Road Tripping USA Part Seven by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

 

Author’s Note

I belong to Angels Abreast, a breast cancer survivor dragon boat race team in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada. Every four years the International Breast Cancer Paddlers Commission IBCPC) holds an international festival somewhere in the world. In the spring of 2013, my team received a notice that the IBCPC had chosen Sarasota, Florida, USA, to hold the next festival in October 2014.
     We decided to attend and while the other members were going to fly down, tour around some of the sites and head home I wanted to see more of the country and meet some of the people. My husband, Mike, and I drove from our small acreage at Port Alberni, British Columbia, on the Pacific Ocean, to Sarasota, Florida on the Atlantic Ocean.
     Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine the people I would meet nor the beautiful places I would see nor the adventures I would have on our ten week, 18,758km (11656 mile) journey. On the thirteenth day of every month in 2016 I will post a part of my trip that describes some of the excellent scenery, shows the generosity and friendliness of the people, and explains some of the history of the country. The people of the USA have much to be proud of.

 Road Tripping USA Part Seven    

When we left the Florida Keys we drove to Del Ray and began looking for a campsite. Our GPS, named Lola, showed us that there were two south of us, but we didn’t want to go back. We went to two Walmart stores but neither one of them allowed campers. There was a KOA 30 miles away. Mike wanted to try for it but I convinced him to look for a parking lot. We found one in a strip mall with a few stores. Once settled we went and did some shopping.
     The stores closed and the parking lot was quiet. It was the night of the fall time change. As I put our clocks back an hour I pictured the extra hour of peaceful sleep I would have.
     It was a cool night so we closed our windows before going to bed. I was having a wonderful sleep when suddenly there was a loud knocking on our door. It jerked me awake. There was another louder knock, knock, and someone yelled. “Franky, Franky, wake up.”
     Mike and I looked at each other but neither of us said anything.
     “Franky, Franky, open up. I got forty dollars.”
     We remained quiet hoping the person would go away. But he kept it up. “Franky, Franky open up. It’s me. I got forty bucks.”
     He was not to be discouraged and kept banging on our door. “Hey, Franky, Debbie come on. Let me in. Open up. It's me. Come on, let me in.”
     Finally Mike opened the door. “We’re not Franky and Debbie. We are from Canada.”
     "Oh, sorry, sorry,” he apologized. “Franky and Debbie have a camper just like this. I thought it was Franky. Sorry. Sorry."
     Mike told me that he was sure the person was a woman and when he told her we weren't Franky and Debbie she began crying and left.
     We discussed Franky and Debbie possibly being drug dealers and if we were in a motorhome just like theirs maybe it would be best if we left. So we dressed and decided to look for a place to see the sun rise over the ocean. At Lake Worth Beach we pulled into a parking lot.
     Mike and I walked to the beach and on the morning of his 68^th birthday we stood, hand in hand, with our feet in the Atlantic Ocean and watched the sun rise over the water.
     We wandered up and down the beach and though it was only 6:30am there were a lot of people walking in the sand, doing tai chi on the beach, surfing, and wading in the water. It was a very popular spot early in the morning. There was a long fishing pier and it cost me $1.00 to walk out on it. It was crowded with fishers.
     We wanted to eat breakfast overlooking the beach so we watched for a restaurant as we drove. But there were either houses or beach on the ocean side of the road. And there were bushes to block most of the ocean views. At Juniper Beach we found a parking spot along the road where the bushes were shorter.
     Mike had his birthday breakfast of cold cereal while watching the waves break on the sandy beach of the Atlantic Ocean.
     After enjoying the view for a while we continued down the road to the Blowing Rocks Preserve. I took the Sea Grape Path to the Main Dune Crossover viewpoint and watched as the waves hit a short wall of rock along the beach and shot into the air. This is part of the largest outcropping of Anastasia limestone on the Atlantic coast of the United States. It would be best to visit during high tide or winter storms when the spray can reach 50ft (15m) high.
     From there I walked about a quarter of a mile on the Dune Trail to the northern end of the beach. In the summer loggerhead, green, and leatherback sea turtles come ashore here to lay their eggs. From March to October visitors are supposed to leave the sand alone so that the eggs will hatch.
     We were travelling north on Highway 95 when Mike saw a sign for a Waffle house. He decided he wanted some for lunch. When we walked in we could choose between a table or stools at the counter. I pointed to the stools.
     “No, you can’t sit there,” the woman wiping the counter said.
     “We can’t?” I looked at her and she seemed serious even though the other waitresses were snickering.
     She shook her head. “Nope.”
     “It’s not even reserved for Canadians?” I asked.
     “Well, okay,” she said. “Come and sit down.”
     I looked at the menu she placed in front of us. Mike was going to have his waffles but I wanted to try something different.
     “What are grits?” I asked.
     “It’s boiled cornmeal.”
     Sounded good to me and I ordered some.
     “Do you want cheese or sugar with them?”
     I didn’t have a clue. “What do you like?” I asked her.
     “I prefer cheese.”
     So I had grits and cheese for my lunch. We enjoyed our food and conversation.
     After we ate we headed to Orlando and registered at Wekiwa Springs State Park to await our friends from Germany, who coincidently had planned a trip to Florida at the same time as we.
     Ducki and Sabine pulled in with their rented motorhome and parked in the site beside us. We sat and visited at the picnic table by our camper. We had a few drinks and then supper in our camper.
