It’s mid-November, and our leaf color display in the Pacific Northwest this year has been nothing short of spectacular. Our drought is finally over, and all the waterfalls along the trails I typically hike are back. I had avoided those areas in the late summer, because it was just too depressing to observe all the dry creek beds. The weather in autumn is typically my favorite, with cool, crisp sunny days.

But I enjoy all the seasons. Spring is always full of anticipation as the hours of sunlight get noticeably longer each day and the blooms and new leaves emerge. Spring, for us along the coastline in the Pacific Northwest It always takes way too long for the snow to melt in the Cascades here, but it’s often fine for spring snowshoeing, so I can conjure up a little patience to wait for the ability to hike on dry trails.

And then there’s summer, the most amazing season of all for high-country hikers, with all the trails melting out and the North Cascades mountain vistas that extend as far as you can see. Mountain goats and bears are around all year long, but are rarely seen in the winter. We are so blessed in this area to have millions of acres of national forests and so many national parks. There are so many trails to explore in Washington State in every direction, I’ll never be able to hike all of them.

So, now it will soon be full-on winter and all the rainbow colors in the trees will be gone. I will, however, still walk the local trails here in the lowlands. I may be one of the few people who actually enjoy seeing the trees in their naked glory. It’s interesting to me to view the branch structures, the differing textures of bark, and the nests that birds and squirrels have built or hollowed out over the seasons. Without leaves, it’s much easier to see the birds that perch on the branches. Owls and hawks are my special favorites.

We still kayak in the winter, but it’s more of a challenge with wind and cold weather and short hours of sunlight. However, it’s always a delight to get out on the salt water. With luck, there will be kingfishers and all kinds of birds along the shorelines, and in the water, seals and harbor porpoises, and the chance to see orcas and whales.

But then there’s snow. I love to drive to the mountains and play in the white stuff there and receive enthusiastic visits from the gray jays that are always ready for a handout. However, I don’t like to see snow here along the coast of the Salish Sea. Snow mucks up the traffic here like you would not believe, because only a few arterial streets get sanded or cleared, so our neighborhoods are left to cope on their own, and many have steep hills to climb or descend. In my area, I often see folks pour out of their houses to help push a stranded vehicle up the street.

I love my independent single life, I truly do. I have lots of friends and all kinds of fun activities that I participate in, such as hiking and kayaking and snowshoeing, and going to movies, plays, and lectures in town. But each year, the holiday season feels to me like it has been uniquely designed to make those of us who don’t have big families feel like total losers.

But now it’s nearly Thanksgiving and the dreaded holidays are fast approaching! While many people look forward to Thanksgiving and Christmas, I detest those holidays, and I guarantee you that many other single, childless people do, too.

I especially dislike Christmas, when everything gets shut down, and so many useless and unwanted items are passed around because of a feeling of obligation. Most Americans have WAY too much “stuff.” It’s awkward to receive a gift that you don’t value. If anyone has to give me a gift, I hope they give me an experience: invite me to dinner or a play, or volunteer to help me fix something around my house.

While I don’t have much in the way of family, many of my friends do, and so they understandably vanish off to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with their relatives. With luck, I may be able to patch together a potluck with a few single friends or married couples who don’t mind having a single woman at their table. For Christmas, instead of buying token items to the few family members I have, I use that money to make donations to worthy causes who help those who truly need assistance.

So, with more time on my hands in this season, I can finally sit down at my desk to write. I’ve been very slow to work on my next mystery, which will be a crossover novel between my Sam Westin wilderness series and my Neema the Gorilla series. Yes, some days it’s hard for me to imagine that, too. But now that I can focus, I’m sure I can pull it off. Stay tuned.

I plan to call this novel If Only, because the theme is about how we all are born into circumstances that may be lucky or unlucky, and we all make choices that may change our lives for better or worse. Imagine how different our lives would be right now if we had been born in Gaza or in Ukraine or Haiti or Ethiopia. Imagine how we might feel if we had bought a lottery ticket for the first time and won a million dollars, or if we had decided to take the boat out and got caught in a big storm.

That’s how the seasons go in my life. I try to “carpe diem” in all of them. And I hope you do, too.

Bad luck comes in threes, right? You’ve heard that one. Where does that saying come from?

In a post back in 2017, the website Folklore Thursday looked at the origins of what it called the superstition of threes.

For example: “Three strikes of a match.” That originates from wartime. The bad luck of “three strikes of a match” comes from trench warfare. If a match burns long enough for three men to light cigarettes, that’s enough time to be spotted by the enemy, pinpoint the position, and launch an attack.

But what about the other half of the equation? Consider the phrase, “third time’s a charm.”

Three is a familiar pattern and maybe if we put a limit on those bad things, we can see that the run of bad luck will end. It’s one small way to gain control of our lives in unpredictable times.

And there’s another familiar phrase to consider: What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I’ll go with that one.

When I started writing this blog post, I figured I’d had my three bad things for 2023. But the universe had another surprise in store for me.

To recap: In July, it was the computer/hard drive/cloud storage meltdown. I lost the book I was working on, as well as notes for several others. I had to start the book all over. I am still working to pull the story out of my head. At least it’s in my head. Despite all the claims for the benefits of cloud storage, it certainly didn’t wind up in the cloud.

