Life and Work, Beak and Claw

• At the reading, I felt as if the work were being tenderly received.


• After the conference was over, I rode my trike to Florence to see my friend J., who had made homemade pasta with shrimp and green tomato sauce. He had a salad from his garden (it's so warm so late this year), chicken with prosciutto, and a brownie with whipped cream and ice cream. It was good to sit out at the table on his porch, eat his beautiful food, and talk.


• My birthday is coming up, so last week I had to ride my trike to Hadley to the Registry of Motor Vehicles to get my license renewed. On the way back, I decided to try out the new extension of the bike path to get some groceries, but it turns out that the path ends at a steep hill just before the railroad tracks across King Street from the store. There was a dirt path up the hill, and I tried to ride up it, but it was too steep. The trike stopped, slid backwards, then, when I tried to turn, fell over on top of me. I rode it off the steep edge of the path in Hadley when I first got it, and had to jump off and hoist it by the handlebars to keep from losing it off a ledge, but this is the only time it's fallen over. I had a sore shoulder after that.


• I was riding past the graveyard on my way home from the conference on Saturday when I saw a large crow in the road peck at the body of a squirrel which had been killed by a car. It pulled loose a long, red strand of meat. Flocks of crows live in the graveyard, where people from the time of my novel, such as Jerusha Edwards, David Brainerd, Solomon and Esther Stoddard, and the Hawleys are buried. The whole Edwards family has a marker there, and crows appear throughout the book.