     The next day we walked on the Wet to Dry Trail then took the trail around Sand Lake. We went to the springs and Mike and I swam in the cool water while Ducki and Sabine sat on the hillside and watched. The water is crystal clear and that is because millions of gallons of cool water flow through the springs into Wekiwa Springs Run each day. This joins Rock Springs Run to become the Wekiva River.
      The Seminole Indians of the area used to be called Creeks. In the Creek language Wekiwa means ‘springs of water’ and Wekiva means ‘flowing water’.
     We had supper at Ducki and Sabine’s campsite and visited well into the night.
     After breakfast we said goodbye to Ducki and Sabine. It had been fourteen years since we’d seen them last in Banff, Alberta, and we vowed not to let that much time go by before seeing them again.
     As we drove, I programmed the town of St Therea’s into Lola. She asked us if I wanted Allenbelle Road. Not knowing better, I agreed.
     Along the highway we stopped at a roadside table where a man had set up rows and rows of honey and syrup. We bought some cane syrup and some Tupelo Honey, which we’d never heard of.
     “The honey is made from the Tupelo gum trees that grow along the Apalachicola and Chipola rivers,” he explained to us. “The bees are placed on platforms above the river’s edge and they fly through the Tupelo-blossom-laden swamps to gather their nectar for honey.”
     I tried some and it does have a very unique flavor.
     When we reached the small town of Sopchoppy, Lola told us to turn onto Allenbelle Road. We realized her directions were wrong but I said let’s see what she wanted to show us. It turned out to be a cul-de-sac behind some trees off the highway. We drove past the four or five houses and then were back at the highway again. We considered it another adventure courtesy of our GPS.
     As we waited for traffic to clear a black man came over.
     “Do you have seventy-five cents for me to buy a coffee?” he asked.
     “We sure we do,” Mike said and reached into his pocket for his change purse.
     “Well, it would be nice if you had a dollar or two so I could get some breakfast.”
     “Okay.” Mike pulled the bills out.
     “It would be great if you have five dollars. I could really get something good to eat for five dollars.”
     Mike gave him a five dollar bill.
     “I’ll pay you back if you are from the area.”
     “Don’t worry about it,” Mike said. “We’re from Canada.”
     “Oh, Canada,” he said. He looked at our motorhome. “Did you drive all the way from Canada in this?”
     “Yes.”
     He told us that his father had been stationed in North Dakota years ago so he’d lived near the Canadian border for a while.
     “Are there any black people in Canada?” he asked.
     “Yes, there are a lot,” I said.
     He thanked us and walked away.
     As we drove east we caught glimpses of the Gulf of Mexico to our left. The houses along there were on stilts because of insurance. Depending on the area, a house has to be so many feet above sea level. If the area is at sea level the bottom floor might have to be 12ft (3.6m) above the ground. If the area is eight feet above sea level then the bottom of the house has to be 4 feet above ground.
     We wanted to have a picnic on the beach so we headed to Carabelle to find a park that showed up on our map. Along the way we saw some empty waterfront lots for sale on the Gulf of Mexico. Some had driveways so we pulled into one and parked. We had our lunch overlooking the blue waters of the gulf. Afterwards, we strolled along the beach and I walked out on one of the docks. Then it was a lovely drive along the shoreline into Carabelle.
     Carabelle lays claim to having the world's smallest police station, which is actually a phone booth and a bus stop bench beside the highway. Prior to March 10, 1963, the police phone was in a call box bolted to a building. However, tourists passing through would make long distance phone calls on it. The box was moved but still the unauthorized calls persisted. When the telephone company decided to replace its old phone booth with a new one, the old booth was taken to house the call box. It was moved to its present location and while it protected the policemen from the rain, tourists still made their phone calls. Finally, the dial was removed.
     When we left Carabelle we passed the park that we had been looking for. There were picnic tables with shelters, a nice beach, and lots of people but we had had a dock and the place to ourselves. It doesn’t get any better than that.
     As drove we were sometimes beside the water and sometimes in the trees. We went through East Point and crossed the 4 mile (6.4 km) long bridge to St Georges Island. St Georges Island, which is a barrier island, is 28 miles (45kms) long and 1 mile (1.6km) wide at its widest part.
     We found a public access to the ocean and walked down to the beach to put our feet in the water of the Gulf of Mexico. I found it cooler than the Atlantic Ocean. I went to the Cape St George Lighthouse.
     The lighthouse was built in 1833 but partially destroyed in a hurricane in 2005. It was moved to its present site and rebuilt. It has a 92 step circular stairway to the top floor then an iron ladder to the light. I had a 360 degree view of the gulf and the town below.
     A man had a fruit stand near where we parked. We bought a large avocado, a pineapple, a red onion, and some tomatoes and tangerines. All were Florida grown and very fresh.
     The old bridge that used to connect the island to the mainland is now used as a fishing pier. Mike sat under the bridge and fished. He had no luck.
      We continued along the coast to Panama City and stayed at a Walmart downtown. Across from it is a building that is upside down. Even the palm trees in front of it are upside down. I asked the greeter at the Walmart what it was
     “Well,” he said. “A few years ago a hurricane come through and picked that building up and turned it upside down.”
     “Yeah, right,” I said.
     “Hey, I did tell that to one woman and she believed me.”
     “So what is it, really?”
     “It’s actually part of an Amusement Park.”

