The river this morning looked like an oil painting. It was an early walk, this last day of August, and not as long as the dogs would have liked, but I wanted to meet a friend on the pond for paddle boarding. Tonight I am ready for sleep with the satisfied feeling that today I tackled a revision of my Laurel Lake piece, and solved, I think, the problems raised when I shared it with my critique group. It's hybrid prose, I finally realized, and so I need to find the structure that will work, and that structure, I decided, is as a nature guide description of mountain laurel, and I set my prose within that context. And I needed a photo to illustrate. So, I went back into my daily photos from the past three Junes, and almost to the day for each year I found a picture of the mountain laurel that grows in the woods nearby in bloom. I used the one from this year, after all. Yes, satisfied, because I seem to have found a way to make it work better without giving up on my idea and making it more traditional prose. When I opened the document I was afraid I would fail, and even as I ventured into my idea I was almost sure I was failing. And then, I passed through all those doubts, finally, and felt this is working, and I like it.
