A Saturday in my town

The view below my bedroom window. 

        There is some risk to setting your work of fiction in the town where you live. When I started my series, I thought, ‘Why invent a new town when I have a perfectly good one right here?’ And so I did, with a fair amount of license: rearranging buildings, changing the name of the roads, moving the middle school, and so forth. My town isn’t a hotbed of murder, but there are times when reality and the world I’ve made up blur.

          Today after breakfast, I figured it was going to be a pretty inactive day, so I went out for a walk around our complex, only about a mile depending on how much weaving in and out you do. 

On the access road into where we live, I spied The Gang standing around idly in the middle, possibly deep in a meeting of whether to go to that side of the road or this one. 

I turned around so as not to disturb them – they’d likely be there for a while working that out. 

          After a shower I set off for the library, which just like in my books, is accessed under a canopy of four Japanese maples. Inside, I checked the new fiction shelves and saw a name that looked familiar. Checking the author’s picture on the inside showed me that yep, I’d met her at my first literary conference when she was a big cheese and I was a newbie. Cool.

     

     My next stop was the D’s, to see what was happening with my books. When I don’t see any of the four, I worry that the library has finally realized what a two-bit writer I am and tossed them. When I do see them on the shelf, I worry that no one wants to check them out. Today three were missing, one still there. Phew.

           I scoffed up four new mysteries, checked them out, and on the way through the entry hall I noticed flyers for upcoming events. Excellent – I can use at least one of them in my current mystery that has a love-sick teen stalking the town’s librarian.

          On my way back to Main Street on this perfect sunny 78-degree day, an 11ish kid went by on his ebike, imaginings of race courses in his head. A young mother pushed a stroller down the sidewalk, another child skipped alongside. And as I waited for an opening to turn, a truck went by with an ecstatic dog, his tongue flapping the breeze.

          Cue the Disney butterflies.