Barbara Samuel O'Neal is the author of more than thirty award-winning novels, including THE LOST RECIPE FOR HAPPINESS and

The Secret of Everything
The Secret of Everything

A native of Colorado, Barbara loves teaching, travel, reading, writing, yoga, walking, food, cooking, photography and...okay, reality television.

Follow Me:
Twitter
Facebook

Book review: MAYBE THIS TIME, by Jennifer Crusie

MAYBE THIS TIME
Jennifer Crusie
St Martin’s Press
ISBN 978-0-312-30378-5

It has been six years since Jennifer Crusie has written a solo novel.  Friends, it was worth the wait.  Maybe This Time, published by St. Martin’s Press on August 30th, is her best book yet.  It’s also another step in her long, interesting career, from category romances to big, funny contemporary romances to suspens-y books written with Bob May, to….this.

Maybe This Time will draw a cheer from readers who adored Bet Me (2004 RITA award winner) and her earlier romances for St. Martins, but it is a step outside romance into women’s fiction, in a story about a woman who is discovers herself, saves some children, and along the way, realizes that maybe she has some lingering feelings for the husband she left behind.

Oh, and there are ghosts. Real ghosts.  I love ghosts, and almost no one takes them seriously enough for my tastes. Crusie got it.  But then, she gets writing. She gets the poignant aspects of humor for women.  She gets the tangled communication between men and women, and how that impacts our love stories.  She gets love stories, for that matter.  This book is smart and funny, as all Crusie work is, but it’s also wise and rich in the best, most vivid details, and best of all, powered by a fierce heart of understanding.

Andie Miller is ready to get married again, but before she can walk down the aisle with her fiancé Will, she has to actually divorce the husband she left ten years ago.  North Archer is a lawyer who has faithfully sent an alimony check to Andie every month for the entirety of that ten years.  When Andie shows up at his office to announce her intention to wed, North asks one last favor.  Andie, who is both unconventional and kind, is the only person he can trust to assess the situation with North’s two young wards, who are marooned in a supposedly haunted house they will not leave.  Andie, of course, refuses—she doesn’t need to be anywhere close to North now that she’s made up her mind to get this done—until he offers her ten thousand dollars for one month of work.  It would solve a lot of problems, that money.  Then he throws in the kicker: the kids are alone and they need somebody. Andie agrees, leaving her fiancé safely in his own apartment.

What she doesn’t expect are those ghosts, or to fall in love with a little girl, or to discover that she isn’t really over North at all.

Not many writers would have the huevos to tackle Henry James and the Turn of the Screw, but luckily for us, Crusie never backs away from the ideas and themes that enchant her.  Maybe This Time is a furious page turner, and just scary enough that I didn’t especially want to go downstairs to the basement alone to finish reading it.  The ghosts are as well drawn as the rest of the cast, and so is the creepy, atmospheric house with its turrets and sad history.

But what Crusie does better than anyone is find the heart of why we fall in love with a particular person, and how the yearning to be seen and then have a witness to share our lives with, are such powerful hungers in each and every one of us.  By turns kind and fierce and graceful, Maybe This Time is the one book this fall you will want the minute it hits the stands.

Elsewhere, a blog on walking

No one here will be surprised at this post that I wrote for  Writer Unboxed.   I knew some of you would enjoy reading it, but keep forgetting to post a link here.

The Writer’s Toolbox: Walking

One of the number one requirements of a commercial fiction career is that you must reliably produce good material, year in and year out. Reliable and good are not always an easy combination. To do it, a writer has to take care of her body, her mind, and her spirit.

Over the years, I’ve found many ways to do that, but the mainstay is walking. I walk every morning, and take long walks on weekends and evenings; I walk around the cities I visit when I travel. I’ve done a marathon and a half over two days (Avon walk) and twice now have walked over a hundred miles in the course of a week. Walking is my passion (which you might have guessed from the title of my blog, A Writer Afoot).