www.joandonaldson-yarmey.com

Successful Advertising? Time Will Tell by Karla Stover

A Successful Advertising Ploy?  Time Will Tell

When I wrote Murder, When One Isn’t Enough, the title was going to be Tahuya Daze because the majority of the book takes place on Hood Canal, in or near the tiny town of Tahuya. BWL and I decided the name would be confusing to book buyers so I changed the title. But I wanted to make Hood Canal and Tahuya residents aware of the book so this is what I did.

1.      Had a blow-up copy of the cover made and laminated:                       cost appx. $2.00

2.      Bought a complimentary sheet of paper to mount it on:                      cost $1.10

3.      Bought a white Styrofoam backing board:                               cost $1.10

4.      Bought 2 four-foot stakes                                                        cost $1.43

5.      Bought lettering from a craft store:                                          cost appx $5.00.

I mounted the picture on the backing and that on the white board. At the top, using the sticky letters I wrote

AMAZON, Prime, kindle.

On the Saturday before the 4^th of July, this year on July 2^nd, Tahuya has a festival, so that morning my husband and I drove there taking the poster and stakes. We found a place along the road where the ground wasn’t too hard, pounded the stakes in, and stapled on the poster. Now, it remains to be seen if my strategy will work.

Since Tacoma has festivals and farmers’ markets practically, it occurred to me that I could do this at each one. I would just change the poster to read A Puget Sound mystery and mount pictures of the two covers.

