Home!

I've had a wonderful few days in the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area with Molly Weston, mystery maven and reviewer par excellence (and the most obliging and thoughtful hostess imaginable), along with two fellow mystery writers, Mary Anna Evans and Mark de Castrique. Our whirlwind tour of one library and three bookstores went beautifully and I'll talk about it and Molly at length in the September newsletter.

But now I'm home!

My pulse always quickens when the mountains come into sight as I leave the flatlands and by the time our own particular mountain is in view, I'm bearing down on that accelerator as if I were nearing a finish line.

I used this in Old Wounds, putting some of my feelings into Rosemary's thoughts as she returns home:

"Full Circle Farm lay in the hazy distance. Rosemary breathed deeply as she gazed at the beloved pattern of dark woods and lighter pastures on the slopes of Pinnacle Mountain, and at the silver speck that was the metal roof of her childhood home, shining in the center. Like a lodestone.

She smiled, feeling the tug of home and family. Words from one of Shakespeare's sonnets ran in her mind

. . . it is an ever fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring barque,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. "

It's good to be back.