There is a long history of writers and walkers—Wordsworth is said to have walked 175,000 miles in his lifetime and Thoreau was given to 20 mile rambles through the forests and over the hills. Walking is done at human speed. It gives us time to see, to think, to ponder and wonder. It gently releases endorphins and keeps the joints fluid. Brenda Ueland wrote:

If you would continue to be alone for a long time, amblingly swinging your legs for many miles and living in the present, then you will be rewarded: thoughts, good ideas, plots for novels, longings, decisions, revelations will come to you

In other words: walking fills the well.

I spent the winter and spring writing a book that tested me, made me reach harder and higher than I ever have, and by the end of May, when I finished the last of the revisions and finally polished it to the place I wanted it to be, I was bone-dry. The girls in the basement crashed, refusing to give me one more word. Continue Reading »

A Bed of Spices now available in ebook format

A BED OF SPICES is a wildly romantic tale of forbidden love set in the turbulent middle ages. Solomon and Rica meet by chance at the herbalist’s cottage and fall deeply in love despite the divisions of religion, class, and expectations — but how can they possibly find a happy ending with so many things stacked against them? Dark, beautiful and ultimately uplifting, this is a romance you won’t easily forget.

Only $3.99!

READ AN EXCERPT FOR FREE

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY

This was my first historical novel.  It came about when I discovered two things: that St Valentines day was celebrated in the middle ages, and also, that European Jews were persecuted during the plague.  Which might make you think this is much too grim for your reading pleasure, and I’ll admit it is a dark book, but it is also a romance.  It is focused on the love story between these two young, passionate, and conflicted human beings feel for each other, and what that might cost them.

Because of the unusual setting and storyline (which was quite quite different at the time), the book did not sell a huge number of copies, but as time goes by, it continues to attract devotion from some readers. This combination has led to a shortage of copies in circulation, and new editions are quite pricey.  One of my favorite comments over on GoodReads said that she tended to be cheap, but paid $15 for her copy and found it worth every penny.  Thank you, my dear.

One of my favorite reviews is here:  http://www.likesbooks.com/cgi-bin/bookReview.pl?BookReviewId=1389. , where it was awarded Desert Island Keeper status by Vivien Fritsche.

Here is the original cover, which I never liked and ended up on somebody else’s historical romance at some later date. How do you like the one my cousinSharon and I came up with (above)?  Does it appeal to you?

If you’d like to look for it in a print edition, you can try some of these sellers:

Amazon new and used copies of A Bed of Spices.  Recommend you skip the $2000 edition.

Barnes and Noble approved sellers of new and used copies of A Bed of Spices.

The damp, dewy beginning

I’m at the beginning of a new book.   This is probably my favorite part of writing—every possibility exists.  There is a freshness to the material, a scent of dew and dawn filling my work hours.  There is always the chance that this time I will have matured enough, learned enough, that I will be able to draw the material from the Land of Book Children with such care and expertise that it will be perfect.

That never happens, of course.  I love many of the books that have flowed through me, and feel a mother’s pride over every single of one of them.  But never once has one emerged on the page just as it exists on the other side of the veil.  I am only human, not an angel or a goddess.  I show up and do the best I can.

But right now, I haven’t yet marred this new book.  It’s still wet behind the ears, delicate and full of potential.  This stage of development is what makes non-writers think they could write books—they have a great idea, they have ideas for structure and originality, and it’s so much fun to think about the book project that a person can spend endless hours daydreaming about it.   It’s exciting to imagine turning points, discover the details of characters.  I love it when the girls in the basement send up a picture of something I know but would never have thought to use this way, like the gorgeous, solid houses built of red sandstone blocks in Pueblo.   There is a whole neighborhood with street after street of mansions built of this lovely material.   The girls said, “Hey, what about this?” and I realized it works perfectly.  The house, the neighborhood.

There are rituals for this process.   I like to start collecting a soundtrack.  The cornerstone piece for this soundtrack is Glitter in the Air, by Pink, because there is one line that captured me completely, and as sometimes will happen, a whole book reeled out from that starting point.   (No, I will not tell you which line it is, but maybe someday, I’ll bring this up again and someone will guess.)  I suspect there is some Adam Hurst again because I’m so crazy for cello right now and I like listening to his slow, melancholy strings while I write.   Maybe some Sarah McLachlan

I don’t have page counts to meet each day, but instead have time requirements. I have to be at the computer by 9, after a walk with the dog, and it is weirdly important not to get online or otherwise let the world in at this stage of development.  I need to be able to hear the soft voices of the novel.  The world is like static, interfering with my ability to tune in.

