Thursday, August 30, 2018
Don Travis: Walls
Don Travis: Walls: dontravis.com blog post #300 Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons The Lovely Pines was released this past Tuesday, August 28. It’s always...
Walls
dontravis.com
blog post #300
 |
| Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons |
The Lovely Pines was
released this past Tuesday, August 28. It’s always a good feeling when a fellow
has a book published, and this one’s no exception. I do hope you’ll get a copy
and read it.
After plugging my book last week, today we’ll return to some
short fiction. It’s long for a blog—1,000 words—but stick with it to the end.
It might surprise you. Here we go.
*****
WALLS
I loved Leah from the first moment
I saw her. That’s not right. She was just pretty the first time. The second
time, she was smart and interesting. The third
time I fell for her… hard. She later told me it took three months before she
reached that conclusion about me.
“Lyle,” she said. “I wasn’t even
sure I liked you the first time we met.”
That had been at a neighbor’s
backyard barbecue party. I tried to be charming and overdid the thing, most
likely. She was a thirtyish widow at the time, and I was coming off a torrid,
two-year affair with Jacob Flynch.
In retrospect, I suppose the
walls were there from the beginning, but we were too involved in getting to
know each other and setting up a household
to realize it. Jacob, still a friend, was in my life, but Harold was absent. She
instinctively disliked my Jake, and I didn’t know her Harold. It was natural
that I was reluctant to talk much about a guy I’d shared a long gay
relationship with, but she was just as loath to reveal her dead husband to me.
A year of enjoying what we had
together allowed us to establish the boundaries of what we would and what we
would not discuss. Even so, the first symptoms of the malaise racing towards
our marriage took shape when she skipped some events attended by Jake and his
wife, both of whom remained in our circle of friends.
Perhaps in retaliation, I asked
about her dead spouse, a subject always touchy. When I had listened instead of
indulged in talking at social gatherings, a few rumors permeated my consciousness. Overbearing.
Violent? If that was all, why couldn’t she talk about it with me? After all, I
was an open book to her… except about Jake, of course. Which meant the last two
years of my life were off limits.
“How come you don’t talk about
him,” I asked bluntly one day. “Whenever I ask, a wall goes up. Invisible, but
as substantial as brick and mortar.”
“And why won’t you talk about
Jacob Flynch?”
“You don’t like him, that’s why.”
“Well, you wouldn’t have liked
Harold, either.”
“How do I know? I don’t know who
he was.”
“I did. So take my word for it.”
Except for the walls around these
two subjects, our life was nice… comfortable. I made a good living as an
architect; she contributed considerably as an artist. There were years she made
more than I did, but those were rare. Gradually, the walls lowered but never
disappeared. Anytime I broached the subject of her first husband, they returned,
substantial and insurmountable. Whenever I spoke of Harold, she raised Jake.
“I’ve heard things, you know,” I
said one day after a verbal skirmish.
She stopped me cold with a raised
eyebrow and the words “so have I.”
It’s hard to pursue a legitimate
line of inquiry when you have a corker like mine riding your shoulder.
Everything came to a head the
evening of our fifth anniversary. Leah was in a fury as we came home from a
party Jake had thrown for us. She slammed out of the car and marched up the
stairs to our second-floor bedroom with a spine so stiff it would have done a
Marine honor. I’d turned everything upside down with my toast to her. And to
this minute, I didn’t know exactly why I’d done it.
I’d raised my glass and gazed
into her eyes as I said, “My most fervent wish, my darling, is that I were your
first husband.”
That sounded terribly romantic—at least to me—until
I heard Jake mutter under his breath, “You mean dead?”
Leah turned to ice right in
front of me and everyone else. The party broke up shortly after that. Now I
followed her rigid frame up the stairway.
“What was wrong with my toast?”
She whirled in the middle of our
bedroom. Rage turned her ugly. Her nose and ears flared a dark pink. The
splotches on her cheeks were something akin to magenta. Not a good combination
beneath her makeup. Anger did something to her perfume, rendering it rancid. “What
was wrong with it? You brought him to
our anniversary!”
