Scenes from yesterday afternoon's walk along the South Fork River. Something about it –– low now, after being high and muddy at the height of the summer –- made me think of phrases of Eudora Welty's, describing for example the Yazoo River, in her novel Delta Wedding: "The bank of the river was willowy and bright, wild and unraked, and the shadowy Yazoo went softly colored and lying narrow and low in the time of year."
No willows along the South Fork, but except where it rushed over stone, the river was "shadowy . . . softly colored and lying narrow and low in the time of year." I don't know why that last phrase has always beguiled me, but it has.
The trail follows an old railway line that used to run between Lincolnton and High Shoals. You can see where the hillside was blasted away to lay the railbed, leaving these exposed rock faces. We went carefully, because it's the time of year for copperhead hatchlings, and they like to lie in fallen leaves on pathways, but we didn't encounter any. You would also take extreme care among rocks like these.
I am having amnesia over the name of this little flower –- Pennsylvania Something. Threadflower? Spindleflower? It seems to me that it's something sewing-related, though it could be pencil flower. Anyway, I've always had a lot of it in my garden, and it's very beautiful in its modest way. Pollinators love it. There was lots of it growing in sunny spots along the trail.
Late sun and shadow on the trail.
For this walk I wore my Camellia just as she comes, with hiking boots. Didn't take a photograph, since I'd already recorded myself wearing my dress yesterday.
Here I am today, first in the upstairs hall, where I'd gone to fetch fresh bedsheets:
This is the full-length mirror on the outside of what used to be my oldest daughter's bedroom. She used to write out her Latin memory work on this mirror in dry-erase pen, which is about the best use for it, since this is as bright as the hall lighting gets. I moved into my other daughter's very bright bedroom for a clearer shot:
Camellia, blue Walmart leggings bought last year (no moral high ground here, friends), and my son's flannel shirt getting a rerun. The morning is quite cool, but it's supposed to warm up into the 80s again, so I'm sure I'll be losing the shirt momentarily. My novel protagonist, a woman in her sixties whose chief occupation is cleaning the parish rectory, remarks early on that while the days at this time of year are warm, in the mornings she wants a cardigan –- I'm relieved to be reminded that she is accurate in her description of the weather. I forget from year to year just what late September is actually like.
The novel's action runs from roughly Michaelmas to the Feast of the Holy Family: from the waning of the liturgical year to its beginning again, which belatedly strikes me as significant. A lot of my revision at this stage is simply fact-checking what's blooming, what's dying back, what the temperatures are, and so on. Also, though she lives now in North Carolina, my protagonist comes from the Shetland Islands, a place I've never been. I am continually going back over my research, looking at usages of words, and so on, to be sure I'm not just writing fantasy in the sections where she looks back on her early life. I watched the entire Shetland police-drama series mostly to check my own research, and I don't think I did too badly, all things considered. But still. I'm anxious about getting it right. I don't know why she decided to be born in Shetland, as again, I've never been there at all. But she did, and so I have to do her history justice. That's one of the ways she's been good for me.
And now she is calling my name, though so are the sheets which need to be put on the bed.