I like to write a dialogue between me and the main character.  It might sound silly, or a trick, and it is, in a way, but it also works.  I say hello, and I am glad to be working with you on this.  Let’s talk.  Tell me about……

And I give the character a chance to respond.  This is a surprisingly long standing ritual.  I started it years and years ago, and it nearly always gets my imagination moving.

I dream and play.  I write possible ideas for direction, play with character arcs.  To really start writing, I need a pretty clear idea of the shape of a novel, the basic themes and ideas I’m working with.  Most of what I will do in the first 100 pages will be more like building a skeleton than actual writing—I’m capturing motives and moods, planting stakes for support.   It’s all very plain and messy, with the odd flash of beauty.

It’s a delight to be in this stage.  Before anyone sees it, before things settle into solidity.

If you are a writer, do you like this stage, too?  If you are a reader, is there some part of your life that mirrors this sense of fresh starts?

The Reward in Going Away

When I was a child, I loved going to  summer camp.  Girl Scout camp in canvas tents with wooden floors, or much more often church camp (probably because it was very inexpensive and my parents had four kids) in cabins housing 20 girls.   It was the highlight of the summer—getting ready, gathering shampoo and following the list of “recommended” items to bring.   I always brought dark green Herbal Essence shampoo, a heady smelling liquid that’s nothing like the watered down version they sell now

Camp pic, circa mid70s. Author on far left.

We were only there for a week, Sunday to Saturday, but it seemed that entire lifetimes took place during those days.  Romances and friendships built and lost, discoveries about self and place uncovered, dreams forged and reinforced.  On the last day, we all had our group photo signed, and hugged each other as if all was lost, and cried our eyes out.   In the backseat on the way home, I was silent and distant, lost in memories, crushed that it was over for another year.

Back home, it was a slam back into everything ordinary.   The ordinary green telephone on the wall.  The ordinary food.  No singing.  No long deep discussions about…well, anything.  For days, I would be lost in mourning, sure I would never, ever have a good time again.

As an adult, I’ve come to appreciate coming home to ordinariness, but I still love getting ready for a trip, making a list, checking things off, packing special totems, creating rituals.   I learned during those weeks at camp that every journey was a lifetime and I was changed by each one.  Sitting in the meadow at La Foret Camp (which is, ironically, only about a ten minute drive from my current home—it wasn’t even very far away in those days), I dreamed a life for myself.  I learned to connect to other travelers—my fellow campers—and I learned to think outside of the box, challenged by counselors to make us do just that.  (I also learned just about every folk and bible and church song known to modern woman—and you would think that my fellow pilgrims would have appreciated that on the Camino.  Somehow, they liked listening to Bethany, the trained professional opera singer better.)

Anyway.

Before I left for Europe in June, my creative well was very low indeed.  I wouldn’t say dry, but a voice shouting down into it would echo for a long time before hitting water.  It’s a normal part of the process, and probably because of the loss of my Sasha and the long months nursing her, I was a little more weary than usual.  I also had that nagging knee injury, which is not terrible, but is sort of…annoying, you know?

Whatever the reason, I was empty and sick of working by June. The great luxury of a writing life is the time

to go wandering.  I went to camp, first with CR to England and then with a group of women on the Camino, and I still wasn’t finished, because then we went to Orlando, where I spent the first half with my dearest writing buddies, and the second half with CR, playing at Disneyland.

Not only did I wander and chat and think about life in small and large ways, I read like a junkie, popping one book after another in a wild lust for story.  Australian writers, English writers, a bunch of Americans.  Fiction and non-fiction.  Adult and young adult.  Spanish and English. Reading, reading, reading, reading.

What I did not do is write.  I kept a journal, as always, and I wrote the odd blog post or Facebook missive, but other than that, nothing. I didn’t think much about writing, either, and when ideas started pushing into my imagination, auditioning for the next spot, I shoved them away.  Once in awhile, I took a note or two on my phone. Once in awhile, I woke up and thought, “Hmm, that has some merit.”