I wasn’t certain if she meant
Harold or Jake.”
“You’re so set on learning about
him?” she snarled. “Well, I’ll tell you about him. He beat me. Not just struck
me. He beat me. You want to know why we
don’t have children? Because he… he injured me down there. You—”
“I’m so sorry, Leah. I didn’t—”
“Don’t ‘I didn’t know’ me. The
whole room knew. Ask your boyfriend about him. He knows, and if he does, so do
you. And you told them all you’d like to be Harold.”
“That’s not what I meant. And
everyone knows it… except you. Honey, you don’t have to—”
I dodged a pillow. “Get out! Go
downstairs. Go anywhere. Go to your lover boy, for all I care,” she shrieked.
“Leah, that was over—”
“Then why is he in our life? You’ve
flaunted Jacob Flynch in front of me for five years. Well, I’m sick of it. Go
back to him. I don’t care. Go back to him!”
I’d like to say she was crying
at this point, but she wasn’t. Pure spite shone in her eyes. Her carefully
pinned and sprayed hair hung limp over one ear.
I collected my dignity and took
the higher road. “I’ll sleep in the downstairs bedroom tonight, and we’ll
discuss this rationally in the morning.”
I turned and walked out of the
room. At the head of the stairs, I paused to think. How had Harold died?
“That’s right,” Leah said. “He
fell down the stairs and broke his neck.”
I whirled. She was right behind
me.
*****
Well,
what do you think? Should she be called Lethal Leah or Tragic Leah. Or are they
mutually exclusive. I know what I think happened and would be pleased to know the
conclusion you draw.
Now
my mantra: Keep on reading. Keep on
writing. You have something to say… so say it.
If
you would like to drop me a line, my personal links follow:
Facebook:
www.facebook.com/donald.travis.982
Twitter:
@dontravis3
Here
are some buy links to the Lovely Pines,
which (as noted) was released on August 28:
Abaddon’s
Locusts is scheduled for release on January 22, 2019. I’m still only 70 percent
of the way through the first draft of The
Voxlightner Scandal. Had some setbacks.
See
you next week.
Don
New Posts are
published at 6:00 a.m. each Thursday.
Thursday, August 23, 2018
The Lovely Pines
dontravis.com
blog post #299
 |
| Artist, Maria Fanning |
People apparently liked MoonPie Davis. He got a lot of
page views and a few comments from readers. I really enjoy hearing from you because it lets me know how I’m doing .
I know we had a recent post on The Lovely Pines, but the
book’s release date is Tuesday the 28th, so can’t resist the urge.
This is the fourth book in the BJ Vinson series, and I chose to make the
setting of the novel north of Albuquerque in the wine country. Many people don’t
know that New Mexico was one of the earliest wine-producing regions in North
America. Nor is it common knowledge that the town of Bernalillo fifteen miles
north of Albuquerque was originally established around a thousand years ago as
an Anasazi settlement. It was abandoned when the Spanish arrived and made it a
military encampment. Placitas, a small (but pricey) settlement west of
Bernalillo On the slopes of Sandia Mountain was also originally settled by the ancient ones. Of course, if you read
my book, you’ll be introduced to those facts.
I had to do a little research for this one because, you see,
I don’t drink. About twice a year I’ll have a glass of red wine with a meal,
but I have no “nose” for wines. I can’t tell the difference between a good one
and a mediocre one.
The scene I’ve chosen below comes at the end of Chapter 2.
BJ is making his first trip to the Lovely Pines Winery and Vineyard at Valle Plácido
just east of Placitas. He’s been engaged to investigate a senseless break-in at
the winery during which a hasp was pried off to gain admission, but nothing was
taken nor was there vandalism. It’s a background scene, not an action scene.
When it opens, BJ is talking to James Bledsong, a transplanted Californian, who
is both vigneron (responsible for cultivating the vineyard) and viticulturist (in
charge of the health and well-being of the fields). I hope it gives you a
feeling of the book.
