via GIPHY

This weekend is supposed to be peak fall colors for the mountains along the border with West Virginia, but Saturday is supposed to be windier and will likely be more crowded, so I’m switching my Friday and Saturday, taking today as a “weekend” to head west into the mountains and see if I can see some leaves. Supposedly, there are some Civil War battlefields that are now parks that have good views, and the farthest west county in Virginia is having a festival today and tomorrow. I may find some apple cider donuts. I hope to have a full report next week.

In the meantime, if you like cozy fantasy like my Tales of Rydding Village series, Monday, October 14, is the Cozy the Day Away sale, where you’ll find a whole bunch of cozy fantasy books cheap or even free. Tea and Empathy will be one of these books, but I’m sure if you’re reading my blog you’ve already read it, right? If not, here’s your chance to try it cheap. I’m looking forward to loading my tablet up with good books to enjoy on cool nights with a cup of cocoa. On Monday, you’ll be able to find the list of books on sale here (but you won’t be able to see anything until then).

I had a big day of exploring on Saturday, and I think some of it may count as research for my books.

The main event was Mill Day at a nearby preserved historic farm. They were going to be running their restored 18th century water-powered mill, and I was very excited about this. I’ve been fascinated by water-powered mills since I was a little kid. We had a print of a water mill — I think it was even in my bedroom at one point — and there was something about it that made me want to crawl into that picture. There might also have been a Captain Kangaroo episode about a mill (I think a lot of my lifelong interests can be traced back to either Captain Kangaroo or Mister Rogers). I saw one water wheel on a trip to England, but it wasn’t a functioning mill. Otherwise, I’d never seen one before.

So, when I got to this farm after a pleasant country drive and the first thing I saw when I got out of the car was the water wheel turning, I got way too excited. I was practically shaking with glee to watch the water wheel turn. Then I got to go inside and see the millstone turning and the meal coming out. It’s a pretty noisy operation, which was a detail I need for potential scenes in the Rydding Village books, in case we visit the mill during working hours. This place also had a nature trail along the mill pond, which I walked, and some other demonstrations that were mostly for kids, but they also let me work the water pump.

My original plan had been to drive home via the Blue Ridge Parkway, but the whole parkway is closed for a damage survey after Hurricane Helene. I don’t think our end, the very northern part, was damaged all that badly, but they got hit a lot worse over there than we did here, so there might have been some trees down. I checked on the map for other things I could do on the way home, and it turned out that there was another mill nearby, and this one has been in continuous commercial operation since 1750. They still mill different kinds of flour and corn there. So I drove over to that mill. You can go around inside it and even go out onto a walkway that overlooks the water wheel. You can buy flour and meal in the shop there. I chatted a while with the miller and got some buckwheat pancake mix and some corn meal (both ended up being really good).

The next stop was the Enchanted Mushroom Festival in a village just down the road from where I live. They had some interesting educational displays about fungi and mushrooms, but otherwise it was the same festival vendors you see at all the local events, so I didn’t stay too long there.

But I realized that once I was in that village, I was pretty close to the mountains to the west of my town that I haven’t visited before (the ones I can kind of see from one corner of my back yard), so I drove in that direction. I saw a sign for a recreational area in the George Washington National Forest and turned off down a narrow road up into the mountains, where I found this small lake/large pond with a picnic area nearby. I’d brought some hot tea and cookies and had my afternoon tea in the picnic area, then walked around a bit. There’s a hiking trail there, but I hadn’t brought hiking boots and it was pretty rugged, so I decided to do that another day. That spot is only half an hour from my house.

Ironically, that area was where I saw the true enchanted mushrooms. These were right out of a storybook. Apparently, mushroom foraging is big around here and the people putting on the mushroom festival are professionals at that, teaching classes. I’m wary enough to stick to eating what I buy in stores, but I now know to look for interesting mushrooms when walking in the woods.