 

Books We Love's Tantalizing Talent ~ Author Mikki Sadil

Hello, I’m Mikki Sadil. I was born on a Quarter Horse ranch out in the middle of Nowhere, Texas. I grew up with horses, but also in a military family, where moving from post to post was a normal part of life. Consequently, I lived in many states, and in three foreign countries before the age of 12, when my father was finally posted for the last time, and we landed in Los Angeles, California. I’ve been writing most of my life, but not really for publishing until a few years ago. In the meantime, I taught Sociology courses at a university in Southern California, became an exhibited artist, and for 23 years, bred, raised, and trained Appaloosa horses for the show ring, along with my husband. When we retired from horse breeding and training, we moved to the Central Coast of California. Now I live here with my awesome husband, our “smartest” and “most beautiful” in all the world Corgi, Dylan, our lazy Siamese/Himalayan cat, Beaujangles, and a beautiful but unfriendly (!) Cockatiel, Riley.

I write books for kids and teens. Someone asked me one day why I write for kids, when writing for adults is more lucrative. In a way, that’s a hard question. Writing for kids, those from ages 11 or 12 to teens about 16, is not an easy thing to do. Adults pick up a book, read a couple of chapters and then decide if it is something they like and are going to finish. Kids pick up a book, read the first page, and either love the book or hide it under the covers because Mom will be ticked off if they don’t finish it! So why do I write for “picky” readers? Because I love it. Because I want to challenge young people to read, to get away from the video games that consume so many of them with their violence and foul language, and find fun and entertainment within the pages of a book. I don’t “write down” to the younger kids, the 10, 11, 12 year olds. I write for them in the same way I write for older teens…I challenge them to comprehend the words that make up a story that takes them away from the everyday life of school, TV, and video games. I write for kids because I want them to know, understand, and appreciate the history of our country. I want them to visualize themselves in the same kinds of situations my characters are always in, and realize that their imagination can take them to places they have never been, or even thought about. I write for kids because I want to share with them the magic that’s in my heart and mind, and I want them to find that same magic in the pages of my books. I want them to see and experience all of the other worlds that imagination can take them to.

Amazon

The Freedom Thief  When thirteen year old Ben McKenna finds out his father is going to sell Ben’s best friend, a crippled slave boy, he knows the only way to save Joshua is to arrange an escape for him and his slave parents. With this accomplished, Ben and his friends embark on a journey into a world of danger, desperation, and deception that Ben knew nothing about, in order to find the Ohio River and the freedom for Joshua and his parents that lay beyond.

Amazon

Lily Leticia Langford and the Book of Practical Magic   What do an eleven year old girl, an IQ of 160, and a book of Magic have in common? Absolutely nothing…unless your name is Lily Leticia Langford. Lily Leticia has an IQ of 160, and is in high school. The other freshman girls won’t have anything to do with her, because, after all, she belongs in elementary school. Girls her age won’t have anything to do with her, because after all, she’s in high school. She thinks she can solve everyone’s problems, whether they want her to or not. Consequently, Trouble seems to follow her around like a puppy dog. But when she finds a book of Ancient Magic, Lily Leticia’s Troubles have just begun.

Night Cries: Beneath the Possum Belly, book one   Sixteen

Amazon

year old Gabriela Gaudet is just learning about all of her psychic powers. For weeks, the voices of three little girls who had been murdered five years ago, have been begging her to find their killer. When her parents’ traveling carnival comes to the children’s small town, and breaks down, Gabriela knows this is the town that covered up the children’s murder, and she sets out to find this killer. Along the way, she meets Remi, the young man, also psychic, who is determined to help her. A web of evil surrounds this town, a web that includes gargoyles and witches, and one that threatens to draw Gabriela into its sticky strands. Will her powers be enough to fight off this malevolence, or will the town win again? The Possum Belly waits.

You can find these and my other books at:  

http://bookswelove.net/authors/sadil-mikki/

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Overcoming Obstacles by Michelle Lee

Hello cover art aficionados. My name is Michelle, for those of you who haven't read any of my past posts.  I am a part of the BWL community, but not as an author - I am the one who gives the books their outer wrapping. 

In the past, I have done a series of posts about all things covers.  Please feel free to check them out.  They are linked at the end of this post. 

Now for the purpose of today's odd topic - Overcoming Obstacles.

