Cemetery Season

It's cemetery season for me, coming up on the annual Evergreen Cemetery Walk. I've been a longtime writer of scripts and scenes for this walk through Evergreen Memorial Cemetery, where community members and schoolkids can meet the people who are buried there, and, in the past, I played many characters and this year will do so again. It's an exhausting but rewarding experience! As actors, we do two rounds of six performances each on the weekends, and three rounds on schooldays for field trips during the week, in all kinds of weather. It used to fall in October, and now it's bumped up to September and the first weekend of October, because the schoolkids were not wearing jackets and appropriate attire in the cold or rainy weather! My character is Helen Clark McCurdy (1866-1962), who ran for office. 

It's also spider season, and all the webs are up!

Other things on my mind:

Second blooming of a lilac bush that touches the sidewalk on my walk to work.

The mulberry bush wrapping a purple smokebush in the same yard.

The glorious breezy, sunny weather this Sunday afternoon.

Barbara Pym, as I am reading a vignette-style biography of her, The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym, by Paula Byrne. I discovered her when I was working at DePaul University as an assistant to the secretrary of the English Department, before I got my graduate degree there, and had submitted a story to the student creative writing magazine, that was accepted and published, and one of the woman professors compared me to Barbara Pym. So I had to find out about her. I hope it was my quirky, comic style in that particular story!

The coincidence of Pym at Oxford + visiting Germany around the time of the Hitler and Chamberlain, etc. agreement to give Sudetenland back to Germany from Czechoslovakia, who was not consulted nor at the talks or signing, and the film we watched last night, Munich: The Edge of War, based on the novel Munich, by Robert Harris, which I guess I will now not have to read...

Rejections, which are now rolling in, from a batch of submissions. Pym got a lot of rejections, too!