Mostly, I ignored every single one of them.

The result?

The well is overflowing.  I’ve been in a working frenzy, sometimes working on two different things in a single day because when I’ve reached the end of the juiciness on one project, I find there is energy and excitement left for another bout, so I change locations and start work on the other one.   One morning, an idea I’ve been shoving away for about two years awakened me and dragged me to the computer and didn’t let me go until well after lunch.

It’s lovely.  It’s like going to camp and getting the good stuff afterward, too.  Filling the well is always, always worth it, and I haven’t been taking enough time to do that.  Not at all interested in travel for a little while, you understand, but I am going to go to movies a couple of times a month, and play with my collages (which I realized recently don’t have to be about books all the time) and water color pencils.  I’m taking cello lessons.

It’s all material, right?

Did you go to camp as a child?  Do you fill the well with travel or by some other means?  What hobbies give you that sense of exuberance, whether or not you are a writer?

New! Online Voice Class available this fall

Finally!  I have a couple of months that are a little less demanding so I can offer the voice class again this fall. It’s been almost two years!  I love teaching this, and believe deeply in the power of voice, so I’ve missed it a LOT.

What it is:

A six week writing intensive designed to help each writer recognize the unique elements that form her own voice, and to recognize voice as a whole.    Each week, I’ll post a set of exercises, and you will have several days to complete them.  Then you will post your work to the group, and we will then discuss what elements of voice have been showcased that week.   There is plenty of time to discuss questions that come up, and to address each writer’s concerns about her own voice.

The exercises are mostly timed writings, and are designed to build, week by week, to help you see what elements make your voice unique, and how you might be able to best match it to the marketplace. Are you a funny ethnic writer with a thread of poignance?  A serious historical novelist with deep roots in a particular time?  What influenced you to come a writer, who taught you to talk, what have you read and loved?   All these elements form the developing writer.

It’s a very deep workshop, very hands-on, and I believe it can be very helpful for writers who are floundering for whatever reason–too many contest judges, too many rejections, a crazy critique group, an editor who undermined you. Maybe you aren’t at all sure where you belong in the writing universe and need to figure out where you fit.  Over the years, a number of students have found their voices in all kinds of surprising and interesting ways, and have formed friendships with other writers as well.

READ THE SYLLABUS HERE

The class is SMALL, and very intimate, and I will be reading and commenting on your work personally, which is why this is more expensive than the average online workshop.  I do offer two scholarships every time, so if you are aching to do this and just can’t swing it, please drop me an email at awriterafoot@gmail.com with SCHOLARSHIP REQUEST in the subject line and I’ll put your name in a hat.

Start date: August 31, 2010

Price: $225

If you are interested, send an email with Voice Workshop in the subject line to awriterafoot@gmail.com

And any of you out there who found it helpful, either online or in person, please let me know that, too.

RITA AWARD FOR THE LOST RECIPE FOR HAPPINESS!!!

I thought you might like to see the sisters.

More when I can actually sit up straight. After 6 days of conferencing and three of Walt Disney World, I don’t trust myself to cross the room, much less post about the conference.

In The Midnight Rain now in ebook

Good news! We’ve been working behind the scenes to get old books into ebook format, and the first one, In The Midnight Rain, is ready.

Only $3.99!

Download for Kindle

Download at B&N

Download at Smashwords

IN THE MIDNIGHT RAIN was my first mainstream novel, a book that was published under my romance pseudonym, Ruth Wind.  It was a hard reach for me at that time, a long book with stories in the past and present.  There is a dog, April. There is music–the blues, which I love with a madness I’ve never been able to quantify.  There is a beautiful,  lost Southern man who grows orchids.  And there is a community of women.  It was a RITA finalist, and a favorite book on many lists.

