Yesterday morning, about a dozen farm tractors, some new, most vintage, drove past our place. I thought they might be gathering for a parade, but it didn’t turn out that way. I tried to get photos as they drove by, but I was too slow. Later, I tried taking a photo of a Linn tractor through the window where it is housed. The Linn tractor was built here, and was used not only on farms, but in the logging industry in the Adirondacks. They were impressive machines, with a combination of wheels in front and tracks for the rear.

I think parades are one of the things that typify village life. They are likely to include a high school band or two, maybe an honor guard of American Legionnaires to carry the national flag, and possibly a few floats as well. Of course, there will likely be a line of fire trucks, and participants will toss candy to the kids lining the sidewalks.

When the usual parade was cancelled in a Connecticut town, a bunch of people decided to do their own. They rode bicycles, with boom boxes (portable radio/tape players) carried on their shoulders. It went over so well, it became an annual tradition. Here, I think a string of farm tractors would have been great, after all, the people who built the Linn tractor helped bring the area into the industrial era.

Would my series protagonist, Bobby Navarro, be likely to participate in a parade? I doubt it. But, maybe he would if there were fifty other Harley riders in it. What are your thoughts about parades?

1917Linn Tractor

1917 Linn Tractor

This past week, I’ve been preoccupied with watching skilled operators using heavy equipment to move something like four hundred tons of stone into place to stabilize our stream bank. On my part, it has been the happy culmination of years of effort, skill development, patience and persistence, along with vital help received from others. There are still no guarantees in life, but the stream is now able to flow freely, like it did before a storm toppled seven giant willow trees and left the bank vulnerable to heavy erosion. The work looks great, and I am confident it is likely to provide our eighteen-seventies cottage with a continued lease on life.

Yesterday, we attended a meeting of our village writers’ group. It was fun, and almost seemed like a symbolic act of celebration. In learning to become a mystery writer, I had to unlearn the style necessary to professional scientific writing and learn how to write a good story. I had to join groups and attended professional events to find out what the trade requires. Most importantly, I had to swallow my pride and keep trying.  Both amounted to seemingly never-ending projects with no clear roadmaps or GPS-guided voices to tell me what to do next or if I was even headed in the right direction.

I guess I can say becoming a writer unexpectedly also prepared me for taking on the  stream bank project. Learning how to interact with local, regional, state and federal agencies, submit and revise plans and permit applications, and to keep trying no matter what has paid off. Now, I can look out across our back yard at a brand new stream bank, one that allows the trout creek to flow freely, unblocked by the huge stumps of the seven giant willows that blew down about eight years ago, causing major scouring of the stream bed and erosion of our bank. And, at the writers’ meeting, I was able to report the publication earlier this year of Murder on the Mother Road, a second book in the Bobby Navarro mystery series, and announce that I have made a good start on the third novel in the same series. Better yet, now I can focus more of my time and energy on writing. Am I happy about all that? You bet I am!

One big tree stump