Heavy, wet air as still as death hung over the forest and meadows when I ran this morning – a classic lull before the storm. During the morning, sun and cloud traded off beyond my study window while I caught up on blog posts and pursued my novel characters further on their fictional journey. It is always a startling and thrilling mystery as to how words suddenly appear on my computer screen when, a moment earlier, I had no idea they were in my mind. Some writers are plotters, painstakingly outlining every bit of action. I’m more like Stephen King, who enjoys seeing where the story takes him. (I recently read his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft and would recommend it to anyone the least bit interested in either Stephen King’s life or the art of the wordsmith.)

During early afternoon, while my characters spun their wheels and blue jays and a barred owl voiced clear calls against the waiting air, I harvested ornamental corn I’d planted at the end of June. First, I cut slender, six- to eight-foot stalks of broom corn topped by sprays of pale, red-tinged seeds and set them on our porch to dry. Next, I severed thick, juicy, bamboo-like stalks of the Earth Tones Dent coloured corn that had grown taller and lusher than either my sweet corn or the broom corn (the three corn varieties grown in different gardens to prevent cross-pollination.) Not all cobs of the coloured corn had ripened, but those that had presented me with surprises rather like my writing. On shucking them, I encountered unexpected combinations of yellow, purple, orange, blue, and green that wove their own stories of botanical pigmentation in a language of genetic codes I couldn’t read, but nonetheless enjoyed.

In late afternoon, the leaves began to whisper of the coming storm. By nightfall, the whispers were transformed to sweeping whooshes of branches flailing in a wild wind. Rain pounded onto the roof of our house – spilling off, running downslope, feeding Matheson Brook. It ran wild like the thundering of chariots in the darkness.