The winner of the December 1 drawing for a Christmas book package is Kathy Weinrank of Indiana. Congratulations, Kathy!
Details for the next drawing for two Valentine’s Day themed books to be given away February 1, 2011 will be announced later this week on the Enter to Win! page. In the meantime, if you want to be entered for that drawing, just send an email with your name and mailing address to me at gina.w@live.com.
I’ve spent the past three weeks with a member of my family who is battling back from a serious medical condition, which is why I haven’t posted in a while. American Thanksgiving will be celebrated next week, and the hours I’ve spent sitting in the hospital during the past weeks have given me the opportunity to be grateful for all the many things I take for granted in my daily life. I’ve seen so much courage and grace displayed by stroke and accident survivors of all ages, from teens to senior citizens. I’ve realized how blessed I am to have such a supportive network of family and friends, and especially my husband and three amazing kids. I’ve come to appreciate the simple pleasures of tying my own shoes, dressing, preparing meals, doing my shopping without needing assistance, climbing stairs and running for an elevator — all those thousands of things those of sound body do every day without a second thought. I’ll be giving them second thoughts in the future. I have a lot to be grateful for this Thanksgiving, most especially that my husband and children are all still with me. That’s a blessing I never want to take for granted.
I’ll check in again soon. In the meantime, be sure to enter for the drawing on December 1 for a holiday books prize. Click the Enter to Win! tab above for details. And watch for my new series for 2011 beginning with THE M.D. NEXT DOOR in January! I’ll post details soon on the Books Available Now! page.
After several rather stressful weeks, my husband and I took advantage of having our son home from college for a 4-day fall break and escaped to one of our favorite day-trip destinations Friday. It was a nice day, still unseasonably warm here in Arkansas, but just cloudy enough to make it comfortable to spend the day outside.
Mountain View, Arkansas is a picturesque town located in the rolling hills alongside the White River, about an hour and a half north of Little Rock. With a population of just under 3,000, the town is off the beaten path, and the drive there from my home is almost all two-lane country roads. Our dry, hot summer has kept the autumn colors from being as vivid as in some years, but it was still a pretty drive with plenty of red, orange and yellow trees to admire along the way. We passed miles of pastureland interspersed with several little towns and isolated homesteads. The occasional deserted old rock-walled house with a falling-down barn in the background piqued my imagination as I wondered when the house was built, how many generations lived there, when the last inhabitant finally moved on.
The rock-walled Stone County Courthouse that sits in the center of the Mountain View town square was built in 1922 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Surrounding it are more stone buildings holding shops, crafts galleries, cafes and ice cream parlors for the tourists who come for a peaceful day of shopping and music. The area was relatively isolated from the rest of the state until the 1950s, and had no electricity until the 1930s. For entertainment, local residents gathered in the evenings to play and sing folk music, a tradition that continues until today.
All around the courthouse square, you’ll find groups of people “pickin'” and singing. I counted eight different impromptu groups playing at one time during our stroll around the square on Friday afternoon. Anyone with an instrument is welcome to join in, everyone else is encouraged to sit and listen a spell. They gather on the grass, on shop porches, under pavilions in Washington Street Park, and it’s perfectly acceptable to sit and listen to one session for a while and then move to the next group to hear different singers and instruments. Listeners bring lawn chairs or blankets and sip lemonade or munch on ice cream cones and funnel cakes purchased from a couple of discreet concessions stands. In the evenings, fire pits provide a little warmth and coffee and hot chocolate are the beverages of choice. The musical selections are totally random — old folk and bluegrass songs, gospel hymns, country hits from the 40s and 50s — and even a few Elvis tunes. If you stand in one place and open your ears, you’ll hear a simultaneous medley surrounding you.
Little motels and inviting bed and breakfast inns are grouped nearby, for those who want to sit on the square late or who attend one of the music and comedy shows in local theaters. Other area attractions are the spectacular Blanchard Springs Caverns, which my family has toured many times, and the Ozark Folk Center Crafts Village, where pioneer crafts are demonstrated and available for purchase. Not to mention the outdoor activities in the area — hiking, camping, fishing, canoeing and kayaking. Annual festivals — one including very popular “outhouse races” — draw tourists year-round. Is there any wonder why Mountain View is one of my favorite places to visit whenever I can slip away for a few hours, and why I’ve set a few scenes from books there?
