Romancing the Genres: wine tasting

I had planned on telling the story of when I was ten, and my father was assigned to work in Taiwan for the Agency for International Development in the early sixties. After flying to San Francisco, we had a few days to explore the city, driving up and down steep hills in a convertible, with my mom in a panic 😊. Then we landed in Hawaii where they put fragrant leis over our shoulders. I don’t remember much, except the perfumed air on the breezes and the incredible fresh fruit.

When we landed in Taipei, and watched as a red carpet was rolled out to meet the plane, we found out we were the first jet to land at the airport. We walked the red carpet to cheering dignitaries from the city and the country.

Unfortunately, this story doesn’t make a great blog, because that is all I remember. Except as an adult, it is my claim to fame to declare I once walked the red carpet. 😊

So instead, my blog will be about my life’s journey in the book I most recently edited, The Inn on Gooseneck Lane. I realized how much of myself I put into the book. Just snippets of my life at various stages, that added detail to various scenes.

My hero, Brad, is an outdoor adventure leader, who has settled down in his small Vermont hometown, to help his mom recover from breast cancer surgery. He’s bought a sporting goods store. And ends up helping the local inn owner with a cross-country ski week for the over-fifty crowd. In this one paragraph description, there are many areas that have touched my life.

Photo taken by Nancy Vosburgh-Zane

My mom, who just turned 94, has had two bouts with breast cancer, but all ended well both times. Both my son and I went to college in Vermont. My niece recently attended college in Vermont. On the return trip home after visiting her, is when I thought up the bare bones of this book, as I drove along a gurgling creek running down a mountain. And when I passed a tiny lane with a bridge going over the roaring creek named Gooseneck Lane, I knew I had a story. In my head I plotted the story all the way home to Maine.

The gurgling, mountainside creek reminded me of years earlier when I visited Vermont, and stumbled on a sweet, small, artsy town, with inns and bed and breakfasts. A town that made it’s living supporting artisans and outdoor adventure activities.

My work at an environmental college has included working with adventure therapy students. One who helped train a seeing-eye dog, her dog being the first to take part in the new college program. So that dog spent many hours sitting in our office, learning to concentrate on her handler and ignore all that was going on around her—what a sweet pup.

Yaz - my grandson's dog

And lastly, I worked at L.L. Bean as a retail store cashier where I spent many hours in the camping and boating / biking departments.

So many of my life’s “travels” found their way into this book.

· Wine tasting, paired dinners and weddings, which I organized at an inn in Maine when I was the dining manager.

· Numerous other events that I planned for schools and non-profits, where I traveled all over the country to host the events.

· Memories of visiting my grandmother in a small town in New York, including her antique teacart that now sits in my mom’s apartment, her Waldorf salad which was one of my grandmother’s favorite things to make, and her gardens full of rhubarb (and the basement full of rhubarb and dandelion wine.)

· My own outdoor employee adventures of kayaking (ocean and mountain lakes and river rapids), archery, a shotgun shoot, winter camping and cross-country skiing, to name a few. All the experiences that gave me a better understanding when helping customers in the retail store in Maine and assisting on the grand opening of the first store out of state in Virginia, where I put in a week’s work in three days.

· Wine-tasting trips in Sonoma County in California, where I also planned an alumni event.

· The famous Maine ice storm, where I was one of the lucky ones and only lost power for less than a day. But I was alone, fending for myself, knowing a huge oak tree limb had just crashed to the ground inches form my kitchen window. I could have used the help of my hero, for sure.

· The trauma of loving and losing a high-school sweetheart. And then finding him again.

· And the painted fiberglass cow art—yes, a true story and a sight to behold in small-town Vermont where I traveled to a friend’s wedding. (See below for fun link to painted cows)

All these adventures and artifacts from my life found their way into The Inn on Gooseneck Lane, a fact I didn’t realize until I revisited and revised this book over a year after I wrote it.

So, my question to you - What shows up in or repeats itself in your life, years after a physical or personal journey? I’d love to hear your stories.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

~ cottages to cabins ~ keep the home fires burning ~Delsora Lowe writes small town sweet romances and contemporary westerns from the mountains of Colorado to the shores of Maine.Author of the Starlight Grille series, Serenity Harbor Maine novellas, and the Cowboys of Mineral Springs series, Lowe has also authored short romances for Woman’s World magazine.