*****
THE
LOVELY PINES
“Old man C de Baca was a pretty good
viticulturist. He didn’t overplant. He used an eight-foot by five-foot spacing,
and that yields around 1,000 vines per acre. We’re stepping it down a little,
so the newly planted acreage will average around 1,500 plants. We get about
four or five tons of grapes to the acre. We could produce more, but the lower
harvest gives us a sweeter fruit. So we do some green harvesting.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Green harvesting?”
“That’s what we call removing some of the
immature grape clusters. When these new plants mature, Mr. Gonda will be able
to cork eighty thousand bottles a year or more.”
“That much?”
“Oh yeah. And a high percentage of it’ll
be good quality wine too.”
“Do you have any ideas about what happened
a couple of weeks ago?”
“You mean the break-in? That happened at
night, and I’m too far from the winery to have heard anything.” He pointed over
his shoulder to the larger of the two buildings at the east end of the field.
“That’s my house over there. It’s just me and my wife, Margaret. Maggie, I call
her.”
“No children?”
A look of pain crossed his pleasant features.
“Late-term miscarriage. Maggie can’t have anymore. Sometimes it weighs her
down.”
“I’m sorry. But she’ll compensate. You
both will.”
“She already has. She’s active in the Healthy
Nation. It’s a group of families in the area that works with local children to
keep them out of trouble.”
“Sounds like a good organization. How
about your people? What’s the scuttlebutt among them?”
“The guys who work for me, you mean? There
are only two of them, Claudio Garcia and Winfield Tso.” He pointed to two men
working among the plants some distance away. One figure towered over the other,
putting me in mind of the old Mutt and Jeff cartoons. “I guess they figure the
deputies were right. Kids, most likely,” Bledsong added.
“I don’t know many kids who’d go to the
trouble of prying a hasp off a door to a winery without doing damage beyond
throwing some papers around and making off with a single bottle of wine.”
“Yeah, that bothers me too. It’s a
puzzler.”
“Any problems like that in the vineyard?”
“The lake’s outside the fence, so kids
come swim sometimes. We don’t have a wall like they do around the winery, but
our cyclone fence keeps wildlife—including kids—out of the field better than
four feet of rock. Anybody and anything can get over the wall over yonder.”
I asked a few more questions before
returning to the chateau. On the way I started to change tapes in my little
machine before remembering I’d joined the modern world and now used a digital
recorder.
Gonda was still at the winery, but Margot
showed me the tasting room—which was empty at the moment—where I learned I’d
been drinking wine the wrong way for lo these many years. It wasn’t a soda and
shouldn’t be imbibed in the same manner. Then she insisted we have a cup of
espresso in the Bistro, where I met the cook, a plump lady with an angel face
named Nellie Bright. A local girl introduced as Katie served us at a small,
intimate table in the corner.
“Are you on board with this?” I asked as
soon as we were situated.
“On board? Ah, you mean do I approve?
After all these years, your colloquialisms still throw me on occasion.”
I had assumed she was native-born. She
spoke with no appreciable accent. “You’re Swiss?”
“Oh yes. I come from Bern. Ariel and I met
at the University of Zurich, where I was reading finance and he was taking a
degree in oenology.” She noticed my frown and came to the rescue. “That’s the
science of winemaking. He also holds a second read… what you call a minor… in finance.
We were wed in Valois in June of 1988, shortly before he came to the United
States. I followed later. But to answer your question, yes, I am on board, as
you say. If the incident worries Ariel, then it worries me as well.”
“Do you have any idea what might be going
on? Sometimes wives see things husbands don’t.”
She spread her hands, palms up. “I am at a
loss. I can find no explanation for anyone breaking into the winery. Perhaps
the sheriff’s office is correct. It was children.”
I asked Margot the same question I put to
Bledsong earlier about children breaking in without at least stealing a lot of
wine.
She frowned. “Then what could it be?” At
that moment I believe the incident became as serious to her as it was to her
husband.