It is more of a romance than some of my women’s fiction, but not much more than A Piece of Heaven or The Secret of Everything.   Here is what people said about it at the time:

“Intriguing and absorbing.” - Sandra Kitt, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS

“In her mainstream debut, Ms. Wind blows away much of the competition with a remarkable rousing drama that touches the inner soul of the reader.” - Harriet Klausner, Book Browser Reviews

“Stunning! Powerful! Eloquent! Emotional! These are just a few of the words I’d use to describe this wonderful story. To say I loved it is a huge understatement. Ruth Wind has written a gem of a book for her breakout novel” - Kate O’Connell

“A multiple RITA award winner, Wind (aka Barbara Samuel), has many strengths that show well in “Midnight Rain.” With La Vyrle Spencer’s retirement, Wind/Samuel inherits the crown as the Queen of Heartfelt Emotion. Wind is more consistent than Spencer, indeed, than most, and her contemporary heroines are more complicated and interesting. She also gracefully delves into cultural territory that publishers often discourage romance writers from entering. Issues of race, ethnicity and class form the solid backbone of many of Wind’s novels. “In the Midnight Rain” traverses the social landscapes of an integrated east Texas small town with respect and love.” - Lynn Coddington, Contra Costa Times

from the back cover…

LOOKING FOR THE PAST… Ellie Connor is a biographer with a special talent for piecing together fragments of the past. Her latest project, though, promises to be her most challenging–and personal. Not only is she researching the life of a blues singer who disappeared mysteriously forty years ago, but Ellie is also trying to find the truth about the parents she never knew. The love child of a restless woman who died young and an anonymous father, Ellie has little to go on but a faded postcard her mother sent from a small, East Texas town–the hometown of her latest subject.

…COULD MEAN HER FUTURE
It is there that Ellie meets Blue Reynard, a man with deep roots and wide connections who may help her find answers. With a piercing gaze and cool grin, Blue is as sultry and seductive as the Southern night air. Beneath his charming surface, however, lies as soul damaged by loss. Despite her better judgment, Ellie finds herself irresistibly drawn to Blue’s passion–and his pain. But Ellie’s been lured by sweet talk and hot kisses before. How can she possibly stay with Blue when every instinct tells her to run?

Click here to read the full excerpt >

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY

My grandmother has been telling me stories as along as I can remember, and the weft and warp of those stories was never woven in fairy tales or proverbs. Her method of instruction has always been tales of sin and redemption from real life–the triumphs and falls of women and men who were tempted and seduced by the wide array of sins–and how they paid if they fell, or how they triumphed if they resisted.

She never hurried through them–they’re laced with details as rich as one of her pecan pies–washed with a moody Southern quality and a thick kind of light. As a child, I loved doing any kind of kitchen chore with her because I knew she’d start telling stories. I lived for that sudden shift in her cornflower blue eyes, that slight unfocusing on the present as she looked the past and she would begin, “I remember when…”

Even better than the stories of sin and temptation, I loved the ones about people who had tried to do the right thing, and only made things worse. My grandma would say it was the finger of God, teaching a lesson, and we should be thankful, but I always privately wondered just exactly how you could manage to be thankful if God kept knocking you over with that finger.

There’s plenty of sin and redemption, temptation and triumph, in MIDNIGHT RAIN, which was born out of those long hours doing chores at my grandma’s side. Ellie Connor, tough and earnest, smart and vulnerable, arrives in the little East Texas town of Pine Bend to uncover the secrets of a mysterious and beautiful woman who disappeared more than a generation ago–and also do a little poking around about the mysteries of her own life. It’s there, in the sleepy, haunted little town that Ellie also finds Blue Reynard, a man as beautiful as he is lost, with a whisky-dark voice and a dangerously seductive understanding of the secrets of a woman’s heart. Blue is everything Ellie has vowed to avoid, and everything she can’t resist.

This is a story about community, about discovery and loss and the way we each find a way to get through those long rainy nights that fall in every life. It’s most especially a very sexy, emotional romance, and I hope you’ll enjoy as much I enjoyed writing it.

Oh, and by the way, Grandma makes an appearance. Bet you won’t have any trouble at all recognizing her.

