearest. Let me finish this—

Jenny: Mom! Treat time! Bedtime!

Me: OK! OK!

8:30p.m.

Jenny: RRRrrrRRRrrrRRRrrr

AI? Pffffffttttt....

 

"Let sleeping dragons lie," by Eirescei, can be found on DeviantArt.com. (Used with permission.)

I’ve heard a lot of talk recently about AI (Artificial Intelligence) and how new apps recently released can write English papers and even books. “It’s the way of the future!” is what we’re hearing proclaimed, with some suggesting that “anyone” will be able to write a book simply by telling the AI software what they want. Yeah. Right. Just as we were told twenty years ago that books would soon be obsolete because we’d all have Kindles (or similar digital readers), which would do away with paper books forever.

Yeah. Good thing I didn’t hold my breath for that to happen.

If you’re a writer who is sweating this stuff, please stop. Your craft is safe. Trust me. If it helps, consider what I wrote some years ago as a submission to a “Flash” contest for nonfiction. Maybe it will help. Here ya go:

(Prompt: Write 250 words on why writing is a mystery.)

Why is writing a mystery to me? Because when Shakespeare wanted Hamlet to express the depth of his depression, he could have written his line as, “Man, I’m just so sad about it all.” Instead, he wrote, “O God, God, how weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of the world.” And when Milton described the domain of Satan as “darkness visible,” he reached for a phrase that had never been used before… and it worked for generations to come, as did Frost’s choice of the road “less traveled by” and Whitman’s cry of “O Captain, my Captain!” Writing is a mystery to me because we cannot resolve scientifically—even with all our super-technology—why one particular word order is more pleasing, more poignant, more profound than another. Nor can a machine, given every dictionary entry known to the language, replicate the creativity, the subtle dance with words that a writer produces with a simple pen and paper. Writing is a mystery to be because a craftsman with words can so set the stage that two words may bring us to tears… or to our knees:

“Hey, Boo.”

“Jesus wept.”

Writing is a mystery to me because when I write, I become enthralled, and when I emerge, finally, there lies my soul upon the paper—for all the world to see.

Rising with the Day

 

Bread is such an amazing food, isn’t it? Take a handful of ingredients—salt, sugar, flour, water, yeast—maybe some olive oil and rosemary—combine it, then watch as it does its magic.

I woke to snowfall on Thursday. We’ve been expecting this storm, here in Calimesa, hoping for snow because we rarely get real snow. When I opened the door to take the dogs out at 4:00a.m., big, fluffy flakes were falling. Did the dogs mind? Not a wit. They had to pee! Out into the yard they raced, returning to me on the patio ten minutes later, their coats dusted with flakes that were already melting.

It rained and snowed on and off all day—a good day to hunker down and produce some good work.

So after breakfast, I started some bread rising. The night before, in anticipation of the storm, I’d plucked some sprigs of rosemary from my back yard shrub, washed it, and minced the leaves. (The entire house smelled like fresh rosemary, and I remember catching a whiff of the scent as I went to bed.) I added salt, sugar, water, flour, yeast, and some olive oil, stirred, mixed, and kneaded until a dough was formed. (When people ask if I have a bread maker, I always answer in the affirmative as I hold up my two hands. I’ve been making bread this way for 50 years. No reason to change it up now.)

With the dough in the bowl, rising nicely, I opened my laptop. I know I don’t talk about it much—I consider it bad form to do so—but since I retired, I’ve been working on a series of children’s books. (Not a Young Adult novel, as I’ve done before, but a Middle-Grade series, for kids 10-12.) The idea came to me years ago, when I lived in Mt Baldy. I intended to write one fun book. Then I heard a fellow writer talk about the advantage of writing a series—in order to sell more books.

Huh, I thought. I could make it a trilogy. (Which is how it started, but well into the second book, I knew there had to be four, as it follows the seasons.)

But finding the time to write it was nearly impossible while I was still working. (Though I did write the first 30 pages and hand them off to one of my favorite brilliant ten-year-olds, Matthew Confer, who read it and gave me the best feedback I’ve ever gotten from a first reader. Matthew is 19 and in his second year of college now.)

One week before our rainy snowstorm, I finished the last chapter of the fourth book. All that was left to write was a short epilogue. But some things happened… some good, some bad… and I didn’t get back to it until Wednesday night. After I chopped up all that aromatic rosemary, I wrote the first half of the epilogue.