Shortly thereafter, I excused myself and
wandered back to the winery. Gonda was in his lab, but I didn’t bother him. I
merely walked around the place seeing what I could figure out on my own. I
found the press and what I was pretty sure was the primary fermentation
equipment. I also figured out the secondary fermentation setup, but beyond that
I was lost.
The cellar beckoned, and I wandered down
the long, silent rows of barrels. The temperature and the high humidity raised
chill bumps on my arms. When I reached the area against the rear wall that
looked like a campout spot, I paused to consider things.
The two wine bottles—the one disturbed in
the rack and the one taken—argued someone gained access to the winery when they
were not supposed to. There had been no additional break-ins, and Gonda kept
tight control of the keys. That suggested the intruder laid his hands on a
duplicate set.
Whoa,
now, Vinson. Don’t get ahead of yourself. Do the background checks and see if
anything turns up that suggests skullduggery on the part of an employee. After
all, they wander in and out of the place all day long. Gonda wasn’t constantly
in his lab, so someone could have entered and fussed with the champagne bottle.
Likewise, it wouldn’t be too hard to smuggle a bottle from the cellar during
work hours.
The only way in and out of the cellar was
through the winery, and thence to the outside by means of any one of three
exits: the main entry at the front, a smaller portal opening to the east, and a
large roll-up door giving out onto a loading dock on the west side. All three
doors were sturdy and showed no evidence of damage, no appearance of having
been picked. Of course, an expert thief would probably leave no such evidence.
Gonda assured me all the locks had been changed after he acquired the business
from the C de Bacas.
No, the break-in was not the work of a
professional. Professionals did not rip a hasp from the door unless they were
doing a smash-and-grab job. And this had not been one of those operations.
Stealth. Except for the hasp.
I made a point of shaking hands with each
of the three winery workers. Parson Jones was a black man in his early forties.
Bascomb Zuniga looked to be a Hispanic barely old enough to work around
alcohol. John Hakamora, a Japanese American, said he came out of the
south-central New Mexico lettuce fields. Marc Juisson, the nephew, was away on
a business trip, so I would meet him later.
It was midafternoon before I collected the
payroll records from Margot and promised to have Charlie Weeks contact her to
come out to fingerprint everyone. Then, with the champagne bottle still in its
protective wrapper, I climbed into my white Impala and headed for Albuquerque.
I’d tackle the two vineyard workers later.
*****
Again,
I apologize for doing another post on the book so close to an earlier one, but
its pending release in five days overrode my common sense..
Now
my mantra: Keep on reading. Keep on
writing. You have something to say… so say it.
If
you would like to drop me a line, my personal links follow:
Facebook:
Don Travis
Twitter:
@dontravis3
Here
are some buy links to the Lovely Pines,
which (as noted) is programmed for release on August 28 (which is coming up
fast):
Abaddon’s
Locusts is scheduled for release on January 22, 2019. I’m about 70 percent of
the way through the first draft of The
Voxlightner Scandal.
See
you next week.
Don
New Posts are
published at 6:00 a.m. each Thursday.
Thursday, August 16, 2018
Don Travis: MoonPie Davis
Don Travis: MoonPie Davis: dontravis.com blog post #298 Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons I got 93 page views from Japan in one day on last week’s “Holly and the ...
MoonPie Davis
dontravis.com blog post #298
 |
| Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons |
I got 93 page views from Japan in one day on last week’s “Holly and the Gang.” A couple of times a year, I get a thousand or so hits from Israel. I wonder what prompts folks from a particular country or region to decide to look at my blog. They tell me it’s the keywords I attach to my posts, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out the proper ones to use… except for two or three times a year, apparently.
This week we’ll go for a short, short story a little different from last week’s.
*****
MOONPIE DAVIS
MoonPie Davis… that was what everybody called me, even the grownups—including my parents. I think most folks forgot my real name was Monroe. I pretty much lost that moniker at the swimming pool back when I was ten. When I came out of the water, my swimming trunks—an oversized hand-me-down from my older brother—slipped down over my buttocks. Naturally, everybody in town heard I’d mooned half the population, so I became Moon. That morphed into Moonie. Cynthia Swearingen added the p because I think she was sweet on me at the time… not so much now. But the p remained. Now I was Nickeltown’s MoonPie.