I want you to take a moment, close your eyes and imagine a beach.  The waves of the crystal blue ocean flicking against the tiny white grain of sand along the water's edge, turning them a damp beige.  The feel of the wind rushing through your hair, the heat of the sun against your bare arms.  Picture dolphins jumping from the water, playful and free, just off in the distance.

Now come back to me.  Remember that scene ... I will get back to it in a moment.

What some of the BWL family knows is that in addition to being their resident pain in the rear cover art goddess, I am also a biology geek and a teacher.  What most do not know (but will now) is that I am dyslexic.  I can't read long streams of numbers without getting a headache.  Math is a nightmare for me - especially algebra.  And until I was in the fourth grade - reading was also  major nightmare.  I avoided it like most sane people avoid snakes and spiders.  But something happened the summer after third grade ... I discovered that I didn't need to understand all of the words.  That my mind would fill in and adapt, if I gave it a chance.

Take a look at the following image:

What you are seeing is what reading is like for me - and yes, this passage above makes perfect sense to me.  When reading aloud in earlier classes, when we came upon an unfamiliar word, we had to sound it out.  But my sounds never quite matched what the words were, so I great discouraged.  I was called stupid by other kids, and as a shy person naturally, it made me withdraw more.  But that summer, my sister spent a lot of time with me, reading to me, and as I heard her voice, I would link the words to the sounds in my head, and pull it together.  Something I wasn't able to do in class with other kids snickering and teasing me.

That summer, I discovered reading.  And the more I read, the more I loved it, and the better I got at it.  Now, as an adult, I read bout 3-10 books a week, sometimes hitting 45-50 in a month (various lengths of course - some are novellas, some novels).  I still struggle when reading aloud - so I avoid it when possible.  But when I read silently to myself, but brain is able to infer, fill in, and adapt to what I am seeing.  Sure, I might miss an occasional word, struggle with the difference between form and from, but it doesn't decrease the please of reading.

I am very up front with my students about my troubles reading (and writing) so that when I do write something wrong on the board - they know they can correct me, that I WANT them to correct me.  And yes - it does happen often.  Some are amazed that I am "allowed" to teach, others that I made it through school (including college) with this cloud hanging over my head.  But some, the ones that need it the most, understand that the things that might get us made fun of, the things we struggle with, are not insurmountable obstacles.

For me, dyslexia was simply an obstacle that I needed to know how to overcome ... and then I did so.  In addition to being a teacher, I am also a published author ... something else that my obstacle could have held me back from, had I let it.

So what does this have to do with the scene I asked you to imagine earlier?  In addition to dsylexia, I also have what it called by many 'mind-blindness', the technical terms that has been proposed is Aphantasia. 

Phantasia is the ancient greek word for, among other things, imagination and images.  A is a prefix meaning lacking, without, or not.  So aphantasia means without images, or mind blind.

Think about that for a minute and remember the ocean scene.  When you closed your eyes, did you 'see' the ocean?

     

I don't.  I can hear a narrator telling me what it looks like, and I have found that if I keep up a running narration in my head during some moments, that I can recall them as an auditory memory later.  

I can look at images and recognize things ... like an actor, or a certain type of owl.  But closing my eyes and telling my principal what a certain student looked like, if I didn't already know the student?  Describing a bird I just saw flying by, and trying to identify it from memory?  Practically impossible. I can't visualize the person or owl to give the details.

Now remember that I said in the beginning of this post - I am BWL's Art Director and primary cover artist.  Which means I take stock photo images and somehow morph them, blend them together, to create covers.  Covers like these:

      

      

      

      

Each of these covers is at least 2 images, some contain up to 5.  Somehow I had to 'visualize' how the images would come together - right?

Nope.  It's not that simple. I can't just close my eyes and use my imagination.  When I am working on covers, I have numerous windows open on my computer and I have to place images side by side, so that I can see how they would fit together.  I can't just close my eyes and let them merge, trying out different combinations.  

For example, I could tell you by looking at these two images side by side, that the dolphins could be placed into the beach image, and with the right text, make a great cover.  Maybe with a woman in the foreground standing, looking out over the water.

