The articulate travail of existence: from the adult novel in progress

When you write as I do—in surges, in stolen time—it is easy to lose sight of your own projects, to tuck them away and out of the aim of hopefulness while you wait for others to read them.

This morning I remember the adult novel-in-progress.

If thirty acres is thirty acres, land never ends.  The stream winds and spills, the rocks break and fracture, the moss grows green between trees, and the squirrels go off on their mad, fugitive runs; these squirrels did.  In the thrill, expectant burst of May, in the hours after Vin drove off, Becca went deeper into the woods.  Across the sodden polish of the stream, over the flat back of stones, toward the rim of pine and in through the grove of tulip, white birch, oak.  Beneath her boots, the carapaces of dead bugs crunched—beetles, she guessed, centipede specters, the lovely, unlucky ladybirds. Into her hair floated cast-off things, dander, twig debris.  Glorious, primeval things, she thought, a huntress by then, a seeker, for she had the Leica with her, and the idea of that boy, and the words from the paperback he’d left behind:  the articulate travail of existence.