Nickeltown was about as far back in the sticks as you could get. Heck, we couldn’t even claim to be a one light town, we didn’t have any traffic lights at all. I can only think of two stop signs inside the berg’s limits. Twenty-seven of us kids graduated from high school this past May. Now it was the final summer before going off to college or hunting down a permanent job, and I found it stressful.
Alfie Summers was my best friend forever. We’d grown up together, gotten in trouble together, jerked off together once, graduated together. He was leaving for school in Texas in a few weeks, and I was going to miss him like crazy.
Wanda Sparks was my girlfriend. We’d also grown up together and graduated together… and I wished we’d jerked off together—or the equivalent thereof. She was heading to New Mexico for her higher education, also in a few weeks.
My life was being rent apart. I was heading for Arkansas to college where I didn’t know a soul and where no one understood me the way these two did. I wasted a week mooning around—what did you expect with a name like MoonPie? That was another thing, I’d have to get used to answering to Monroe again.
As the time to leave for college neared, I reached the conclusion the remaining days didn’t have enough time for both my friends. I would have to make a choice. Alfie was comfortable and interesting and exciting to be around. Wanda was, too. But in a different way. Unfortunately, they didn’t get along with one another well enough for us to buddy around. It only recently dawned on me why this was. They vied for my attention. Made me feel squirrelly when I understood that. Who would fight over MoonPie Davis? These two, I guess. But it was one or the other, that much was clear.
I took a day off from both of them to figure out my dilemma. It was a miserable day. Like I’d deprived myself of oxygen or something. Worse, it was a harbinger for days to come when neither of them would even be in the same state with me. As the endless day wore on, I tried to decide which one I missed the most. The answer was, both of them. Alfie made me laugh, challenged me at ball and chess and in the swimming pool. Wanda made me feel funny inside. I liked putting my arm around her shoulder in the movie and drawing her close. She smelled good. Felt good.
When I boiled it down in my mind, it came down to sex. I’d graduated from high school and hadn’t had any yet. Arrested development, some would say, although I’m convinced half the guys who crowed over making it with their girls were bullshitters. If not, then most of the girls in this bible belt town were sluts, and that was hard to swallow.
Nonetheless, that’s what all this came down to. I preferred Alfie’s company but craved what Wanda guarded. Guarded. That’s exactly what she did. Guarded her virginity. Was she gonna give in and invite me to participate? Not likely. For the rest of the summer, I’d go home at night aching and unfulfilled. Now, on the other hand, I was pretty sure I could talk Alfie out of his pants again. Wasn’t the same, but it was something.
That made my decision much easier.
*****
Well, did MoonPie make the right decision? Hard to say. One route might be right for some, and the other way might be right for others. That’s what makes the world go round, folks. Hope you enjoyed my musings.
Now my mantra: Keep on reading. Keep on writing. You have something to say… so say it.
If you would like to drop me a line, my personal links follow:
Facebook: Don Travis
Twitter: @dontravis3
Here are some buy links to the Lovely Pines, programmed for release on August 28 (which is coming up fast):
Abaddon’s Locusts is scheduled for release on January 22, 2019. I’m about 60 percent of the way through the first draft of The Voxlightner Scandal.
See you next week.
Don
New Posts are published at 6:00 a.m. each Thursday.
Thursday, August 9, 2018
Holly and the Gang
dontravis.com blog post #296
 |
| Courtesy of Public Domain Pictures |
I received a lot of page views on last week’s post about rain in New Mexico. Most of the hits were from outside the US. For the week, the most viewers came from Ukraine, followed by Russia, China, and Canada. Domestic viewers came in fifth. I thought that was interesting enough to share.
This week, let’s go for a short, short story called “Holly and the Gang.” Hope you like it.