It was on the way back that I realized how far into the mountains I’d gone because I had mountains ahead of me. I guess the road goes up gradually in elevation but also through a pass so I didn’t realize I’d gone through mountains on the way to that lake. The mountains are smaller than I thought, so they’re closer than I realized. I think I prefer these ancient, sort of worn-down mountains covered in trees to the more rugged, snow-capped mountains like the Rockies and the Alps. The Appalachians are so old that the mountains in Ireland, Scotland, and Norway are all part of the same range because the range was formed before the continents split apart. Maybe that’s why I feel so at home here. My heritage is Scottish, Irish, and Norwegian, so I’m living in the same mountain range that’s in my ancestral lands.

Supposedly, this weekend will be peak fall color in West Virginia, so I may head over there. I might take Friday off and go then so that it will be less crowded, then work on Saturday.

For years, around this time of year I would find myself researching other places to live. I was getting impatient for fall, while it was still in the 90s and felt like summer in Texas. I’d read the fall issues of magazines and dream of being in a place where September was time for warm beverages, walks in woods where the leaves were starting to turn colors, and the weather was getting cooler.

And now, I’m in a place like that. The trees are just starting to turn. The mornings are chilly — I have to put on a sweater to sit on my porch — and the afternoons are pleasantly warm. I’m getting baking urges, and I want to drink All the Tea. It keeps blowing my mind that I’m actually getting September in September, not the upper 90s that they’re having back in Texas.

This week we’ve had both kinds of my favorite fall weather. It’s been rainy and cool, and today it’s cool and sunny (now that the morning fog has burned off) but will be warm in the afternoon. It’ll be rainy again tomorrow, which is nice because I’m getting my flu shot this afternoon, and a good rainy afternoon is great for huddling under a blanket with a book while feeling icky in the aftermath of the shot. Even if I’m not feeling icky, I’ll pretend I am so I can have a proper wallow.

Then next weekend, all the fall festivals seem to really get going. I’m volunteering for the one in my town, since I can walk there and it will make traffic nasty enough that I won’t be able to get around, as close as I live to downtown. After that, I’ll have to look at the calendar and prioritize which ones I want to go to. There’s an apple butter festival, a mushroom festival and a couple of harvest festivals, that I know of. They’re putting decorative scarecrows in the park, and there’s going to be a pumpkin float in the lake at the park.

Yes, I do seem to have moved into a Hallmark movie. Still haven’t found the flannel-clad woodworking guy yet, but maybe at one of these festivals …

I’ve been making good progress on my writing, so I should be able to get away enough to really enjoy my surroundings. I’ll be picking up Instagram fodder, so it kind of counts as work.

I recently read a book that was about creating some kind of superhero persona or heroic alter ego as a way of motivating yourself to do things, so for instance, you’re not just exercising, you’re training yourself for some heroic task, like going on a journey to Mordor or being a secret agent. (I actually thought the book would be about something different when I checked it out of the library, but I read it anyway) Along the way, you’re supposed to also be planning grand adventures that you could actually do, finding real-world ways to live out the kind of adventures you might read about or see in movies.

That got me started wondering, what would my alter ego be? I don’t have too many grand adventures I want to carry out. I’m old enough that my idea of fantasy travel right now would involve first-class flights and either nice hotels or interesting bed and breakfast type places. I have no desire to bungee jump over gorges or parasail, or anything like that. If I just focus on what kind of character I might “play” in order to get more fit and do the kind of exploring that interests me, I might be some kind of wandering druid/bard who goes exploring to see more of nature and learn about plants and trees and pays my way by telling stories.

While they talk in terms of superhero secret identities, the characters they describe seem to have more to do with D&D character classes, so maybe they just mean that this is your secret “super” self, not necessarily that you’re a superhero. Oddly, the town where I live now does have a superhero. There’s a guy who dresses up like Spider-Man to do parkour and good deeds around town. He’s a local celebrity. People in the town Facebook group will respond to missing pets posts by commenting that they saw Spider-Man out looking for that missing pet. When there were some car break-ins at the town swimming pool, he started patrolling the parking lot (presumably either to be a deterrent with his presence or to call the police rather than shooting webs at anyone breaking into cars). There’s a big local festival coming up, and I’m volunteering as a way to get involved in the community. Last weekend, there was a Zoom meeting for volunteers, and Spider-Man was in the meeting, because of course he’s volunteering. He’s apparently an integral part of all local events (he was the grand marshal of last year’s Christmas parade). He wore the mask, and his Zoom name was “Spidey.” So, if I did want to actually go around dressed in a hooded cloak and tending to the trees while telling stories, it wouldn’t be the weirdest thing in this town. People probably wouldn’t blink. There are people who hang out at the farmers market dressed in fantasy/medievalish clothes and hand out quests to find the dragons hidden around town. People would assume I was with them.