An afternoon in Madrid and other surprises

There are always ideas that unnerve me when I consider taking a trip.  A number of things cropped up on this one, and I spent a lot of time thinking about the challenges ahead of time, trying to plan how to manage them.  One was the trains, which I would be taking on my own.  The other was the language.  When we went to Italy,  I worried for months about how little Italian I understood, and I kept thinking about how badly I spoke French (and how disdainful Parisians often were even when I did try!) and despite the months I spent practicing basic Italian phrases, I felt utterly paralyzed when it came time to ask for something even as simple as a glass of water.  I had the words in my head, I could approximate the accent (well, sort of…I’m pretty sure I speak Italian with a Spanish tint), but I could not get the words to my tongue and out of my mouth.

To avoid that syndrome this time, I gave myself permission to speak Spanish as badly–and as earnestly–as I wished.  I wanted to rely on others as little as possible. I wanted to be brave enough to at least try.

The main worry on this trip was the fact that I would be taking the trains on my own, first from Neal’s mother’s house in Kent, through London and a change of stations, up to York to see my friend Jo.  Then I had to return through a different station, navigate stairs and streets, find the Eurail station, and get to Paris.  In Paris, I would have to change stations again, and the time window was only two hours.  Which theoretically should be enough time to take a cab across the city, but you never know.  I fretted.  I thought about it a lot.

Finally, I knew I would be arriving in Madrid before the rest of my group, and I would have to get to my hotel and check in by myself, with my not-great Spanish.  This, too, made me fret, though I don’t think I even had any scenario in mind except embarrassment.

One thing I knew from navigating the Tube in London, and the train stations in Italy, is that there are a lot of stairs.  A lot of stairs.  There are some escalators, but not in all stations, and not in all areas.  I didn’t want to have to be lugging a heavy suitcase through all those mazes.  My goal was to take only a carry-on size suitcase, and my smallish backpack, and a sturdy, smallish purse I could wear close to my body while looking so touristy.   At least I could give myself that gift ahead of time.

And it turned out, this was a gift. I did end up going up and down hundreds of stairs through those many stations.  Not having a big bag was worth the small sacrifices I made (uh, basically living in the same three t-shirts for nearly two weeks, and they were all misshapen by the end, having been washed by hand in basins across the Camino. In retrospect, I would spend the (more) money to get quick dry tops).

Anyway.

I had assumed that I would take a taxi from Paris Nord to Paris Gard to save confusion and worry.  When I arrived in Paris, relaxed and well fed from the extraordinary day of travel with plenty of leg room and the niceties of tea and biscuits, with the loveliness of an English summer countryside passing by the windows, then the French countryside, and a full meal complete with wine on the EuroStar that I felt brave.  I looked around for the Metro signs and thought, “How hard can it be?”   I knew which train I needed and which direction to go.  I just had to get a Metro ticket.

Well, it turned out that there was no English on the ticket machines, so harder than I expected.  I tried to watch others to see if I could figure it out.  As my anxiety started to mount, I remembered the translator on my phone and I could program it to tell me how to ask for something. When I pulled out the phone, however, it didn’t get a signal.  I started to feel that fretting paralysis rising, but recognized in time that it wouldn’t do me any good.  I joined the queue for tickets and when I got to the window, I greeted the man with a polite “Bon jour. Parlez vous Ingles?”

He said, “I am South African, madam, and I speak Africaans. How may I help you?” He gave me a ticket in two seconds and I was so relieved that I was giddy. I found my train (up stairs, down stairs) and waited.  It was busy and I had to go through a busy tourist station (Bastille), but it was fine, and all the way, I was thinking, hey, I did it!

I still had to find my train in the station, and this particular station was the site of a place where I stubbed my toe so badly that I ended up losing a toenail, but this time, I found the train, the man spoke to me in Spanish, and I relaxed.  Immediately.  I found my sleeper car, made myself comfortable, and in the morning awakened to Spain passing by outside the windows.  I ate breakfast watching fields tumble by in the mist, seeing cows and a man walking down a road in a landscape that looks very like my own….except for the walled medieval city there on the mountaintop.

