Snow, beautiful snow!

We have finally received a few inches of snow and it feels like winter.  Of course, it always feels like winter when the temperature hovers around 20 degrees, but at least with snow there is the hope of snowshoeing.  I have a little group of friends who snowshoe with me, but to my horror, they were all busy on Snowshoe Monday!  My friends couldn't come out to play and I was sad.

 However, like the trouper I am, I stayed in my jammies an hour longer until it warmed up to 29 degrees, strapped on my icewalkers and headed to Lone Pine.  I know I should have snowshoed anyway, but Lone Pine is closer to my house and, after all, we didn't get THAT much snow.  The trail up to the top of Lone Pine was snow-packed and icy, so I was glad to have my trusty YakTrax and my poles to keep me upright. 
 
 It was a beautiful day, cold and crisp and the walking warmed me.  I climbed up the Cliff Trail and paused when a bunny dashed across the trail in front of me.  Bunnies aren't bred for brains, so this one stopped under a big rock, believing himself to be invisible.  I fumbled in my pocket for my camera, turned it on and found the bunny - still frozen and 'invisible' to me.  Poor bunny.  There's a reason that they are incredibly fertile.

He was cute and as soon as I rearranged my camera into my pocket, grabbed my poles and continued on my way up the trail, he hopped away through the snow.

 The trail led me up to a vantage point below the overlook, but I am always fascinated with the geology of a place, so I looked up at the rocks looming overhead.  At one time in Lone Pine's history, the overlook was used as a dumping-off place for old cars, dead refrigerators and bald tires.  There are still a few traces of rusted bits of castoff machinery below the overlook, left there by the Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department because it's too hard to remove.  Now we have a lovely trail system where there was once only the novel pastime of seeing how far an old tire could bounce on the rocks far below the drop-off point.

As I looked up at the rocks, I began to feel the cold, so I pushed on up the trail looking forward to being at the upper vantage point.  There is a place on the trail where a hiker must climb up and over some sizable rocks.  This always means to me that I'm past the steepest part of the trail and the end is in sight.  I like climbing on the rocks.  Somehow, they seem friendly and not so steep as the switchbacks that lay just behind me.  The sun was shining and I thought I'd stop and take another photo.

My next stop was at the overlook itself where I admired my little town, the mountains and the view of Glacier National Park in the clouded dip beside Columbia Mountain.  The mountains in winter are beautiful and I longed to be in the park, no matter what the weather.  Perhaps a snowshoeing road trip is a good idea.  Then my working friends could join us on a weekend.

I always like going downhill much more than going uphill, so I started on the downward path toward the bottom of the hill and my waiting car.  I didn't see any deer this time, so my little bunny was my only companion on my hike.  I can't wait for more snow so I can snowshoe up the trail. 

 Today, we woke up to rain.  RAIN.  It'll be icy on Lone Pine this afternoon, but I might make the attempt anyway and dream of more snow later in the winter.

STATE OF WONDER by Ann Patchett

I just finished another great book by Ann Patchett.  This time she returned to South America where BEL CANTO was set, but we were taken to the Amazonian jungle, down sinuous rivers choked with trees on both sides and filled with terrifying predators, insects and cannibals.

The main character was Dr. Marina Singh, a pharmacologist who came to that field after leaving a promising surgical obstetrics residency after a tragic accident in which she blinded a newborn during a C-section.  She worked for a large pharmaceuticals company, Vogel, in her home state of Minnesota.
Marina seemed apart from everything from the beginning.  She is a the daughter of a blond Minnesota mother and a professor from Calcutta, India.  She works with Dr. Anders Eckman in statins and is having a secret affair with the CEO of Vogel, Mr. Fox, who never shows her any affection, or even recognition in public.  Marina is coerced into a trip to the Brazillian laboratory after word comes that Anders has died of a fever on a trip to Brazil to judge the work of Dr. Swenson, brilliant but elusive head of the drug development lab in the jungle.  That Dr. Swenson was once Marina's teacher and mentor during her disgrace in surgery adds an element of suspense and tension to Marina's life.
This novel is Marina's journey from the comfortable, mundane life in Minnesota to the steamy, unknown life in the jungle.  The nearer she gets to the answers that she seeks, the more she is stripped bare of her former life.  And, as her former self falls away, her true character shines forth with her innate humanity and courage.

Meeting her nemesis and former mentor changes how Marina thinks about herself and her abilities to be a doctor.  She begins a journey of discovery about her priorities and her loves, and in the process, she finds a vein of iron in her personality that allows her to save one friend while sacrificing another.

The end of the book leaves the reader with a lot of questions.  I want to know where Marina goes from here, having been altered beyond imagination by her experiences in the jungle with the Lakashi tribe and their miraculous trees, moths and mushrooms that can both extend a hand to fertility and condemn a woman to a lifetime of childbearing.  Dr. Swenson was the tragic result of wanting too much and having too little to give.

I would recommend this book overwhelmingly to anyone who loves a good story and a puzzle to consider long after the last page has been turned.

String Theory for the Middle Ages

I'm becoming more and more convinced that as women age, they fall under two theories of body changes - the String theory and the Dough theory.  Some women become thin and stringy, appearing to lose mass to the point that their muscles and tendons show prominently through their skin.  At first, it's a good look - one of strength and sinewy grace.  Grace soon gives way to grotesque and you look at them and think about wasting diseases.

The other theory is just as unkind.  What were once well-defined muscles become, well, doughy.  This dough has the properties of bread dough - floppy, stretchy and pale.  One looks in the mirror and wonders at what temperature those doughy blobs would firm up again to resemble firm contours of health.  Maybe that's why so many seniors go to Arizona and Florida.  They harbor a secret hope that the heat will improve their dough.

NanoWrimo goal achieved!

I last made a post just before the National Novel Writing Month of November kicked off.  I guess I can only write one thing at a time.  I did meet my NanoWrimo goal of 50,000 words.  YAY!  It was more difficult than last year because I overextended and agreed to work for 5 days, thus missing my goals for those days - 10,000 words. Gulp.  I managed to make them up and squeaked by at the last minute. 

My novel this year was a quieter one.  Last year, I found myself embroiled in an epic.  It grew larger and larger, kind of like a piece of tofu that I tried once.  I spit out the tofu but the novel lives on, still growing larger and calving into two future novels.  While that is exciting, I decided to experiment with a quieter novel this time.  A contemporary novel with one main character who has life problems to face.  I found it to be less exciting than sending a young man to war, or killing off several people during the influenza epidemic of 1918, but with a quiet novel, it's easier to go deeper into the character and really get to know her in depth.

I attended a class associated with the NanoWrimo month and, together with my classmates, we discussed the problems of writing a novel.  It was fun to hear how other people handled the flow and creative life of a longterm writing project.  My instructor, Kathy, advised us to put the novel away once we had our rough first draft and let it 'percolate' in our minds.  So right now I'm letting my quiet novel percolate while I've started another rough draft of a book that has been in the back of my mind for several years. 

Ideally, this is the start of a continuum of writing and percolating, editing and percolating, writing and percolating.  The object is to continue a process, a neverending yet everchanging process.  I like the sound of that.