It sounds kind of silly, but I did find my mindset changing when I started thinking of myself as that character. So, instead of sitting down at my computer to write, I’m crafting stories I’ll share with my adoring public in Ye Olde Amazon Tavern. Going on long walks in the mountains would be exactly the sort of thing I’d do, though I’d come home at the end of the hike instead of camping out or staying at an inn (one nice thing about living in the mountains—I can hike the Appalachian Trail for a few hours and then come home).

Now I just need to figure out why a druid/bard would be doing housework and cleaning the kitchen because that’s where I really need the motivation. Maybe not enough people tossed a coin to me after my storytelling session, so now I have to wash dishes to pay for my night’s stay at the inn.

I do have a few big adventures I’d like to do, though they’re less on the “adventure” side. I want to get back to Europe to hit a few of the places I haven’t visited and revisit some of the places I’ve lived or visited. Staying in a real castle is on my bucket list. I also want to see New Zealand and Alaska. For now, I hope to start really exploring this area. I think my big fall vacation will be to Yorktown/Williamsburg/Jamestown. It’s only a few hours away, the hotels aren’t expensive this time of year, and in addition to all the history stuff, there’s a big outlet mall with the shops they don’t have here, so I can replace my comfortable nice shoes (comfortable enough to walk downtown, but nice enough to go to concerts/theater/church) and maybe pick up some winter clothes that will be suited to this climate.

I also have some day trips planned. There are so many festivals in the fall, and there’s what looks like an interesting event at the Mennonite heritage center. Then there’s hiking and some drives to look at the autumn colors. The leaves have already started turning, and it feels like fall.

So I guess I’ll put on my druid/bard persona and get out there and do stuff — in addition to writing, of course. The bard has to tell stories to pay the bills.

I guess I’m still enjoying my surroundings because I got sidetracked by such a perfect fall-like day, so I took a long walk in the park and totally forgot it’s one of my blog days.

In Texas, around this time every year was when I’d be looking around for other places to live where I could experience a real fall, and I’d be making lists of things I wanted to do to enjoy the fall experience when the weather finally changed. Here, the fall weather started in August, so I feel like I need to catch up, and I definitely need to make a list because there’s so much going on. My plan was to get a draft of the next Rydding Village book done in August so I could take time off to enjoy the fall. Now I’m hoping to get much of it done in September so I can take time off in October. I may also shift my work schedule to spend the days exploring and my evenings writing.

I also need a shopping list to restock my fall supplies, like some candles, apple cider, cocoa, and ingredients for fall baking. I need to make cookies and bread and other fun stuff. I made my first batch of veggie soup for the year last night, since it’s starting to be soup weather.

I’m hoping to do a lot of day trips to look around the area and see the fall foliage in the mountains and visit the historic sites. I also want to make it over to West Virginia, just to add another state to my list. Then there are a ton of little festivals around here.

I’m starting my fall exploration with a guided nature hike at one of the parks tomorrow morning, then there’s an event at the frontier culture museum, and I think I’m going to do some baking.

I had pretty much the perfect weekend in a way that was unique to being in this place. I haven’t had any regrets about moving, but I have moments when it strikes me how crazy it was to move across the country, kind of on a whim (though a thoroughly researched one) and I’ve wondered if it was worth it. But this weekend really took advantage of the location.

Friday morning, there was a meeting of a group for creative people in the area, and I went with a friend (the person who used to have the apartment I now live in, and we turned out to be kindred spirits). I picked her up and we drove to the next town over to the park where the meeting was, which was on top of either a very tall hill or a very small mountain on the edge of the Blue Ridge. It was absolutely spectacular up there. There was a fog/mist, so it looked a bit overcast down in the valley, but up at the park we were above the mist. The meeting turned out to be a fun mix of theater people, photographers, writers, artists, musicians, etc., and the backdrop of the speaker was an incredible view.

