Susan's Hill Country Journal

September 12.

Getting away is always wonderful, but coming home is a shock, especially when the temperatures on Ontario’s Bruce Peninsula (our favorite get-away spot) were in the 70s, and it’s 95 here now. However, I have a large collection of pictures to help me remember what it was like—such as this one, a view of Lake Huron, taken from the deck outside the cottage, looking out across Johnson Harbor.
One morning, Bill and I took the canoe to a small lake and spent several quiet hours enjoying ourselves. This picture shows what Bill looks like with a paddle in his hand.
We surprised a trio of Canada geese preening their feathers, admired a kingfisher diving for his dinner, and floated through a garden of water lilies so unexpectedly, beautifully exotic in this Canadian wilderness.

September 14. Now that vacation is over, the laundry is done, and (almost) everything is put away, it’s time to start writing again. While we were gone, we did some background research on the next Robin Paige, a book about anarchism and terrorists at the beginning of the century—a fascinating and frightening topic that shows us that the more things change, the more they change the same. But it feels good to be back at work again, and I’m looking forward to digging into this book. Death at Hyde Park, we’re calling it.

September 18. We just heard from our Berkley editor that my proposal for the Beatrix Potter series has been accepted! This is great news, although I feel both excited and daunted by the idea of this project. Beatrix is a truly remarkable woman—far more complex than our usual idea of her as the illustrator of the popular children’s books—and it won’t be easy to do justice to her. But I loved writing about her in Death at Gallows Green, and I know that the project will be an exciting challenge. I’ll write the first book early next year, for publication in Summer, 2004. The title I’ve proposed for the series is The Beatrix Potter Cottage Tales, but the marketing people like to get involved with decisions like that, so we’ll have to wait and see what they think.

September 21. Today is our sixteenth wedding anniversary. We didn’t do much to celebrate—just gave ourselves an anniversary dinner at our favorite Oriental restaurant in Marble Falls (the only Oriental restaurant there, as a matter of fact) and talked about the years that seem to have flown by since our wedding. We were married on the Fall Equinox in Zilker Park in Austin, with drifts of roses all around, and swans on the little lake, and our family and friends there to help us celebrate. It seems like such a short time ago, and yet it also seems an immense and unimaginable stretch of time, and when I look at the pictures, we all seem so young. Bill and I hadn’t yet learned to live together, or work together (which is the greater challenge)—and there have been times when we wondered if we’d be able to pull it off. It’s easier now, somehow. Maybe we’re finally beginning to get the hang of being married and being partners in our own business.

September 27. The fires in Colorado have made us think about our own vulnerability to fire. The hills around us are covered with Eastern red cedar, small brushy trees that go up like a torch when they’re lit. (I’ve seen this happen, unfortunately.) So we’ve been clearing out the cedar brake behind the house, cutting down the small trees and trimming the larger ones. It’s not an easy job, but a necessary one, and we’ll both feel a lot better when it’s done. We’ll shred most of what we cut for garden mulch, and split the rest for firewood. The fields are full of bright goldenrod and purple gayfeather, and the temperature is still in the upper 80s—far too warm to think about sitting in front of the fireplace in the evenings, but we can dream….