… in the swing of things, generally. The current crud, seasonal flu, heavy pollen allergies, new COVID variant or whatever – or a combination of all of these – laid my household low for the last week. First my daughter, who was exposed to the mold, dust and assorted animal-dropping crud inside a derelict house that her investor clients were interested in purchasing and gutting. She was recovering from the massive affront to her immune system, when Wee Jamie began running a temperature high enough to be of concern. Pronounced by the pediatrician to be not in any danger, he recovered in a day and a half … and then I fell in turn. Fortunately, a lot of daytime sleeping and rounds of Theraflu knocked back the worst of whatever – but I had a seriously reduced interest in doing very much at all over the last week, beyond walking the dogs around the block, checking various blogs, answering email, and crawling back into bed.

The YA pioneer trail adventure is chugging along, though – I’m doing some refresher reading for it. Another commenter on regular weekend book post that I participate in recommended the Lockley collection, and I sent away for two volumes of the Lockley Papers. Fred Lockley was a turn of the last century writer and local news reporter in Oregon; he had a practice of interviewing as many of the old pioneers as he could corner and setting down their unvarnished reminiscences about the trail and the early days. The Lockley archive ran to thousands of interviews of first-hand recollections of all kinds of people, many of them children or teenagers at the time of the events related. It’s basically the same sort of goldmine for researchers as was J. Marvin Hunter’s collection of interviews of Texas trail-drivers; both men were from the same generation and had the same background in newspaper reporting. I’m also reading some of the Lockley volumes to get a sense of the archaic voice and vocabulary of the time.

It wasn’t all skittles and beer, either – several of the accounts were from surviving sisters of the Sager family – seven brothers and sisters, the smallest a newborn infant, whose parents both died on the trail. The Sagers were adopted by Oregon missionaries Narcissa and Marcus Whitman – and orphaned again several years later when the Whitmans were murdered by Indians angered by Dr. Whitman’s inability to save their people from an epidemic of measles which were ravaging the local tribe. Another woman related the murder of her father and three small younger brothers in another Indian uprising. Later, her mother was murdered by two white men who were convinced that her mother had some money hidden away and tried to force her to reveal the hiding place. Yep – trauma galore, but only some of this will be part of my narrative; it will be happening to other people, on the fringes of my heroine’s story.

Anyway, this was the first day that I felt up to working on a project; it wasn’t a book project, I regret to say, although it was at least as much fun – another miniature scene, this one of a garage, full of tools and car parts, and advertising for various automotive products. A fun build, and very much outside the usual project of this kind, which more usually runs to twee little bookstores, coffee shops and homey kitchens. And so – now that it is done, after a day and a half of fitting, gluing, sanding and painting – back to the book projects.