What´s In the Oven

I need a good editor, a professional.

I am writing, but it is a tough slog. I cannot find the thread that joins together all these random tales. I keep writing, though... I feel like I am knitting, knitting, knitting. I start a new row every day and just continue going, and at the end I will have a woollen Thing that is huge and well-wrought and snuggly, but pointless. Good for nothing.

I am feeling a lot better physically, but I am low. People still write to me out of the blue, asking for advice usually. I always answer them eventually. But lately my responses are evidently, well... less than upbeat. A kindly lady who wants to find a comprehensive solution to the massive litter problem on the camino says I am "just telling (her) all the reasons why this WON´T work, so (she) just wants to give up and walk away from the whole project." And she is right. I keep cleaning up the same trash, year after year, and I get no kind of support from the Powers That Be. (Indeed, one camino brahmin says camino clean-uppers are "neurotic German hygiene enforcers!"  

So I will leave the ambitious comprehensive projects to those who feel called to solve problems in a comprehensive, systemic way. I love to be part of solutions, but I have only ten fingers -- not enough to keep in all the pies that are baking.

Here is what´s in the oven now:

The book.

Buying and planting a tree on the camino in memory of Rev. Philip Wren, an English pilgrim who died this spring out on the trail.

Planting a strapping big chestnut tree in the plaza mayor, to make up for the several magnificent plane trees chopped down here in Moratinos in recent days. (I still don´t understand why.)

Finding a home for little Ruby, who is growing less little every day. Seems nobody who´s going to Sweden wants to get involved in transporting dogs.

After Thursday, taking whatever pilgrims show up looking to stay at Bruno´s place, seeing as Bruno is going on holiday and closing up shop for a week or so. 

Holding a big powwow at Peaceable the first week of December. It combines a Hospitalero Training session with three or four days of trail cleanup and a re-dig and reset of the much-neglected labyrinth.

A trip to the United States at the tail-end of the year. My son Philip is getting married in Ohio, and I need to be there. (I bought a great dress for that. And today the Hat arrived, a hat I ordered from England. A

black wool pillbox hat with a bow on the back and a little net veil in front... it is splendid! Now to figure out how to stick it onto my big head!)

Winter is long around here. I book it up. There´s a shopping trip to London at the end of January, for the Wedding Part II that´s planned for May. Philip is marrying into a huge Pakistani-American family, and the big blowout three-day celebration calls for some ethnic outfitting... an opportunity to shop the princess-worthy boutiques of London with my friend Leena. And piggy-backing onto that, a walking retreat on the Camino Ingles, a week of spirituality -- just what you need the first week of February.

Mix into all this the daily Dog Wrangle (we still have six); and the always-possible lottery jackpot win, and the ongoing battle of Conditional subjunctives, which I have pretty well given up on...

And that is what makes up a life.