*****
HOLLY AND THE GANG
I don’t know why I think of it as Holly and the gang. By rights, it should be Holly’s gang. Gang’s not quite right, either. Can four kids—including Holly—make up a gang? According to some of the neighbors, the answer is yes.
It started off with me’n Joey Staller some six years back. We were next door neighbors; me eight and him just barely nine. Carlos Hills started hanging around, so we included him even though he lived two streets over from us. Then Holly and her family moved into a house down at the end of the block. At first, we didn’t know what to make of her, but she was such a tomboy it wasn’t long before she fit right in. That’s probably when we earned the reputation as a gang.
Holly was lots bolder than the rest of us. Except maybe for Joey. He was all for making mischief, but I’d been able to put a halter on him most of the time. But when Holly came along, it was two against one. Carlos always went with the flow.
First, it was mailboxes. Not stealing, mind you. Just knocking them over and running like hell before someone came out and dusted our britches. Then it was letting air out of tires. Not puncturing them, just deflating them. No harm done, right? Not till old Mr. Harcourt two doors down didn’t know the difference between deflating and a flat and tried to change his tire on a sloping driveway, ending up on his butt when the jack collapsed. Pretty soon, it was like every day was Halloween. Trick or treat time, except we didn’t give our victims any option.
Of course, we got caught a time or two and earned grounding for a week or a switching… or both. But led by Holly, we didn’t let such temporary setbacks bother us.
Holly was a buddy, a pal, just like the other guys… until the day I noticed bumps beneath her grass-stained sweatshirt. Joey saw them, too, and spent a lot of time staring at them. Holly wouldn’t go skinny dipping anymore after that. Other things changed, too. Joey, my lifelong pal, started going squirrelly on me. If Holly whispered something in my ear, he’d puff up and demand to know what secret she’d shared, sometimes threatening to flatten my nose for me.
“Pauly, you tell me what she said, or I’ll bust your chops.”
“Go ask Holly. If she wants you to know, she’ll tell you.”
“I’m asking you.”
Somehow something always seemed to come up to prevent bloodshed. Most of the time what she whispered was something as innocuous as “Someday I’d like to live in California,” or “I saw Harry Knox kiss Eloise Randall.” Nothings. But if she whispered them in my ear, they were just for me, right?
It got so that I started finding other things to do besides hang out with my buds, but inevitably, Holly would show up at my door with the other two behind her and call me out to go to a show or on a hike or something. I’d usually give in, but something was changing, and I didn’t know why. Heck, if Joey would just go away, everything would be fine again.
The day that thought hit me between the eyes, I wandered off from the others and sat down with my back against an oak at the edge of the park. What was going on? Joey was my best… my oldest friend. How could I think about him that way?
For the life of me, I couldn’t say why, but that was the first time I really tried to figure things out. Joey had been at my side forever. He’d saved me from bullies a bunch of times. Now he was one. Why?
Another bolt from the blue. Holly. It was because of Holly. Those bumps I’d noticed a year ago were grapefruits now… little ones, anyway. But not hard like the fruit. Whenever she leaned in to whisper one of her “secrets” they pressed softly against my arm. OMG! For a guy who was school smart, I must be the dumbest ass in town. Joey was sweet on her. Not like a buddy… like a boyfriend. Geez, I didn’t even think of Holly that way. I sort of liked Margaret Hillcrest. She was a blonde and a girl, not a pal from the neighborhood.
With my new understanding, I managed to cool things off and go along more or less the way we always had. Until my fourteenth birthday, that is. That evening, when we gathered as usual for some hijinks we hadn’t yet decided, Holly promptly christened my birthday with a kiss.
That was the day Joey delivered on his long-threatened promise to punch me out.
That was also the day the gang broke up.
*****
When things are perfect, why do they always have to change? Carefree childhood days morph into adolescent uncertainties and conflict. One of the hardest lessons to learn is that “life goes on.” And the older you get the harder that reality is to accept. I hope this little story reminded you of something in your youth.
Now my mantra: Keep on reading. Keep on writing. You have something to say… so say it.
