Shifting over to My Author Website (possibly permanently)

Hi, folks, Just wanted to let y'all know that I'm shifting content from here over to my author website: www.katherinescottcrawford.com. This is temporary, but may be a permanent move. Blogger has been giving me headaches and I can't seem to fix the format. To see all my recent posts, including today's newspaper column--which is about a childhood, Southern summers, and regaining some of that summer magic, go www.katherinescottcrawford.com">here. I've been blogging solely at my author site since April, so please feel free to catch up!

New Publication Date for Keowee Valley

Hi, all!

Just got word from my publishers that the new, official publication date for Keowee Valley is September 27. In addition, pre-orders will be available within the next two weeks at places like Amazon.com, etc. So exciting!

More from me soon when things calm down about the tail end of the publication journey. For now, I'm wallowing in my last night at the beach with family and friends.

Reclaiming Summer

Rhododendron in Pisgah National Forest
(Credit: myspace.com)

The rhododendron are blooming in the Pisgah National Forest. Milky white with pink centers, in fanning green bushes tall as trees. On my favorite trail they grow like a great tunnel, canopying above. Running beneath them yesterday, the smell was like the forest exhaling summer.

It was only my second trail run since I'd sprained my ankle pretty terribly last month. If you're a runner, or even a part-time runner, you know what the first run back after a break is like: it's wonderful. Truly, you feel like a rock star, like you could run for days.

And then there's the second run. This was yesterday for me, running on very sore legs and a grumpy ankle encased in an Ace brace, my eyes scanning the trail ahead for unruly roots or rocks. My dog (an extremely athletic, almost 9 year-old black lab) bounded ahead, pausing only to drink from creeks or to look back at me as if to say, "What's up with you? We're in the forest, don't you get it?"

Then there was the rhododendron. And soon I was looking up, breathing in. Sure, I felt every jar in my ankle, blinked back sweat from my eyes, readjusted my sloshing Camelback. But when my dog shoots me one of those looks, one of those looks that says, Come on, you ridiculous human, this is the LIFE, it's imperative that I listen.

At the end of my last post I mentioned seizing the summer, trying to recapture the essence of what made this season so spectacular when we were kids. But it's hard, isn't it? Our lives are insanely busy, complicated, and the days pass so quickly that looking at a calendar is a recipe for whiplash. But if we don't do it--don't slow down, don't take a moment to just be--then the moment is lost, and we never get it back.

It's time to reclaim summer.

Here are three items from my personal "to do" list--things I hope will help me take back summer from the oppressive heat, the jam-packed schedule, the blood-thirsty mosquitoes in my backyard:

My daughter, 2 years old, baking a birthday cake for her daddy yesterday.

1. Enjoy time with my daughter. Really enjoy it. Take her for walks in the woods, for creek adventures and ice cream. Show her how to catch lightning bugs. Listen to what she has to say.

2. Read as many books as is humanly possible. Even if it keeps me up late at night. Even if I look a decade older in the morning. Read anything I want--magazines, books from the bestseller list, biographies, beach reads. Be brave enough to put a book down if I don't fall in love with it. (As an English professor, I have a hard time with this.) But summer is far too fleeting to trudge through a book you don't like.

So far, my reading list this summer has included Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot, Melissa de la Cruz's Witches of East End, Patricia Hampl's The Florist's Daughter, Adriana Trigiani's The Shoemaker's Wife, and various issues of Garden & Gun, Southern Living, Poets & Writers, Parenting Magazine, and a little book a dear friend gave me that we keep in the bathroom, called Very Nice Ways to Say Very Bad Things.

3. Breathe. I mean it. Really breathe, deeply and cleanly, inhaling the light (the smell of rhododendron in full bloom, wafting scents from restaurants I pass on my walks around town, my daughter's giggles, my husband's clean shirts, the sweet early morning mist) and exhaling the dark (too little sleep, a calendar that would make the most "together" woman I know weep, short tempers, a cluttered house).

After all, it is summertime. And the intrinsic magic of summer never really fades, no matter how old we get.

So what's on your reading list? (I need ideas!) What do you plan to do to enjoy summer?

Summertime, Summertime

I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it was always June.

~ L. M. Montgomgery

Summer is here, summer is here, summer is here! For me, there is no real dilineation of the season except for the letting-out of school, the thick mist low on the bottomlands, the emergence of green corn, and the appearance of the lightening bugs. I still feel summer like a child does, like a glow low in my abdomen, spread out to the edges of my appendages, sparking at the fingertips and bare feet. It is, as it always was, a gorgeous, magic, infinite time of year, no matter how old I get or how my life changes.

This past week I abandoned the Internet for a week at my family's lakehouse in the South Carolina foothills. This, and my willful, lazy embrace of summer, are the reasons for my not writing in a while, here. I don't have a good excuse.

The lakehouse is a special place for me, with a honing beacon that pings and lights no matter how long or far away I go from it. I could fill a book with the memories made there. But this past week, I was there because my husband was out of town on business, my daughter is out of preschool, and I'd just finished the last packet of my first grad school semester--30 pages plus 20 more for my summer residency mailed off--and for the first time in several months, my reading material was my own.

I packed an extra bag full of novels, biographies, new magazines, and DVDs, certain I'd wake early and stay up late, just to soak it all in. I took my laptop, thinking I'd be so inspired by sunrise over the lake and blue mountains that I'd be up every morning long before anyone else, typing away as I used to there as a teenager, so easily inspired. 

My soon-to-be three year-old, whom I was solo-parenting for the week, obviously didn't get the memo that Mama was going to be reading. And writing. She woke every night between 3 and 5 a.m., and only took a nap on the first and last day we were there. I spent days chasing her up and down steps, pushing her on the swing her Grandaddy installed at his Tiki Bar, just for her, and funneling her away from the edge of the dock. It also rained for three days straight. At the end of the week I looked about ten years older, and not tan. So not tan.

But still, it was a good week away from my house, my desk, my work worries. Sometimes you simply have to physically remove yourself from those things to disconnect. And, I had good friends visit, time with them and their kids, time--even if only snippets of it--to talk, to share, to laugh, to simply be. And this is priceless.

Photo credit: www.runwildadventures.com

Navigating motherhood alongside being a writer (and now, again a student) has been nothing but a challenge: an obstacle course like one of those mud runs, where you get to leap over fire and scale slippery walls and climb under barbed wire. You know the ones: where you come up utterly exhausted, your clothes trashed, with muck in your mouth and in your nose but a huge grin on your face.  Yep: motherhood is like this.

Thank God I like to get muddy.

Since it is summer, and the ferns are green in the woods, the crickets sounding their thrum at night, I vow to soak it in. To breathe. To go barefoot, eat a popsicle, ride a bike, and get dirty. I may be doing all these things with an almost three year-old in tow, and on very little sleep, but they'll happen. For it is summer (my, what a word!), and it doesn't get much better than this.