We spent the weekend in Charleston for the graduation of my beautiful and talented sister-in-law. (The baby once again accumulated awesome-traveller points–slept through the night every night and reacted to the eight-hour drive with excellent humor.)

This is the third best thing about the city for me (Number 1 is caramel apples, specifically apple-pie-flavored caramel apples, and Number 2 is the excellent running path along the Battery): Every crook and corner seems to have an unexpected bit of charm and history. Walking down King Street, we stumbled across a Unitarian Church which predates the Revolutionary War. But it wasn’t the church the grabbed out attention–it was this archway…

It was a winding, shaded entrance into an old cemetary, all hanging branches and twisted vines and gray stone. Even in mid-afternoon, it was the perfect setting for a ghost story.

I love magnolias. They are my favorite flower, my favorite smell. They don’t bloom for long, but now is the sweet spot of the season, and trees all through the neighborhood are covered with them. They fit very nicely in a little two-flower vase we have in the kitchen.

The only problem is that we don’t have a magnolia tree. My grandparents had a huge, endlessly climbable one when I was growing up, and my best friend in elementary school had one in her backyard. We would climb the branches and break off the grenade-shaped buds, throwing them like bombs at each other and falling to the ground at the count of 10.

These days, no grenades. But my husband thought of a spectacular idea on our last anniversary–we dressed all in black and snuck out after dark, taking a pair of scissors with us. We skulked around snipping magnoliasoff other people’s trees–never more than one or two per tree–and came home with a stolen bouquet. We really know how to spice up an anniversary.

But that night was so enjoyable that I find myself sneaking magnolias everywhere now. There are so many of them, and so many trees in out-of-the-way spots where no one is appreciating them. So I’ll pluck one from the alley behind the grocery store, bring it home and pop it in the vase. Snap another one behind an ugly apartment building as I’m going for a run.  It’s addictive.

I hope my neighbors don’t read this.

I have found that it’s when I have the most material to blog about that I don’t get around to blogging.  I’ve got all sorts of good stuff built up now, so I’ll see if I can’t catch up with my life.

What with the baby and trying to get some small measure of writing time, I don’t travel too much these days. I try to keep it to no more than two book events a month, maybe three if they’re all in town.

During the second week in April, I was scheduled to speak at a library in Montgomery on Tuesday, then was headed to Tupelo for a booksigning on Thursday. It’s a two-hour drive from here to the far side of Montgomery–no fun for baby, even though his grandma lives there. He was going to stay here. Then he got a fever on Monday, which meant he couldn’t go to his little school on Tuesday.

So there was a moral conundrum–force a sick baby to a) stay with someone other than me when he was sick, b) force a sick baby to make a long car trip, or c) cancel an event at the last minute, particularly an event arranged by a very good friend who’d put a lot of effort into planning the whole thing. Guilt involved no matter what.

We ultimately decided the baby would be happier with me in the  car than home with anyone else, so I loaded him into the car at 7:30 a.m., thinking I had plenty of time to get to my event by 10 a.m.

Sick baby, early morning traffic, big cup of coffee. I got about an hour on the road and hit a standstill. So we sat there, unmoving, for half an hour, then found out they’d closed the interstate. (If I weren’t concerned about stereotypes of Alabama, I’d say that the last time I was rerouted for a closed interstate, there was a secondary wreck on the alternate highway when a chicken truck overturned and let loose chickens pell-mell all over the asphalt.)

Got to the event half an hour late. Baby feeling worse. Finished the event and soon found out he had hand foot and mouth disease, which is not, as my husband suspected, a horse disease. 

It’s spread by fluids, and, since I frequently have a slobbery little baby fist shoved in my mouth, I got a fever two days later in Tupelo. Very short-lived. The baby felt fine by then, and, in fact, slept so well in the hotel that even the fire alarm didn’t wake him. (No fire.)

A couple of weeks ago, Come in and Cover Me got a nice mention in Parade Magazine (that super thin insert that comes with some Sunday papers).  It read, “Part love story, part field guide, this beguiling novel charts the excavation and restoration of a damaged soul.”

That’s may be my favorite sentence in a review, largely because it has the word “beguiling.” Great word.

But thumbing through Parade reminded me that I used to love the Ask Marilyn column in it while I was growing up. I thought that would be an amazing job–just to answer people’s random questions by accessing the power of your genius intellect. A lot of times the column ran math problems that I had no interest in, but plenty of time the questions were more interesting.

The one I remember most clearly is when a reader asked Marilyn what one food she would take with her if she were going to be stranded on a deserted island indefinitely.  She gave two answers, with the first being what she would choose if the reader just wanted to know her favorite, tastiest food. Her second answer was what one food she would choose if she were picking solely based on nutritional value and keeping herself alive and healthy for the longest time. The food? Dog food. It has all your nutritional needs, apparently.