For many of you, you could probably close your eyes and actually see it come together.  I don't.

 

So much of my process, I don't even understand.  I know some images I will see and have a flash of insight - that it would make a great cover with the right other elements, but I don't actually visualize the finished product.  

I never see it until I actually create it.  

So what are my dreams like, you might ask?  Well ... that is a topic for another post. :)  (Have to keep you coming back somehow - right?)

As for why I posted this ... I admit, the obstacles I face are NOTHING in comparison to what many others face (and I do not in any way want to trivialize those obstacles) ... but at the same time, while mine are seemingly small in the grand scheme of things, they can seem insurmountable to dreams of becoming a writer or artist.  Just like I want my students to know, I want those reading this blog to know that they can be overcome.  More than that though ...

When it is physical, we can point to it and say 'ah ha! there is the issue!'.  But when it is something in the brain?  I always knew I was a little different, and thought something was truly defective in my brain for the longest time.  I couldn't read word correctly, I couldn't visualize images when I closed my eyes. I had to be broken somehow right?  But guess what ... aphantasia and dyslexia are a lot more common that I ever imaged when I was growing up, thinking myself damaged somehow.  

If you are interested in learning about Aphantasia, check out some of the following articles:

A Life Without Mental Images (BBC)

Picture This? Some Can't (NYTimes)

* * *

And for those who wanted to find my older posts ... here they are.

* Cover clones, movie posters, and a cover artist's opinion

* A few of my favorite covers

* Here comes the bride - wait, what?

* Two sides to a cover

* Alas poor images ... I cannot find you

* Fonts, fonts, and more fonts

* He's Sexy and You Know It

* A whole series about various aspects of covers:

     - Behind the Cover Artist's Curtain 

     - The Cover Art Form

     - Image Selection

     - Cover Elements

     - Series

     - X-Factor in Covers

     - Cover Branding

     - Heat Levels

* Dear Artist - a Dear Abby kind of thing, but for cover art questions (feel free to leave questions in the comments for future posts)

     - Getting Started/Training 

     -  Favorite Cover Styles

* Website Suggestions

* AUTHOR RESOURCES -- well worth checking out!!!!

* What's In A Biography?

* Black and white and shifters all over -- probably one of my favorite posts :) Research is so very important!

I also have a couple odds and ends posts

* Is it possible to have too many books?

* A study of men's facial hair

The Lake (a/k/a Summer Magic) by Gail Roughton

A few years back, Alan Jackson sang of  "...an old plywood boat, with a 75 Johnson with electric choke". I love that song, love its poignant lyrics that hark back to childhood for all of us born in a far-away time warp when there was enough technology to make life pretty dang sweet but not so much that it'd taken over the world to the extent everybody posted pictures of their meals on Facebook.  There was no Facebook, there was no such thing as a smart phone, cause there was no such thing as the internet. Heck, there was no such thing as a cell phone, and texts as a means of communication were far in the distant future. Life was simpler then. Nobody had to tell kids to play an hour a day. Mothers hollered out the doors for us to "get in outta that hot sun a minute 'fore y'all fry alive!" But it was modern enough that suppers were cooked on electric or gas ranges rather than wood burning stoves and refrigerators had replaced iceboxes, even if folks still called them iceboxes and would continue to do so for years. Ice was plentiful to chill beverages even if came from ice trays and not ice makers and milk and diary products were actually delivered to your door should anyone so desire and most folks did.  Air conditioning wasn't yet a standard in homes but oscillating fans twirled overhead and in windows. There was a television set in almost every home even if it was only one, and even if it was still black and white and not technicolor, and America unwound in front of it every night. After Walter Cronkite advised us "That's the way it is...", we watched sitcoms with far more innocent humor than the sitcoms of today, cheered on heroes in white hats (or law enforcement hats or military helmets), and booed the villains, for whom no one had any sympathy at all, 'cause they were clearly villains and not victims of anybody's society. 

