Susan's Hill Country Journal

July 4. It’s hard to believe, but we’ve gotten over a foot of rain since Saturday—13", to be accurate. It looks as if this rain system (a "rain event," as the meteorologists call it) is moving off to the west, so maybe we’ll get some sunshine today. The creek has retreated inside its banks and Bill’s bridges survived intact, but the ground is like a wet sponge. The real problems, though, are in the counties just to the south of us, where houses have been carried downstream and people have died. Most of the flooding, though, is in areas where it has flooded before, more than once. I guess if people want to live beside the river, they have to consider the dangers, as well as the beauties, of nature. Whatever else it has done, though, the floods have given me some good ideas for A Dilly of a Death, which I’ll probably think of to myself as the "flood book."

July 7. The weather system took its sweet time about moving, and today is the first day in over a week that we haven’t had any rain, and I’ve been out taking pictures of the sunflowers, which are undaunted by gloomy skies. Already this is the rainiest July on record, and it may be the coolest, too. We haven’t hit 100 degrees yet. The flood cleaned out Pecan Creek, and the water is beautifully clear and amber-colored--tannins from the plant material in the cattail swamp, I suppose. The pools are full of carp, sunfish, and striped bass, washed down from the lake. I took a day off from Dilly to work on my magazine pieces today. My deadlines have been changed so that they’re both due the same day, which makes me focus on them and saves time in the long run.

July 12. I’ve laid Dilly aside for a few days in order to work on the OWL project, planning to get it wrapped up in time for an August 1 submission to the University of Texas Press. This is a Story Circle anthology called With Courage and Common Sense, a collection of short memoirs written by women in our Older Women’s Legacy Circle workshops in 1999 and 2000. We had another editor on the book, but the Press rejected that version, so I inherited it last October and spent a couple of weeks reworking it. In May, the book was finally accepted. One of the big jobs has been getting people’s permission to publish their work. Quite a few haven’t replied to my letters and phone calls, which is pretty frustrating. I’ve also been working on the Potter proposal, planning to send it off next week.

July 16. The Beatrix Potter proposal went off yesterday: two sample chapters, an expanded outline for the first book, outline sketches for books two and three, as well as ideas for the remaining four books. The package will take a while to work its way through the system, since this requires a fairly substantial commitment on the part of the publisher—in terms of books, I mean. It’s not the sort of project they could begin and then abandon, halfway through. By this time, of course, I’m completely invested in this idea, and I’ll be very disappointed (very, very, very!) if it’s rejected. But I’ve been in the business long enough to know that rejections happen for all kinds of reasons, some of them entirely unrelated to the project’s worthiness. It will probably be at least a month before I hear anything, maybe longer. This is the time of year when everybody’s out on vacation.

July 20. Our webmistress, Peggy, has inspired me to start a walking program. She got a treadmill and has lost . . . well, I won’t say just how much, but it is substantial. And she says she feels stronger and more energetic. Bill and I walk up to the lake every day with the dogs, a leisurely half mile broken by pauses to admire the wildflowers, birds, and lovely lake—brimful now, since the rains—but our morning stroll doesn’t really qualify as serious walking, I’m afraid. I considered getting a treadmill, but if I don’t stick with it, I’ll feel doubly guilty: guilty for not walking and guilty for letting the treadmill sit idle. So I’ve decided instead to add more walking time to my morning walk. This morning, I put the dogs into their kennel and did an extra quarter-mile, up the lane to the gate and back. I’ll do a quarter mile for a week, then add another quarter mile, and so on. This takes determination, when the temperature is 80 degrees and the dew point 80, which makes for 100 percent humidity. But I’m determined.

July 25. I’m mourning the loss of a great many pretty rosemary bushes. A couple of them died off last spring, and now it looks as if I’ll lose about a dozen others. The tips wilt, the bush turns completely brown, and the plant is dead—all in a couple of weeks. I did some research on the problem, and it looks as if the bad guy is a soil fungus call Phytophthora, otherwise known as root rot. The plants that died first were probably stressed by the drought—the ones that died this month were probably stressed by the rains. A number of survived, though, and I’m taking starts of those, hoping that perhaps they have some resistance.

July 29. Our neighbors asked if they could put their two horses into our pasture, and we’ve agreed. So Candy and Jimbo moved in yesterday. Candy is what Judy (her owner) calls a "brood mare," happy only when she’s pregnant. She’s pregnant again, although I forgot to ask when the blessed event is expected. Jimbo is her colt, and nearly two years old. We’ve been wanting to find a way to keep the grass cut without a lot of extra work on our part, and this seems right. The fences are good and there’s a watering tank and plenty of shade. We went up this morning to say hello to our two new residents, and give them a couple of carrots.