Which left the last, scary bit—getting from the train station to the hotel, and then checking in without my group and explaining that they would be coming later.  Remember, I had been thinking fretting about this challenge for a couple of months. It took two seconds to walk out of the station, find the taxi line, give the man the address I had written down, and get in the car.  He drove through the morning light in Madrid, listening to the radio and I drank in the sights.   At the hotel, I paid him, he took out my bag, and I went inside, bracing myself to navigate the check in, reviewing the words and names I would need. He spoke English.  He had been expecting me.  The main group had been delayed by plane issues, and I would have time alone. In my room.

I had plenty of time before anyone arrived to…get settled, reoriented, wash underwear and hang it up to dry, take a shower and do my hair, all those things.  Sharyn came and we went to find food, ordered blindly off the menu, which ended up being all right, even if I inadvertently ordered pulpo for us both.   The square was, I think, Santa Ana, where there is a statue of Federico Garcia Lorca, and the bar where Hemingway wrote (also the bar next door, where Hemingway never ate or drank or wrote).

We had a meal and went back and by then I felt brave enough to venture out on my own, so Sharyn went upstairs to rest and I wandered around, seeking a supermarket for yogurt and a transformer for my computer.  The grocery was tiny and I browsed around looking at things, finding no candy but some interesting cookies.  Next door was a bazaar, like a dollar store with everything all jumbled in a dark store with close, crowded aisles and millions of things to buy.  I found demitasse spoons, 6 for 87 cents, and since I’d missed looking for them in England, bought two sets. I also found my transformer for 2 Euros and felt like a big game hunter carrying all my booty back to the hotel. That evening, we went to dinner and got to know each other a tiny bit, but that was really it for Madrid and me.  I liked the wide boulevards. I liked the hotel and the good coffee.  I would like to have seen flamenco.  I would like to have been tourist more, seeing things, but as it is, Madrid is now in my mind lit by early afternoon sunlight, bright and strong, and it is a series of narrow alleyways littered with bars and cafes and small shops.

And sometimes, that too is how it goes.  A day that was meant to be filled with sightseeing is instead spent quietly, taking care of things and wandering around a little neighborhood.  For now, that is Madrid in my mind.

Have you ever spent a lot of time worrying about something ahead of time, only to find it was no big deal?  Or the opposite, had something become a big problem you had not anticipated?

THE JOURNEY BEGINS WHERE THE ROAD ENDS

The molecules of my body and brain are drifting home a handful at a time, plugging in the holes left by the challenges of actually moving one’s body thousands and thousands of miles across time and space and cultures and landscapes.  For once, I’m trying to be patient with the process.  I did not get a cold this time, which is often what my body seems to do in protest; instead I’m resting a lot.  Walking the dog is my only exertion, catching up on blogs and posting photographs my only mental activities.
But in the background, there is a lot of processing going on.  The last time I did a major pilgrimage, just before 2001, it took a long time to be far enough away from the event to really understand how I had been transformed, and it will be awhile for this one, too. What I do have are concrete moments, encounters and blips of contact and illuminations that are echoing for me now:

—Ana, our guide, has been walking and biking the various Caminos for awhile now. An American ex-pat who has lived in Spain for 30 years, Ana told me that one thing she likes to do it give away candy on the road, to weary pilgrims who look like they need a little lift.  I saw her do it several times through the course of a day.  A day or two later, I was walking alone when I saw an old, old man making his way down a steep rocky section.  He had two rough walking sticks, one in each hand, and his knees were tied with white strips of cloth.  He labored carefully, one bow-legged step at a time, and it was plainly very difficult work.  I wished that Ana was with me, but she was a long way back on the trail.  I wished him Buen Camino as I passed, but wished desperately for something more.   Then I remembered I had some candy in my pack, so I walked a little further and dug it out, then walked back up the hill with it in my palm, offering it wordlessly since I couldn’t think how to say anything appropriate in Spanish.  He looked at my hand for a moment, uncomprehending, then understood I was giving him candy and he gathered it up in gnarled fingers.  His face lightened and blazed and he said, “Merci! Merci beaucoup!”   I waved and walked back down the hill, suddenly overcome with emotion.   How small a thing, and yet how large!  I loved Ana very much in that moment for understanding that idea, and teaching it to me.