I grew up in the heart of Georgia, raised a country girl in the very center of the state. In Middle Georgia, when you say "the Lake", you mean Lake Sinclair, a man-made lake engineered by Georgia Power Company. It's a major, major source of hydroelectric power for the Middle Georgia region, has  roughly 400 miles of shoreline and spreads over 15,000 acres. Nothing compared to the Great Lakes, of course, but we'll take it. Its shores are lined with lake houses and boat houses and in my childhood, those houses were mostly little cottages, cabins or trailers used as summer or weekend houses, most of which were accessible only over a series of turns onto dirt road after dirt road. Nowadays, a high proportion of Sinclair Lake houses are extremely nice year round residences and I'm not sure if a dirt road even exists anymore in the general vicinity of the Lake.  

I don't remember how old I was when Daddy built his own old plywood boat (not that it was old at the time of construction, of course), around ten or eleven, I'd guess. Daddy was a master carpenter, so there wasn't anything half-done or half-finished about that boat. It was absolutely water-worthy, complete with steering wheel and windshield. I remember early morning fishing trips with Daddy and Mr. Emory, our next-door neighbor without whom no father-daughter excursion was complete. We didn't have a lake cabin ourselves, but the owner of the construction company Daddy worked for did, and as he was getting on up there in age and seldom, if ever, went to the Lake at all, we had full permission to use it at any time. We didn't, in fact, ever use the cabin proper, mostly because boarded up cabins have a very distinctive smell that's not all that pleasant, but we made frequent use of the property itself for family cookouts. That was pretty much standard Sunday afternoons, boat rides and cookouts at the Lake. Nothing fancy. Just good food, good company, good fun. Like I said, a simpler time and place.

Then "life"--whatever that means--got in the way, and before I knew it, it'd been a minimum of forty plus years since I'd been on any boat at all, let alone on Lake Sinclair, and just as many for my husband, who'd also spent the weekends of his teen years at the Lake, though he was more athletic (it doesn't take much to be more athletic than me) and had been a heck of a slalom skier.

I'm happy to say that situation's been rectified for us now. A few years back, my husband bought an older, used boat. He didn't get a lot of use out of it the first couple of years after its purchase, mostly because until this spring when I retired, I was too tired to even think spending a whole day of my two day weekend manhandling a boat in and out of the water even sounded good. This year, though? Ah, this year, we rented a boat slip at a lake marina right off the main road to the Lake, and put the boat in the water for the summer. It just sits right there and waits on us, and we're there at least once a week. It's great when we're with the kids and grandkids. Sinclair's a lake where you just jump right off the boat into the water (with life vest, of course).  You don't see too many folks skiing these days, the big thing's "tubing" and I admit, even I might be able to tube, though I haven't gotten up quite the nerve yet. So far I've left the jumping into the water and the tubing to the young folks. 

It's just as great when it's just us. We love riding up and down and exploring the lake but I confess I think my favorite's when hubby turns off the engine, sets up the trolling motor, and we just putt up and down the shoreline while he throws out his fishing line. Oh, he hasn't caught a thing yet, and we don't even go when it's actually a "good fishing time" so there's pretty much not even a chance he'll catch a fish, but that's not the point. I come from a long line of fishermen who don't fish to catch fish; i.e., my Daddy and Mr. Emory. They fished to enjoy the outdoors and the company they were in, and that sure works for me. I slather on the sunblock and sometimes I read (that Kindle App on the smartphone, don't you know?) and sometimes reading's just too much trouble. I just look at the shoreline, listen to the whooooossshhh of hubby's line as it swishes out into the water and the slow criiiiikcriiiiik of the reel as it comes back to the boat. I drink in the peace, the smell of the water, the sound of contentment. And I go back. Back to a simpler time and place.

I must have subconsciously missed the Lake more than I realized in the forty plus years I spent away from it, because it certainly plays a part in the one of the books written in my years away from it.  In fact, it's the scene where the heroes of said book take down their villain.  Okay, yes. I love, love, love the lake, it's idyllic and quiet and peaceful but some parts of it are pretty dang remote. Back in the day, they were even isolated, especially in the winter, and I ask you. What kind of writer would I be if I passed that up as a setting in a Southern Gothic horror story?

my name be Cain...and my color be Se'ben

Because evil never dies. It just--waits.

Gail Roughton on Amazon

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