We took a scenic route home, with my friend directing me around some sights in town. After I dropped her off, I continued exploring, taking each of the major roads I hadn’t been on yet to the edge of town and then driving around one of the neighborhoods where I think I might want to get a house.

Saturday morning, I walked to the farmers market because I needed zucchini for a recipe I wanted to make, and while I was there I found a stand from an apple orchard. They had some samples, and I’d never had fresh apples straight from an orchard that weren’t from a supermarket. The flavor was so much more intense than any apple I’d had, so I had to buy a small basket of mixed apples (the grower made me take a couple more) and I chatted with the grower, swapping apple butter recipes.

On the walk home, I saw a deer running across my street, a few blocks from my house. That’s the fun mix of urban and rural here. I can walk downtown, where there are sidewalk cafes and shops, but it’s still rural enough that there are deer running around (one night last week I saw one in my yard, near my front door). I sat on my porch and drank tea and finished reading the newspaper to recover from the hike up the hill, then I went to the park, where there was an art show. I browsed all the booths and made mental notes of things I might want when I have a permanent house.

Then in the afternoon, it clouded up and rained off and on, and it made for a good reading day. We got a mild thunderstorm in the evening. I’ve seen people talking about liking thunderstorms, which always sounded odd to me, since I’m used to storms meaning the potential for danger, but this was gentle, with just some rain and distant thunder. I opened the curtains and blinds in my bedroom and sat on the bed and read, looking out at the rain every so often. The view and sound were basically one of those “rainy evening” ambience videos on YouTube.

These were all things that were reasons I wanted to move here, and I felt like it validated the decision. Just looking at the mountains makes me happy. The few vacations I took back in Dallas were road trips to mountains, which took at least three hours of driving to Oklahoma mountains or about five hours to the Ozarks. Now, I can be in mountains in half an hour driving either east or west from my home. My town has a couple of tall hills that might technically be mountains, and the hill I live on is about the size of an Oklahoma mountain. Since I’m also surrounded by trees, I can’t see the mountain ranges from my house, but I can see them while I go to and from the grocery store. Just going to and from Kroger gives me breathtaking views, and the trip to and from Target is practically a religious experience.

Meanwhile, I like being able to live in a wooded, country-like place but still walk downtown. I love being able to buy apples from the farmer, right off the tree. I also love the arts and creative community around here. And I love being able to have a thunderstorm that isn’t a serious threat.

This weekend, I’m going on a guided nature walk at one of the city parks. This morning, I took a walk in the park, and it was crisp and cool, and the leaves were just starting to turn vivid colors. I love getting into fall weather so early. This is pretty much Thanksgiving weather in Texas.

This week, we’ve been having what the locals are calling “false fall.” The overnight lows have been in the 40s (some areas in the mountains have had freezes) and the afternoon highs have been in the low 70s. It’s the kind of weather we might get in late October in Texas, if we had a cold front. I’ve been loving it because this is one of my favorite kinds of weather. I can sit outside comfortably all day (though I need a jacket in the morning), hot tea feels good, and I can sleep under blankets without getting too hot. We’re even getting the first fall color. It’s just individual leaves turning red and gold, but it’s a hint of what’s to come.

It’s been even nicer when I see that it’s been in the 100s, with heat advisories, where I used to live. Apparently, that’s all due to the same weather pattern that’s blocking air from the north away from Texas and bringing it to us.

Alas, starting this weekend it’s warming up again. The locals are talking about going back to summer and “Satan’s armpit,” but even so, it’s still late September and early October weather for Texas, so it will still feel a bit like fall. to me I might not want to go for long walks at the hottest part of the day, but I also won’t need a heated throw and a jacket to eat breakfast on the back porch in the morning.