If you would like to drop me a line, my personal links follow:
Facebook: Don Travis
Twitter: @dontravis3
Here are some buy links to the Lovely Pines, which is programmed for release on August 28:
Abaddon’s Locusts is scheduled for release on January 22, 2019. I’m working hard on The Voxlightner Scandal.
See you next week.
Don
New Posts are published at 6:00 a.m. each Thursday.
Thursday, August 2, 2018
New Mexico Rain—the Lord’s Plaything
dontravis.com blog post #296
 |
| Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons |
After last week’s homage to the upcoming The Lovely Pines, a couple of hearty thunderstorms turned my thoughts to rain in New Mexico.
As regular readers know, I was born and raised in southeastern Oklahoma and grew up with weather fronts that moved in overnight to dominate the skies for the entire day, spoiling outdoor plans and darkening moods. I’ve spent nights in storm cellars because the elements were so threatening. I’ve experienced rain in Texas and California and Colorado and Arkansas and Germany and Hong Kong, as well as other places I’ve forgotten. In each locale, rain seemed natural to the scheme of things. Inevitable. Something to be endured.
To me, rain in New Mexico is different. It’s the Lord’s plaything. And you may interpret “Lord” any way you wish: as nature, as fate, whatever. But for the purposes of this piece, He is my Master, my Higher Power.
Plaything? How so? When I see heaps of ominous gray storm clouds to the west that would have sent me to that Oklahoma storm cellar, I merely wonder if it will reach us. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t, depending upon His whim. A man can stand directly beneath such roiling banks and never get wet even though it is obvious water is dropping on his head. Virga, they call it. Precipitation falling from the sky that evaporates before reaching the ground. If that isn’t a teasing Lord, I don’t know what it is. Sometimes I see gray curtains of pelting rain in the distance and prepare for a drubbing, but it never happens. I look again, and the skies are clearing with spears of laughing sunlight penetrating white fluffy clouds. Mischievous behavior at the least.
At times, unexpected lightning strikes so close that I rush to turn off and unplug my computer. Strange, I don’t take the same precaution with the TV. Is it because that, as a writer, my computer is crucial to my continued existence? The television set? Not so much, although I’ve occasionally spent interminable evenings trying to read with one eye glued to a set that proudly proclaimed: “No Signal.”
Albuquerque parents teach their children to watch the mountains as they play in the arroyos—natural dry waterways that claim any child’s attention and imagination. Paved arroyos attract roller skaters and boarders. Rocky-sided ones become private playgrounds for children safe from adult eyes. But it can rain miles away in the Sandias without a cloud worrying an Albuquerque sky and send unexpected torrents of muddy water on it’s headlong and uncontrolled race straight downhill to the Rio Grande, an ever-thirsty river, turning these ravines into death traps for the unwary.
Rain is fast-moving in New Mexico. It comes and it goes, usually in a matter of minutes. If I have something planned, I simply wait half an hour before going to do it. Sometimes the drops fall softly, dampening the dry dust as if the Lord is sad and weeping for His people. A hearty rain signifies contentment and pleasure. A pelting one, beating angrily against the Earth, sometimes driven sideways by limb-breaking gusts of hurricanic winds, warns of His displeasure.
Come to think of it. New Mexico rainfall is not my Lord’s plaything. It is His voice. So listen well.
*****
Perhaps some psychiatrist out there can enlighten me on why things appearing on these pages find birth in my mind. That might make for an interesting post.
I hope you enjoyed my mindless musings.
Now my modified mantra: Keep on reading. Keep on writing. You have something to say… so say it.
If you would like to drop me a line, my personal links follow:
Facebook: Don Travis
Twitter: @dontravis3
Here are some buy links to the Lovely Pines, which is programmed for release on August 28:
Abaddon’s Locusts is wrapped and waiting for release on January 22, 2019. I’m working on the new book, The Voxlightner Scandal. Its publication date has not been determined.
See you next week.
Don
New Posts are published at 6:00 a.m. each Thursday.
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