At last, rain! An inch and a tenth by our gauge. You can hear the land sighing if you listen carefully. It has been a month since the last bit of moisture, and today the land smells rich and fecund once more after crackling, dry heat. Wild fires raged west of us in the Big Horns, mostly due to dry lightning. A single careless toss of a cigarette could also have begun the conflagration. Imagine. But with the rain, and snow in higher elevations, that fire is mostly contained. Hands fold in gratitude.

I celebrate the completion of the first draft of the fourth book novel in my Riven Country series. It will stand as a quartet. The story is resolved, and now it will rest for about four weeks—maybe longer—like a lump of dough, before I take it up again to begin my revisions. Meanwhile, I have dusted off my copy of Revising Fiction, A Handbook for Writers, by David Madden, to review the process. This last novel in the series must answer a reader’s questions regarding several threads and I hope it will. Moreover, it must answer my own questions!

Autumn is a good time of year to have reached this pause in the work of writing—we’re harvesting the apples and will press a few bushels soon. My husband Jeff and a friend planted the garlic crop for next summer’s digging. Next, we’ll forage for Echinacea roots. The birds enjoyed the  elderberries (for their essential juiciness, I suspect), before I thought to pick them, but we have several pints of syrup put by against coughs and colds and I am not concerned.

Last weekend I thoroughly enjoyed a well-organized Literary Festival in Lander, Wyoming, seven hours west by car—a lovely drive. Given an opportunity to read from The Riven Country of Senga Munro, and to listen to several excerpts by mostly Wyoming writers, I was able to reconnect with my tribe, as it were. Ordinarily, I am inclined to the quiet life. A Book Fair enabled each of us to sell our books and this proved the case. I also placed some books in Mr. D’s, a grocer that promotes Wyoming authors. Thank you, Michelle and Jodie, and Amy Vincent!

The Festival Keynote Address by Téa Obreht, author of The Morningside, rocked my sensibilities with her gorgeous descriptions of emotional resonance—what we writers strive to elucidate in our work—and I felt the impact still the next morning when I drove up, into Sinks Canyon, on the highway into the Wind River Mountains. I parked and hiked the short trail that follows the river, the one that abruptly ends on one side of the road and continues on the other side. This anomaly is due to the stream pouring into an underground pockmarked system of Madison limestone; then the water shoots out several yards away into a still pool called The Rise.

Full of large, languid trout, with magpies darting within arm’s reach, dramatic cliffs rise vertically above the blue-eyed pool, and further on, the stream continues on its merry way.  Studies have shown that more water actually exits at The Rise than enters the tunnel—the limestone formations beneath acting as aquifers.

Emotional resonance, indeed. I felt my chest doing its pesky angina thing as I made my slow way back to the car, where I took one of the nitro tablets I carry with me. After waiting the requisite five minutes, I decided I was all right to drive the seven minutes to town.

Back at the Lander Motel (wonderful boutique stay), I placed two more tablets under my tongue, separately, before the pressure subsided. My husband was beyond concerned about my driving home, but I felt up to it and made it with no difficulty. I was simply overcome by beauty: the author’s poignant words, and the canyon. And by living on the Earth in these uncertain times. My prayer: May Peace prevail in the coming weeks and months. May Good Sense and Decency prevail. May Beauty prevail, and Love, Justice, and Kindness.