This is a big reason why I wanted to move. No 100s here. It is really muggy during the summer, which is weird because the temperatures are lower and the dew points are about where they were in Texas, but it feels a lot more humid. I went to hear the local TV meteorologist do a talk at the library and asked her about it. She said it may be that the layer of humid air is deeper here, and it may be that there’s less wind. The wind really may be it. I hadn’t realized how still it is here compared to Texas. A normal day in Texas had steady winds of about 10 mph. Here, that’s a pretty gusty day. Most days we may get a gentle breeze, at best. When the air doesn’t move, it feels a lot more humid, which makes it feel hotter. I’ve had to set my air conditioner a lot lower than I kept it in Texas just to take some of the humidity out of the air. My internal thermometer is still a bit off. I’ll look at the temperature on my weather station that has a sensor on my porch, and I’ll think I need to put on a sweater to go walking, then get started walking and immediately have to take it off. It always seems to feel warmer than I expect it to.

And this is one reason it was a good idea to wait until I’ve lived here a while before I make any decisions about buying a house. On paper, I might have said I wouldn’t need air conditioning here because it almost never gets to the temperature at which I turned on the air in Texas, but it does feel different here. I might be able to survive without AC if I had a whole-house dehumidifier (or one in each room), lots of ceiling fans, an attic fan, and no strong direct sun exposure, but it would definitely take the dehumidifier and fans. It does get cooler and drier at night. My AC never comes on at night, and I’m comfortable sleeping under blankets with an oscillating fan aimed at the bed (no ceiling fans in the apartment). I only need the AC for a few hours a day, and it’s a bit cooler than I’d like it to be, but the humidity is bad if I set the AC at a temperature that doesn’t require a sweater.

Now I’ll have to see what winter’s like. Statistics are showing that winters here are warming up more than the summers are, so the winters are getting milder faster than the summers are getting worse. When I was looking for a place to move, I was looking for a Goldilocks zone where it was just right, where I could get four seasons and less miserable summers without horrible winters. I’m excited about fall because that’s my favorite season and everyone is telling me it’s glorious here. I need to hurry and get a lot of writing done before it hits so I can take some time off to be outside as much as possible.

Supposedly, making a big break in routine is good for creativity because it forces the brain to make new connections and pathways. The example I’ve seen most often is that brushing your teeth with the opposite hand from the one you usually use will make you a bit more creative all day because you’ll have set yourself up for thinking differently, or taking a different route to and from work will make you more creative. If that’s the case then a big move like the one I made should make my creativity explode because I’m having to rethink everything.

A lot of that comes from fitting a two-bedroom house (one bedroom used as an office) with two living areas into a small one-bedroom apartment. Along the way, I got rid of several bookcases, a large desk, and a lot of plastic storage baskets and bins. That means I can’t put things away in the same places where they were in the old house. I started to automatically shelve books on the same bookcase where they were in the old house, then stopped to consider when I use those books. For instance, I started to put my writing books on the same bookcase where they used to go, but it’s now serving as my entryway. It used to sit beside my desk, so I could swivel in my desk chair and get to those books for reference. Now there’s a different bookcase in my office area. I moved the writing books over there so I could get to them when I was writing and put other books on that shelf.

Setting up the kitchen also forced me to rethink things. There aren’t a lot of cabinets in the tiny kitchen here, though there is a large pantry. I automatically put the dishes in the cabinet near the sink, over the dish drainer. That would be an obvious and convenient place for them, but that cabinet is small and up high. The rack I have for inside a cabinet that allows you to stack dishes and still be able to access them didn’t fit in that cabinet, so I would have had to stack dishes a different way. I couldn’t make them all fit, and it was up high enough that I’d have needed a step stool to reach some of the dishes. Then I got the bright idea to put that dish rack in the pantry, where it fits. I have the dishes I don’t use often on the top shelf of the cabinet, and I moved some of the things from the pantry to the cabinet. It’s maybe a bit of a pain to go to the hall where the pantry is to get out the dishes, but I wash dishes daily, so I’m mostly just getting them out of the dish drainer, anyway. I do still automatically reach for that cabinet, but I’m starting to develop some different habits.