—Walking suddenly beneath a canopy of trees, their joints grown over with moss to make faces like Green Men, the forest stretching out around us in lush, fertile mystery.  Here be the fey and enchanted foxes and witches, called here meigas.  Once we passed a marsh so alive with frogs that we almost couldn’t be heard as we puzzled out what was making that noise. Now and again, we crossed a pond or a stream on old flat rocks, and I couldn’t help but think of the pilgrims before us in their sandaled feet, hundreds of years of them.

–Everywhere a little village, a bar, a church.  All have their own particular sello, or pilgrim stamp. Among our group was a little contest–who had the most? Who had the most beautiful? I kept forgetting to get a stamp, but in the end, I didn’t mind.  You have to have two per day to prove you’ve walked the distance, but that’s all.  Most days, I had more.  Often, I was lost in some other thing when we entered a place–admiring the wall of letters and postcards and messages and bandannas left behind in one; the colors of paint around the door in another; the German shepherd mix creeping up behind the bar to steel pigs feet and ears from the back step; the long limbs of a cyclist in tight shorts.

—an old woman walking up the street with a wheelbarrow in Lavacolla (wash your bottom town–where once pilgrims were required to stop and wash before they walked the last six miles into Santiago). We are drinking cerveza con limon, checking stamps in our passports.  She’s jaunty in a blue dress and an apron, and we wave. She greets us cheerfully, and comes back a little later with a giant, professional flower arrangement.  Beautiful! I cry. She lifts her chin, smiles.  For the graveyard tonight.

And there is a festival that night that begins at midnight.  Everyone is out in the streets.  There is a band playing, loudly, singing, and everyone is dancing and singing and talking all through the town, until four or five.  My roommate is grumpy.  I keep thinking it would be fun to go join the party, but in truth, I’m too tired after seven days of walking to rouse myself, so I drift in and out of sleep, listening to the party pouring in through our open windows, and it makes me think of nights when the children were little and we played cards and drank beer with friends, when the children fell asleep in puddles on the couch or the floor.   I had no idea that I would miss those days so much.  We were poor and the food was simple, the children barefooted and everything I thought I wanted  seemed far away in the future on the other side of some magical line.

–the astonishing, impossible grandeur of the cathedral at Santiago.  I have seen many spectacular palaces to the glory of God, including the Vatican (and most recently the splendid York Minster) but Santiago’s abode is tremendous, with wings and stairs and gold and turrets and spires and gold and dozens of entrances and gold and carvings and statues and gold. Did I mention gold?  The entire altar is drowned in gold and jewels, so much gold it is impossible to calculate the cost of it.   The statue of Santiago himself is almost entirely made of gold.  It is a giant thing, much larger than a human, and one of the pilgrim rituals is to “hug the saint.”  Once we had our official certificates, we stood in line to do this, not all of us at once, but in twos and threes, after one had showered, another had found trinkets to take home.   There was in front of me a quintuplet of Spaniards in late middle age.  One of the women paused behind the saint, whipped a baby wipe out of her purse, and wiped it down before she stepped up and gave Santiago a hug, putting her face on the gold between two enormous topazes.  I hugged him, too, but really found pleasure in the glimpse of the church from that vantage point.

Later, at Mass, we had a chance to see the fabled censer.  It’s more than four feet tall, carved of silver, and it swings the entire length of the transcept—hundreds of feet in either direction, pouring out incense to fill the church with fragrance.   It nearly touched the ceiling on one side, then the other, over and over.  It’s hard to describe in a way that captures the beauty of it.

A worthy destination for those long ago pilgrims, and all of us, too.  I was giddy by the time mass started, however, and I will admit that I found myself sometimes trying to surpress a giggle over the lispy Gallegan of the priest.  It was not disrespectful, but joy and weariness in equal measure.

Before I left, I read somewhere that the journey begins when the Road ends (have not been able to find it again, sadly, so if anyone knows, please tell me), and as I sit here now, I can see that’s true.  I will be going back–perhaps to walk the Camino Primitivo, or the northern road, or maybe the entirety of the Frances.   It does feel I’ve only begun.

Buen Camino!