In August, my 99-year-old mother came to the end of her life. I’d been a long-distance caregiver for years. I hoped that we could see her celebrate her 100^th birthday, but that was not to be. At the start of what I figured would be a two-week trip, I thought I’d see her through the hospital stay and rehab, then she’d go home and get along as before, with more local caregiving assistance. I didn’t think I’d be planning a memorial service. Those two weeks lengthened into four.

September brought the condo flood. It was just after midnight when I woke up, thinking it was raining. It wasn’t, at least not outside. I got up to investigate and discovered water pouring from the light fixtures in the kitchen and dining room, courtesy of a pipe under the upstairs neighbors’ sink. They were unaware of the situation until I pounded on their door. They managed to stop the flow and helped me mop up water, using nearly every towel I had. Then came the water mitigation crews with their industrial-sized dehumidifiers and high-speed fans. All that noise for nearly two weeks. The cats were freaked out and my stress level went through the roof.

Weeks later, I’m still dealing with the fallout. The carpet went away, leaving me with bare concrete floors. Many of my belongings were packed into boxes. Those boxes, and much of the furniture, were picked up and moved to storage. Water in the ceilings and walls meant the sheetrock had to be cut open, those big dehumidifiers set so they would dry out the wood. Next step is sheetrock repairs and painting. Then I can think about new flooring. Before that happens, though, the remainder of my belongings must be packed up and put in storage.

Life in the construction zone was put on hold in October, for my long-planned and much-anticipated trip to Greece. Which I thoroughly enjoyed. I climbed to the top of the Acropolis, and back down again. I went to Delphi and saw the Temple of Apollo. I saw beautiful scenery and ancient sites in the Peloponnese, Crete and Santorini. And ate lots of wonderful food.

All in all, the trip of a lifetime. Except for the part about testing positive for COVID-19. That was definitely not on the itinerary.

I’d had all the boosters. I like to think I was careful. But . . . The tour company protocols said I could not sightsee or eat meals with the group. However, that didn’t prevent me from sightseeing on my own. I particularly wanted to see the archeological excavations at Akrotiri on Santorini. After all, I’d come that far and spent a good deal of money on the trip. I wasn’t going to miss a significant archeological site that ranks with Pompeii. Not able to travel on the tour bus? I wore a mask and took a taxi.

I’m home now, testing negative, back to the construction zone. Neither the cats nor the gremlins made repairs in my absence.

Three, or four, bad things. Are they bad? Maybe it’s how I look at them. Challenges, and I’ve had more than my share this year. Dealing with these challenges has made it more difficult for me to write. It takes concentration to write fiction, to organize and pull those thoughts and ideas out of my head. That’s hard to do with all the chaos I’ve been experiencing. It has certainly made it more difficult for me to get ideas out of my head and into the computer.

That computer meltdown and losing the first draft of the book—I hope that the book I’m working on now will be even better. As for the flood and the resulting construction zone—well, I was thinking about replacing the carpet anyway. Just not right now. And the trip to Greece, COVID-19 or not, I came away with ideas for two books.

Besides, there’s something wonderful about reading Mary Stewart’s classic My Brother Michael, which is set in Delphi, after having been to Delphi. As I reread the book, I could see the terrain of Mount Parnassus—because I’d just been there.

And that book has one of the best first lines ever written: “Nothing ever happens to me.”

Writing a novel has its frustrations. For me, one of them is often having at hand a word that kinda fits what I’m trying to say, but isn’t the right one. Thus begins the search for the missing word, the forgotten word, the word just somewhere off in the ether taunting me with its proximity.

For those all too frequent times, I have my online Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus for which I pay good money. I also have the thesaurus in Word. Both can help. But not always. When all is lost I have hubby, a former English teacher. I will babble the sentence to him, give him the awful word that came to me, the one I reject with every fiber of my being, and hope he knows what I am trying to say. Sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn’t.

If this word is still eluding me I have a decision to make. Do I stop what I am doing and begin a wholehearted search as if I were Juan Ponce de León looking for the Lost Fountain of Youth? Which he never found, by the way. Or do I carry on writing, hoping this errant word will come to me eventually? Decisions, decisions.

Dropping everything and searching for the right word pulls me out of my work, causing me to lose focus. And I also have a disease known as Maniacal Searchitus. It’s not catching, and I’ve known many other writers with this disease. I include them not because it gives me hope for a cure, but simply because misery loves company.

If left to my own devices, I can spend hours if not days getting lost in a plethora of words that suddenly appeal to me but have nothing to do with my original search. Take the word ululation. When I was at the Visual Thesaurus website, there it was. The word of the day. Ululation: the art of crying out in a high-pitched loud voice while rapidly moving the tongue and the uvula. I refrained from going to YouTube and watching a video showing this practice.

If it’s a verb I’m looking for, another trick is to go online and look at a product description. Everything is for sale. I could probably find another husband on Amazon if the one I have doesn’t learn to stack the dishwasher right. Product descriptions don’t always work. A lot of them are hackneyed and old hat. But sometimes they trigger the word I’m desperately seeking to come forward in my mind. Also, I’ve bought many an item I didn’t even know I needed using this method.

But the tested, tried, and true for me (yes, I know, hackneyed and old hat) is to put that first, awful word that came to me into the sentence, ghastliness and all. Not only does this allow me to continue with my writing, but the word will grate on me every time I see it and make me crazy. I will begin to ululate in sheer frustration. Eventually, I will stop everything I’m doing and work on the sentence until I find the exact word I need or throw the sentence out. It’s one or the other.

Because no writer wants thwarted readers ululating when the wrong word is allowed to get by.