I was having trouble finding a good place to do yoga. In my old house, I had a big open space between the sofa and TV. I could put on a YouTube yoga video and roll out the mat in front of the TV. Here, the only space in the living room is in the path from the front door toward the kitchen area, and it was pretty cramped. Then I realized that I have a nice, big open area in my bedroom. I can bring my laptop in there for the videos. It was a big mindset shift to exercise in the bedroom, but I had room to move, and it was a rather peaceful setting.

Then there are all the other changes to get used to, like going to different grocery stores. They have a Kroger here, but it’s vastly different from the one in my old neighborhood, and they have stores we didn’t have back there. I’m figuring out which one I like best. I tried a new one yesterday, and I’m not sure what I think. It was probably closest to being like the Kroger in my old neighborhood, but it had just enough differences to throw me off. It seems like different things are less expensive in each of the stores I’ve tried, so I may have to go to multiple stores to get everything I need.

I’m still reworking and rewiring habits to figure out what works best for the way I’m living now, and I’ll have to do it all over again when I get a new house. I think the year of living in a really small space will help me learn what’s essential, and I’ll certainly appreciate having a real office again.

Now we’ll see if my creativity explodes because of all this.

I enjoyed my small-town July 4 celebrations. There were some downsides from living close to the festivities (I got to hear the all-day concert, whether or not I wanted to), but it was nice to be able to do the things I wanted to do without worrying about traffic or parking. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to enjoy a July 4 fireworks show and then have a 5-minute (or less) walk home.

First, there was a parade in the morning. They used the road that runs through the park, so the only road that had to be blocked off was the one they used for lining up the parade units, and there were a lot of nice, shady spots along the route. It wasn’t unpleasant to sit outside in the shade. I think this may have been my first July 4 parade at which I didn’t end up with a bad sunburn. Most of the parade units seemed to be either people showing off their classic or fancy cars or businesses and organizations promoting themselves. Some just drove their business vehicles in the parade, like the HVAC company with a truck full of air conditioning units or the cement truck. Some got a bit creative, like the company that installs rock and stone countertops that played “We Will Rock You” on a loop as they drove their truck with stone countertops in the back. Most of these groups passed out candy or promotional gizmos.

So, when I saw the Little Debbie delivery truck coming down the road, I joked to the people sitting by me that this was the unit I hoped passed out samples — and then they came around handing out packets of brownies.

No marching bands, probably because school’s out for the summer and it would be hard to round everyone up, but there was a bagpipe band. I don’t think I’ve ever heard “America the Beautiful” and “God Bless America” played on bagpipes. They must have been pretty good because I could identify the songs, and that’s not always the case with bagpipes. They also played “Shenandoah,” which seems to be mandatory around here. It’s a major earworm for me because we sang it for one of the patriotic concerts in choir, but I only remember a couple of lines that repeat themselves in my head, and every time I hear the word “Shenandoah” it triggers the song. Living in the Shenandoah Valley, it’s pretty much running non-stop because I think every local ad during the news talks about being in the Shenandoah Valley. I need to find exactly where the river runs and pay a visit.

I took a turn through the carnival grounds after the parade, but there were threatening clouds, so I headed home, and it started raining soon afterward. I ended up spending the afternoon indoors, watching 1776 and reading. I watched the Capitol Fourth concert on PBS, then it was time for our local fireworks, which were pretty good for a small town. I didn’t have the best vantage point because there were some trees and a streetlamp in the way, but now I know the general area of where to go, and it beats sitting in traffic.

I also got a sense of what it’s like living on this end of the park, which may factor into my decision of where I want to buy a house. The neighborhood I’m mostly targeting is on the other side of the park, so it will be convenient for the weekly band concerts and general park activities, but the big concerts at the baseball stadium shouldn’t be as loud. It wasn’t too bad as long as I kept the TV or the stereo going. It was like a neighbor was playing music too loud inside their house if I didn’t have my own noise going. The main issue was that the neighborhood dogs were going nuts from the noise. The barking was more annoying than the music.

Now I’m trying to get in a normal day’s work, and I keep forgetting it’s Friday rather than Monday. It feels like a Monday. In fact, it took me a few minutes after I woke up to realize what day it was, and then I had to hurry to take my trash out because Friday is garbage day (I actually got it out an hour before the garbage truck came by, but the panic came from realizing I could have missed it).