On Thursday, while the bread was rising, the house now filling with the scent of yeasty dough, I put some soft music on for the fur kids, then, as I mentioned, opened the laptop. And cried. And wrote the final words of the book. And cried some more.

It may seem like a tired trope of egocentric writers, so forgive me if that’s the case, but I absolutely love my characters. Writing fiction is damn hard—you have to create lives and back stories and scenarios out of thin air—truly like pulling a rabbit out of a hat where none existed previously. But a decade ago, when I had the idea, one snowy, wintry night in Baldy while I lay in bed in the loft with my tiny cat, Sugar Plum, curled beside me, I began to tell her a story. A story about a cat… and a dragon. And in the years that passed, the story took shape in my head. And I knew exactly how it would end. Ten years and four books later, that story ended exactly as I had envisioned it.

To celebrate, I took a long nap. When I got up, I shaped my lovely mound of dough into four smaller mounds, let them rise one more time, and then put them in the oven.

Imagine the joy in my house: The quiet snow falling… the scent of fresh baked bread… the satisfaction of seeing a vision come to fruition….

Storytelling is much like making bread. You only need a handful of ingredients—a few characters, a setting, a bit of conflict to get the story churning—and, with patience, you can produce something wonderful. Something magical.

Now the hardest part of all begins: Finding just the right publisher to get these books out into the world for kids just like me who love to read books with cats, dogs, dragons, and a wee bit of fantasy.

While we wait, here's a tiny sample from Book One, just to give you a taste: (FYI: I have this section printed and thumbtacked to my writing board.)

"Little one." The dragon stopped, turned, and spread her enormous wings to embrace the small girl who had halted in the middle of the path. Softly, she continued. "Here is my blessing of peace to your heart. It matters not whether this person at this time chooses or does not choose you. Let that be the furthest from your mind. It has been asked of you to sing. This is a sacred gift. You honor us all--your ancestry and yourself--when you do so. At the time given, let go of 'what if' and celebrate what is."

The DirecTV Guy

 

Okay, I’m going to palaver on about my hellacious weekend, but really, all that mess is just backstory to what I really want to say about the DirecTV guy. Please be patient….

In the middle of the night on Thursday night, I was heading for the back yard with Thomas when I walked through a large pool of water on the floor. It was coming from under the refrigerator.

But that’s not what this post is about.

The next morning, I called an appliance repair place, and they scheduled someone to come out and fix the fridge the same day. Booyah!

So I’m thinking, I’m on a roll. Might as well get this over with and call DirecTV. My receiver had essentially quit working days before. I was so done with DirecTV. But wait! The lovely young woman I spoke with made it all okay, said she’d send someone out the next day to install a new receiver, and we did a fancy-dance work-around on the cost. Boom!

Fridge repair guy, Ruben, comes out, pulls the fridge out, clears the defrost drain tube of all the accumulated ice, charges me a fair price and heads out, mentioning as he does that “there may be some residual condensation there on the floor.” Huh. So I just keep putting down dry towels, rinsing the wet ones, drying them, repeating the process.

At 3:00a.m. the next morning, taking Thomas out, I step into nearly-a-lake on the kitchen floor. Many, many towels are removed from the dryer and thrown on the floor to try to sop it all up. I do not go back to bed.

At 6:45a.m. I call the appliance repair place and am surprised when someone actually answers. I explain that I still have “huge amounts of water” on my floor, and I’m told the technician “will call” me. And, eventually, he does. When he comes back out and pulls the fridge out again, he discovers that the water is not coming from the refrigerator. It’s seeping in under the wall. What’s on the other side of the wall? My water heater.

But that’s not what this post is about.

Ruben takes some pictures, tells me his company can replace the water heater (which is what I should have done last summer, due to age, and I knew it), and they’ll call me with an estimate.

So now I’m sopping up water in and around my water heater. And there’s no shut-off valve for the incoming cold water on the thing, so to stop it would mean turning my water off at the main. No. Hard stop.

Overwhelmed, I call my next-door neighbor, the very cool and heroic Gustavo, who hurries over, assesses the situation, hurries back to his place, returns with channel locks, a pipe wrench, some plumbers tape and a pipe cap. Fifteen minutes later—I kid you not—he’s shut down my water heater. Finally, the water stops seeping under the wall. I don’t have hot water, but I can deal with that. I have water. I have pans. I have a stove. I once went two weeks without hot water while living in Mt. Baldy. What I don’t have is water accumulating along the baseboard and pooling on the floor. Bravo!