You learn important things from the most interesting places. I learned that the sun sets in the west on an episode of Hart to Hart. That knowledge alone made me feel like I was–at six years old–prepared to survive being lost in the jungle. I felt similarly about the whole dog food revelation.

Down in Fairhope, Al., for Spring Break. Beautiful town on the Mobile Bay with breezy beachy weather, fantastic food, and a history that screams “write a novel set here!” It started as a Utopian colony in 1894–28 people landed near the present-day site and set about building a perfect society in the middle of pines, sand, and red bluffs. They believed land should be common property, not private.

One great feature by 1907 was the Organic School, based on the idea that children should be children and not little adults. In other words, learning should be organic. And fun. Children learned with no desks, no books, and often no shoes. They studied the Greek myths of the stars by day and then met at night to learn the constellations. They worked arithmetic problems in the red dirt of gulley walls.

Here’s one of the original buildings:

Brunonia Barry, who wrote the very good The Lace Reader, also wrote this review of Come in and Cover Me for the Washington Post.

It’s a very smart piece, and it’s kind and generous in the way I think all writers should be. It always puzzles me when a reviewer–especially another novelist–goes out of his way to criticize in a really cruel way. There’s just no point. But, whew, Barry is a lovely reviewer, and I need to get her new book.

Right now I am desperately trying to finish up an edit of my next manuscript. I have three hours before I need to pick up the baby.

NPR asked me to write about a favorite book, and I chose Adam Rex’s The True Meaning of Smekday. That piece just came out on the NPR Web site–here it is.

One note: This is in a section called Guilty Pleasures, but I do not feel the least bit guilty about Smekday. It’s brilliant.

P.S. We had a family reunion this weekend, and the best line of the weekend was my husband saying to the room service guy, “Come on in, but we do have our baby sleeping in the bathroom.”

It was a really big bathroom with a closing door. Excellent for a Pack n Play.

I believe I’ve mentioned before how much I love X-Files. And I’ve liked my share of vampires—Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Blood. But it’s surprised me a little that both in press interviews and in Q&A sessions on tour, the issue of my own belief in the paranormal has come up several times. Do I believe in ghosts? Have I seen a ghost? What are my own personal experiences with the paranormal?

On a somewhat related note, one of my favorite negative reviews of the book gripes that a real archaeologist with a solid academic background would never rely on ghosts to guide her fieldwork. Um, no. Probably not. I do not recommend this book as a textbook.

I like magical realism. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison. I love the idea that there is a magic in the everyday, and I like it when fiction blends two worlds—the real and the fantastic.

 That said, I have not seen a ghost. I believe we all have our own ghosts, that we all carry some people with us, but I don’t tend to think those ghosts appear as shadowy entities. I haven’t really had experiences with the paranormal, and I think that probably disappoints potential readers who like Ghost Hunters and other shows where you try to catch a ghost. (Catching a ghost would be cool—no question.)

Ren’s world is not quite our world, and in some ways I’m glad of that. I’d prefer not to have dead artists sitting cross-legged on my kitchen floor. For one thing, any ghost would constantly be tripping over all the dog bones and baby toys strewn around.

The book tour is now wrapped up—we made our last stops,MemphisandOxford, last week. Ahhh. It’s nice to be home. Both stops were satisfying, though, with the added benefits of excellent food and a visit to Faulkner’s home inOxford.

 Twice now, I’ve had people tell me their own stories of death and loss at book-signings. One woman in Woodstock talked about her husband dying when their youngest child was four-years-old, and how a taped interview by a neighborhood high school student was the only recording they had of his voice. A woman in Memphis said her son was killed by a drunk driver, and—needing to get away somewhere, anywhere—she took a position on an archaeology dig in South America. Both times I nearly cried. I’m not sure why, although I think there’s some sort of uncomfortable contrast between the self-conscious, self-promoting vibe of book-signings (Hey, buy my book!) versus real grief and love and loss.

 I don’t think there’s such a wide gap between fiction itself and real emotion. I think that’s what every writer desperately hopes for—that in this imagined world you’ve created (and granted, it’s an imagined world well-stocked with your own experiences and emotions, even if they’re disguised), you’ve managed to tap into your reader’s life, into their minds and their secret thoughts. There’s something really humbling about the idea that a character you’ve created, a story you’ve created, can tap into the worst experience of someone’s life. It’s very intimate. It feels, I guess, like that kind of connection deserves more of a moment than a few seconds standing in line a book-signing.

Hoping to get in a little site maintenance at the end of the week, but here’s the review from USA Today from last week.

Sometime soon I’m going to explain about ghosts talking in 21st century English.