This past weekend marked my third visit to the Tucson Festival of Books, and I believe a wonderful time was had by all. (Wow, what a gross exaggeration. There was probably at least one child who threw up, a bunch of people who got hungry and cranky, etc…but I had fun.) Book festivals, various though they may be, always have the same effect on me: I start out the weekend jazzed by life, and end up an exhausted recluse. But a happy exhausted recluse! I am currently hiding in my writing studio while our yard guys put in new spring plants, and if things go my way, I won’t have to talk to anyone until the evening.

I have a lot I want to accomplish in the next few months, and a lot of things coming up for me and my loved ones that will happen no matter what I accomplish, which is always a vexing sensation. I didn’t think of myself as a control freak when I was younger, but I have grown increasingly Type A as I coast into adulthood. (Or perhaps, more accurately, as I take exact and purposeful steps into adulthood.) Things beyond my control are always annoying, and there have been a lot of them lately.

It helps somewhat that it’s spring in Tucson: really and truly spring, it seems, with flowers bursting out of every cranny of dry ground. Soon they will metastasize into clouds of pollen, but right now they still have the appearance of delicacy: a gift rather than a barrage, and a reminder, too, of the cycles of life, the good that comes both before and after bad, or sometimes simultaneously.

Anyway. There is a lot that I can’t control, very little that is certain, but at least I can spend today doing my best to make a book, and when the day is done, my yard will be full of new life.