Just as Gus is picking up his tools, the DirecTV guy shows up. Whew.

That’s what this post is about. It’s about the DirecTV technician, Luis.

He introduced himself, showed me his badge, then trudged in, carrying a new receiver. As he went to work doing the install, I went in the kitchen and started getting organized for who-knows-how-many days without hot water.

When I finished, Luis was sitting idly on the living room floor, scrolling through his phone, waiting for the system set-up on the receiver to do its thing. I asked him if he was having a good day.

“I’m not,” I said, “so I hope your day is going well.”

He shrugged. “Saturday is always easy.” Then he looked back at this phone.

Hmm. Definitely not a chatty guy.

I persisted. “Because less traffic?”

He shrugged again. “Yeah, I guess.” Then he pointed to my typewriter. “I used to have one. In school. For homework.” His accent was heavy, his English imperfect. I wondered if he found it easier not to engage in conversation with people who weren’t likely to understand him.

I told him I was a writer, and it’s like this quiet gentleman just came to life. “You do art, then,” he said. “I am artist, too. I paint.” He picked up his phone again, excited now, poking it a couple of times to bring up Instagram. He started to show me his pictures, but I told him to wait while I got my phone so I could follow him on the platform. As I scrolled through his beautiful beach and forest scenes, I told him how much I loved the mountains, how I used to live in Mt. Baldy. He told me he drives up to Idyllwild as often as he can just to be up in the mountains and look for scenes to paint. He told me how he was bored during the pandemic so he watched some YouTube videos and picked up a brush and started painting with acrylics. His wife took one look at what he was doing, he said, and she charged off to Hobby Lobby, buying him more paint and canvasses. He started posting pictures of his work on Instagram, and people commented. So he set up an Etsy account, and now he sells them. His wife, he said, likes to go to bed early and get up when the world is quiet. (Sounds familiar.) After she goes to bed, he paints. For two or three or five hours. He showed me a picture of his wife and son, talked a bit about his wife going through some health problems in recent years. She didn’t want him to sell any paintings—because she loves all of them.

Finally, he asked if he could see a copy of one of my books. I grabbed one and showed him. He asked where he could buy a copy. I took that one back, signed it, and gave it to him.

“I will read it,” he said. “I promise.”

And I believe he will.

Given the “Salvi Pride” tag on his Instagram profile, I’m guessing Luis is from El Salvador. I don’t know how long he’s been in the U.S. or what he had to go through to get here or what it felt like to leave his homeland, hoping, as he came to this strange new country, that he would somehow make a better life for himself and his family.

But… consider this: His Instagram handle is @luis_vichez_art. What if, like, a whole lot of people read this post and decide to follow Luis on Instagram? And maybe even some people buy a painting from him? Wouldn’t that be amazing? I’m telling you right now, it would make all the insanity of the past couple of days worth it.

And oh—the appliance repair business called while I was talking to Luis. They gave me a reasonable estimate on replacing the water heater—on Monday, so I would only have to be hot waterless through Sunday. Which is when I’m writing this. And guess what? They called back this morning to ask if they could please do the job today. A day early. And yeah, it gets even better. They did the whole job in an hour and a half. Done, cleaned up, water heating as I wrote the check.

But that’s not what this post is about. It’s about Luis, the painter. @luis_vichez_art

Sgt. Thomas Tibbs, Nine Years In

I know. I can’t believe it, either. This fuzzy boy has been with me for one year shy of a decade. Amazing.

If you don’t know his background, clicking here will give you some perspective. And if you also read the post from January 4^th, 2014, you’ll have a more complete picture of how far this dog has progressed from the frightened feral creature he once was.

Now, when I post his picture on Twitter or Instagram, I get far more “likes” for his cute mug than I do for anything I post about myself, whether that is some bit of wisdom for writers or a photo of the hills where I hike. Thomas has the GQ good looks to get him noticed—even though he still hates having his picture taken.

At fifteen, my boy is an old guy now, with arthritis in his shoulder and hips and back. Last year I spent a thousand dollars on tests to try to discover, once and for all, what initiates the on-going issues with his sensitive gut. Turns out he has Irritable Bowel Syndrome due to his chronic anxiety. So now he has multiple meds for anxiety, IBS, and arthritis. Some days are tough, when his belly hurts. Some nights are even tougher, when we’re up four or five times—especially in winter—going out to the yard. Good thing I’m retired and I can nap during the day….

