Before the students arrived the staff had a few days back to get rooms ready. At the welcome back assembly there was a slide show with pictures of what people did over the summer break. It was optional to submit and it’s not something I do unless required.
As I watched the trips to various places across the country and beyond, I thought to myself did I even leave the county? I was pretty sure I hadn’t left the state as my mother moved out of her apartment in NYC and I didn’t go to the beach.
I did leave the county, but it was on foot. I took the Delaware and Lehigh Trail (D&L) from south of Easton, PA in Bucks County along the Delaware River to Easton. There I followed the Lehigh River north and west alternating between Northampton and Lehigh Counties until I arrived in Carbon County. This was over the course of many walks ranging from ten to twenty miles at a time there and back.
I also hiked the Appalachian Trail (AT) from Wind Gap to Lehigh Gap, which weaved back and forth from Northampton to Monroe before arriving in Carbon County. Again, these were also there and back trips and I don’t get nearly the same MPH on rock as I do on rail to trails, so these were more 8 to 14 miles each.
The fact is I loved every minute of every step I took. Checking the weather the night before and heading out to hit the trail at dawn on nice days and staying home to write when it rained or was too hot and humid to enjoy.
Most of the time I took my walks and hikes on weekdays. I love this because there are far fewer people out during the week. I like the peace and quiet of the trail. I like when I’m the one alerting an animal or catching it doing its thing before being on guard.
I also found myself lost in my writing and having spent hours at a time with no interuptions or felt the need to take care of something else.
I still played racquetball two or three times a week, including the Tuesday guys night out, where we played and then got together to eat and catch up.
I wrote daily, often hours a day working on my nonfiction Neithan the Wronged, and fictional The Grit Girl.
Short stories and essays were mixed in. My personal essay for the Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Guild was finished to submit for the Anthology and I finished my presentation for my talk that was accepted for the Tolkien Society’s annual conference, Oxonmoot.
My investment of time in my writing craft continued. I participated in the Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group meetings, workshops, and writers cafe and was asked to serve on the board of directors.
I started a group to meet weekly and go through Ursula LeGuin’s writing craft book. There are four of us and each week we meet on Tuesday to go over the weekly assignment. I did this to ensure that I wouldn’t just read the text and skip the actual exercises. It has been great to get to know these fellow writers and share our work with one another.
Everything together has been very helpful and I think my craft is improving.
Music was in the mix as well. I don’t listen while hiking, but I do while walking and got to a good number of live shows by local artists including about five days at Musikfest.
I was able to see Erin Kelly twice this summer and catch up with how she is doing. I had given her my great-grandfather’s 1930s Martin Mandolin a year or so ago. The personal essay I submitted for the anthology was about that instrument. I learned that she wrote and recorded her first song specifically for it, ‘Unbreakable Love’ as a gift for her brother’s wedding, which I’ll be noting as an addendum.
I closed out my summer over Labor Day by presenting at Oxonmoot on Friday, September 4 at 6:30 p.m. ET. This was a ‘promotion’ as far as time slots went as I had been Saturday at 8:00 p.m. the past couple years. I was informed, unofficially, that there were twice the number of submissions as time slots this year, and going through the bio’s I noticed that there were many PhD students presenting from their thesis this year. I was one of nine presenters out of about forty, who were not academics, authors, or published artists/illustrators.
My presentation, ‘The Ordeal of Hope: Turin and Aragorn’ went well. I had a couple questions and blew answering the easiest one, which in hindsight bothers me, but I’m not a professor so I’m’ not accustomed to answering on the fly, so I’m trying to forgive myself.
The question was why Aragorn with Turin, as my book is on Turin. The real answer was that a major theme is hope and despair, Turin, his sister, and father all despair and end their own lives. Aragorn’s name is literally hope, ‘Estel’. The other type of Elven hope is Amdir, and that represents Turin. The entire premise of my presentation. My bad. I said something about people always beating up on Turin and praising Aragorn so it was a natural pairing.
Oh well, if that was the worst that happened to me this summer, I had one hell of a good summer! I hope yours was as well.
