October&November ~ Sunlight&Soaking ~ NaNoWriMo&Nirvana

36,436 WORDS AND NOT CHEATING!



October in Southern Oregon is sometimes so magnificent that you begin to wonder if someone is messing with the natural lightening or something. You know, maybe someone from the Shakespeare Festival was working on an experimental set and some how ended up cranking up the light to UberMaX in the whole town? The air turns gold. I don’t mean that the leaves turn gold, though that happens too, I really mean that the air literally turns gold. There is more light than there is supposed to be. It’s not that there is too much light, because this is a soft, hushed, rarified light that is so delicate and delicious that you can almost eat with a spoon. It is just that there is more light in the valley than ought to be possible. Maybe someone rustled the light from somewhere else. Possibly, if you drive down to California it is totally dark down there. I hope you people in the Bay Area are not having a total blackout because our October was so incredible and unearthly. That just wouldn’t be fair.



Then there are the trees. I have a suspicion that the leaves don’t TURN here like they do everywhere else in the world. It happens too quickly. The word that really fits what happens here is one that is used for Christmas trees. DECKED. The October trees look like they have been decked with autumn leaves. Truthfully, the whole thing looks more than a little bit fake. I mean, really, who is paying to have the entire Rogue Valley decorated with those expensive, over-dyed silk leaves? Walking through Lithia Park last month I went on a quest to find two leaves that were the same color. I couldn’t do it. There are millions and tri-billions of leaves and each one is a different color. Of course each one is different, as in the whole snowflake metaphor, which tells us, as human-merely-beings that, yes indeed, just like the snow flakes and the autumn leaves, we too are all individual, amazing creations as well. (Tra ~ La ~ La ~ ) That isn’t it.  I couldn’t find two leaves that were the same color.


It isn’t really October that worries me, it is November. Well, no. It’s not even November - it’s me. After the sublime glories of October in Southern Oregon, it begins to rain . . . and it rains and it rains and it, well rains and they call it November. Everything gets soaked. Now, I don’t mean it is just wet, I’m using “soaked” as an action word here. It rains and every piece of nature SOAKS up the water. The leaves soak until they steeped and saturated and they slop off of the trees and soak into the ground; they turn various shades of soused generic brown and get sodden. It starts getting cold and all that sodden, soaking vegetation makes a fog that comes up from the ground, stirring and sidling, especially in low areas like soupy, saturated ghosts. In certain slants of light, it looks just like Sleepy Hollow. When the cold steps up just one more notch, the real fogs begin.





 These fogs are not brown, they are all colors of grey from charcoal dust to pearled cotton. The real fog hugs the low land areas too, but it also whispers up the mountains and sticks like cotton wool on the prickly pine trees. Looking across the valley you can see where a huge hand has pulled the cotton across the mountain and how it caught it the pine trees, pulling and separating into thin strands of softness. Everything goes very quiet. It is as if the valley is packed in cotton wool and it is heaped into our ears as well. I think November is my favorite month.

Does that seem at all normal to you?

“Sleep . . .” says the Grey King up in the mountain, “quiet, hush, shush, mellow, fallow, sleep, mist, silence, still, quiet, calm, soundless, lull, sooth . . . sleep . . .” And as soon as everything gets moist and covered with mist, soaked and saturated and still and silent, soothed and sleepy . . .

I wake up and start writing. And I write and I write and I write and I write. And I call it - November. I write until my eye balls are furry and my fingers ache. The NaNoWriMo folks have a lot of tricks to help you if you can’t think of anything to write. This is NOT my problem, but I’m not sure if my hands and my eyes are going to make it. Truthfully, I have been doing a lot of writing with my eyes closed, because I get to where I can’t focus. Writing without seeing, just by touch, is entirely different than seeing the text appear on the monitor. It is not like regular keyboarding and it is not like writing by hand, it is like a third something, entirely new. Fascinating.

I was glad to see the automatic validation machine come up at NaMoWriMo this morning. My own word counter was giving me 35,528 words. Given the fact that we are only eleven days into the month, this sounds like I’m cheating. I’m not, I’m just writing until I can’t see. Most people who are doing NaNoWriMo are trying to find an hour a day to write, before work, before bed. I’m not doing anything else. I’m not painting. I’m not reading. I’m not doing research. I’m not doing the dishes or laundry or anything else. I am only writing. This is the reason that my word count is so high. Heaven . . . I’m in heaven . . .Fred Astaire is dancing across my keyboard . . . he is riding off on the pink unicorn . . . the Wizard who has been riding that unicorn is going to be PO’ed when he gets out of the tea cup that he fell in . . .

I was going to visit my daughter at Halloween, but Southern California sort of burned down, so I postponed my trip until the last week in November. I now have to finish 50,000 words in three weeks instead of four. That is the other reason my word count is so high.

This is the thing: I just really think I deserve it. I’ve been a writer all my life. My mother was writing down my “poems” before I could write myself. She wrote them on pieces of paper and stuck them into what ever book she was reading, the cookbook, the encyclopedia, dictionary, thesaurus ~ they are still surfacing. For fifty+ years I never had enough time to write. I lived with constantly having to go somewhere else and do something else when I wanted to write, because I always wanted to write.  I remember so well the frustration of having to stop writing mid-inspiration because it was time to go to school, to work, to dance class. I can even remember having someone waiting down stairs to pick me up for a date and me sitting upstairs furiously writing in my notebook, trying to finish something before I had to go . . .

I wrote while I was breast feeding, correcting papers, cooking, doing the laundry. I typed with a two year old on my lap, wrote poems during math class, sat down in the middle of the stairs and wrote right in my text books, wrote on my lecture notes during a class discussion, in the midst of giving barre work. I wrote on my children’s homework papers, my students homework papers, grocery lists, the back of envelopes containing bills. I really, truly once wrote a poem once in McDonalds, on a disposable diaper with a crayon.

When I was working as an editor, I spent nearly seven years completely blocked. That was the worst. Much worse than having to steal the time from somewhere else was finding that I had a spare hour, but that nothing would come . . . that was by far the worst.

I retired in 2005. On a scale of 0-54, these long, free hours are something relatively new. I have gotten nowhere near a place where I take them for granted. I do wish my fingers and especially my eyes had a little bit more stamina, but still, I am incredibly happy. Just plain old good old, downright - happy; while the wet, cold wind of November drips and drenches the world outside my big window. I have to go to the gym, I have to eat, I find that I have to dance and sooner or later - I’ll have to sleep. Other than that the hours stretch in front of me like the shadowy, vaporous, soaked and squelching road to Nirvana.

The NaNoWriMo word counter put me at 36,436 - they are always more generous than the counter on my word processing program. I’m not cheating, but I am bewitched - beguiled - enchanted - enthralled -  entranced -  caught in Hamlet’s spell . . . “Words. Words. Words.”

Sonnet to NaNoWriMo

The long year stretches to a close
A banked and burning ember
The Grey King on the mountain blows
Shadowed pearls of chill November

The faded, dissipated rose
Still dreams of gold September
Across the ground the cold fog flows
The drenched dance of November

Inside my room the lamp light glows
Treasured hours that I’ll remember
Enchanted here as I compose
The magic of November

Words pile deep as star-kissed snows
From my fingers a miracle grows



©Edwina Peterson Cross
November 11, 2007
“Shakespeare’s Sisters”
36,436 Words

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