Last year around this time, I wrote about how Thomas has come to love our bedtime ritual, wherein we sit on the floor of my bedroom and he is petted, massaged, and/or brushed before it’s time to say goodnight. A year ago, it was Purrl getting in on the attention. Now, with Purrl gone, Jenny has stepped in, insisting that she, too, be the recipient of all this love and affection.

And Jenny has made up her own bedtime ritual for Thom. She loves to ambush him. When I tell them it’s time for bed, she runs ahead toward the bedroom, but ducks into the guest bathroom, hiding there in the dark until Thom comes trotting down the hall, at which point she jumps out at him, batting him with soft paws. He has no idea that this is a cat game, and that he is supposed to react by jumping in the air and chasing after her. So he just ignores her. Which he pretty much does all the time anyway. Even though she loves him and rubs on him.

Thomas was six when I adopted him. I told him then that I just wanted him to live six years, to have as many good years of safety and love as he had starvation and abandonment. I was surprised and happy when he reached that landmark. Now we’re three years past that. In some part of his brain, he still remembers the awful time; he still occasionally cries out in his sleep as if he’s being wounded. But as the years go on, those times are fewer and farther between.

May he never have another bad dream. 

The Darkest Evening of the Year

 

I wrote the following short piece for Fresh Ink, my writers club journal, but I decided to share it here because... it's the Solstice. And why not?

     In “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Robert Frost describes a reverie he’s had on the night of the December solstice as he stops to watch the snow fall on a neighbor’s woods. It’s a lovely image—the white flakes falling, dusting the trees with winter icing. As his “little horse,” impatient to move on, shakes himself, his harness bells—sleigh bells—jingle. Apart from that, they are in a place so isolated, it’s quiet enough to hear the snow falling. (“The only other sound’s the sweep/of easy wind and downy flake.”)

We love this poem because, the Christmas season being what it is, with its frenetic activity of shopping, wrapping, preparing, cooking, and so forth, we relate to the final lines of the poem: “But I have promises to keep/And miles to go before I sleep/And miles to go before I sleep.”

Until I memorized this poem long ago (along with a freshman English class I was teaching), I didn’t fully appreciate the line that comes before those final lines: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep.” It seems there is a certain reluctance here to push on, get those chores done, those promises kept, get out of the cold and into a warm bed. Why? What drives a man to sit in a sleigh and stare, when he has so much at home compelling him to get moving?

This is what I relate to, the dragging of his feet, the lure of the woods. As much as we would love to remember Frost as the kind, grandfatherly man who wrote of nature and farming, he was a profoundly troubled individual who possessed the requisite tortured soul of many poets. Consider this: His sister spent her last years in a mental institution, as did one of Frost’s daughters. One son died of cholera at the age of four; the other committed suicide when he was thirty-eight. Frost would outlive this son by twenty-three years, which is a long, long time to carry such grief.

Suffice it to say, the poet experienced his share of sadness and depression. What comforted him, we assume from his work, was the beauty and resiliency he observed in nature, the constancy and routine of the seasons’ change.

Many decades ago, when I had recently emerged, battle weary and deeply depressed, from the worst year of my life, two friends stopped by my house and nearly dragged me out to hike with them. I had no hiking boots, only sneakers. It was January, and while the golden California sun was shining, it had snowed in the mountains the night before—which is where they insisted on taking me, up to the nearest mountain, Mt. Baldy, for a long walk up a winding fire road that eventually led to a crystal-clear view of the valley below.

The snow was the brightest white I had ever seen. The trees, warmed by the sun, gave off an aromatic scent of pine you will never find in a cleaning product or deodorizer. And after miles of hiking, endorphins flooding my brain, I was hooked. Here was solace. Here was comfort. The sights, the smells, these two goofball friends who told stories and laughed and kept me moving until I was (finally!) warm, gave me the gift of hiking to achieve balance and perspective, to be reminded that, as nature endures, so will I. The hours we spent were more memorable than I can describe, and I will be grateful for it through the rest of my days.

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep.” During the holiday season, this line will come to me at the oddest times—standing in line at Target, sitting on the floor wrapping gifts, breathing deeply in heavy traffic as I try to remain calm and get to my destination alive. They will draw me out, those woods, and offer me quiet moments of solitary, serene walking in between the frenzied times. And I will remember Frost and his work with much gratitude.