My husband is in the process of making a mountain dulcimer — something he has always wanted to do — so we visited two local musical instruments shops to chat with the luthiers there. And as a wood turner, he enjoys admiring other turners’ work displayed in local crafts shops. We enjoyed visiting with a dulcimer player performing in one of the shops who impressed us with his knowledge of folk music history — especially Celtic folk music, one of my favorites. We spent a couple of hours wandering through antique stores, finding a few little treasures buried among the old collections (my mother used to say you know you’re getting older when you find mementos of your childhood in the antiques stores). Our 21-year-old son might not have appreciated some of the music and shopping as much as we did, but he indulged our nostalgia (and savored the food).
I returned home from that trip pleasantly tired, wishing I could have spent more hours listening on the courthouse square and eager to return. The stresses of everyday life were still waiting for me at home, but for those few hours, I could pretend to live in an earlier time, when people escaped their much harder existences with an evening of pickin’ and singin’. Maybe I’ll even learn to play that dulcimer when my husband finally finishes it.
Don’t forget to enter the drawing to be held on December 1 for a holiday book package! Details can be found on the Enter to Win! tab above.
October 1. Looks like fall has arrived, though the temperatures here in Arkansas have still hovered in the summer range. Beautiful, cooler weather is predicted for next week and I, for one, am looking forward to it — especially since I’ll be finishing my newest Silhouette Special Edition this weekend (title and publication date to be announced later) and will take a week off to decompress and recharge. The Arkansas State Fair starts next week — one of my favorite fall events! And then it will be time to dive into my next story.
The winner of the October 1 drawing for two ghost stories – to commemorate Halloween – is MeLisa Cannon of Wisconsin. Congratulations, MeLisa! I’ll get those in the mail to you as soon as possible.
The next drawing will celebrate the holiday season. On December 1, I’ll draw the winner of two holiday-themed books from my back-list plus a special little surprise present. Be sure and enter again to be eligible, even if you have entered before! Click the Enter to Win! tab above for details.
My son sometimes fusses at me for taking too many pictures. I have more than a couple of shots of him frowning in dismay at seeing my camera aimed once again in his direction. He has even accused me of being more interested in recording excursions than experiencing them — fair point, I suppose.
What he doesn’t yet understand is how much those photographs mean to me. I can spend hours leafing through the albums of pictures of my three kids growing up, and almost every photo brings with it a pleasant memory of the occasion it commemorated. They grew up so fast — I enjoy seeing how much they’ve changed and matured and remembering when they were small.
When I’m particularly stressed with deadlines and family issues, as I have been for the past month, I turn to the nice shots I took on nature outings and vacations. Like the photo above, taken on Whidbey Island in Washington state. If I look at it hard enough, I can almost imagine myself there again, feeling the cool breeze on my face, hearing the surf and the birds and the rustling evergreens, enjoying the company of my husband and two of my three now-adult offspring.
I inherited my love of pictures — and a cedar chest packed absolutely full of photos — from my mother. I spent so many hours with her looking through the old family pictures she hoarded, hearing stories about the people in them, some of whom died before I was even born. She loved her pictures and her stories, and she passed both down to me.
For a brief time after college, I worked in a job that required me to use a camera almost daily. I took photos for advertising and for employee training programs and I confess I burned out for a little while on photography. I was never particularly enthused about F stops and shutter speeds and light meters. I finally packed away my SLR camera and special lenses and started using disposable point-and-shoots for family photos.
The advent of the digital camera changed my life again. My husband bought me a little Canon Powershot for Christmas ’95 and it’s hardly been out of my hands since. To have almost unlimited shots available! To see those photos immediately without having to wait for development to find out if they turned out well! To store them in my computer for instant slide shows whenever I need a little memory lane pick-me-up! Sheer joy. That camera goes everywhere I do now. It’s even sitting right by my chair now in case the kitty does something cute or I see an interesting critter through the patio door I face as I write.
In answer to my son’s criticism, I am experiencing life — but I’m also recording it occasionally, just for myself. For those times when I feel tired or stressed or lonely or nostalgic, and all I have to do is pull out my pictures to cheer me up. And when I come upon a photo in which he looks at me with such baffled exasperation, that, too, makes me smile. Maybe he’ll understand someday. Or maybe he’ll never have the affinity for photos that I have. That’s okay, too.
Sorry, kiddo. The holidays are approaching — which means you’ll be doing your share of posing for mom again. Sometime long in the future, when you look at those old photos in whatever medium they are stored then, I hope you’ll be glad that you did.
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Don’t forget to enter this month’s drawing. Click the Enter to Win! tab above for details.
Look for PROGNOSIS: ROMANCE, from Silhouette Special Edition, in stores now. See the Books Available Now page for more.
Gina Wilkins 