Potentially scary event of the weekend (Mom picks my manuscript) turns into gratifying event of the weekend (Mom refuses to give manuscript back). Phew. She turned to me at page 12 and quizzed me about how much Lovely Agent had read before asking to represent me. After I explained the whole process to her, I asked why she wanted to know. "Because! I was hooked by page four, and I wanted to know when she was hooked."

Okay...

Anyway, now I can say things like "And my mom loves my book!" Which I didn't actually think mattered, even to me, but apparently it did, just a little.

In other news, the scent of blackberry drinking syrup is following me. (The kind for mixing into Italian soda.) Maybe I spilled some on my fleece a few days ago?

And in still other news, Mom and I went to visit a small park we each remembered from childhood. She and her dad used to stop there and fill water jugs--there was an overflow from an artesian well--and I remember wandering around the gravel paths when I was very small. When we arrived on Saturday, though, we were stunned. It was not the park we remember. Someone had leveled the ground and taken out most of the trees. The well had been capped off, and now there's a pump. There are no more boulders thrusting up from the earth. The stream still meanders through in a way we remember, and there are a few cedars that we recall, but it looked like it had been landscaped by committee or something.

We could NOT figure out why anyone would do this. We cursed the engines of "progress" and whatever foolish eye couldn't see the beauty in that overgrown little park and decided to take a hand. Mom bemoaned the quality of the grass, and I noted that the topsoil had been removed. REMOVED THE TOPSOIL? For profit, no doubt! Capitalist villains!

Well, we went home and kvetched about it, and my aunt said, "Oh, actually, the whole place blew up."

WHAT?

The story is a little muddled. Actually, some guy applied for a permit to blow up a beaver dam. And did it very wrong. Or something. (The story remains muddled, even after some clarifying phone calls to an uncle.) Anyway, the ensuing flood pretty much tore the park up--topsoil, boulders, trees, the well, etc. It did a number on the old highway running past, too, but who cares about a highway? We just wanted our park back.

So, there was that melancholy feeling of the "can't go home again" variety as we drove away; we wandered (by car) around town and up past Mom's old swimming holes, listening to spring peepers and speculating on all the changes, remarking how the edge of town has moved (like it does). We popped into the Quik Stop to purchase the Spikehorn book, which clarified the half-remembered stories we'd both been told during our childhoods. Ooh, a link to the book.

(My main memories, when being driven past the ruins of the Spikehorn Bear Den, were that Spikehorn used to keep bears there, but that they ate him--or maybe they all died in a fire together... when in truth, the bears merely mauled dozens of tourists, and Spikehorn died in a nursing home. There was a fire, though, during which some bears and raccoons escaped.

Oh, yes, this is all in the same county that went feral 70 years previous.)

Right, so, I'm writing, like you do. (The Fairy Apocalypse. Seriously, how long did it take me to come up with that? Of course, once I'd written half the story, I was like, "Oh, you know who did fairy apocalypse? Robin McKinley in Sunshine." But mine is just fairies, and no vampires or anything else. And it's a proper apocalypse.)

Anyway, I need a last name for the neighbors. And I'm thinking about my grandparents' neighbors (of a sort; I don't think they lived closer than a mile away), the Guinnerguskys. Or are they the Ginnerguskis? The Gunnerguskys? The Guinner-Guskis? Something much more Polish than I'm capable of spelling, like... The Guighnergafhikis? (I'm bad at making up Polish phonemes; that looked pretty Irish, actually.)

I can't figure it out. So I start Googling. And you know what, "Guinnergusky" doesn't exist. Period. Or any variant I can think of. So I start Googling the name of the county, and maybe I'll stumble into a list of names.

Instead I find this:

"Clare County has had its troubles with lawless elements. Some of this conflict was generated by farmers in Grant and Sheridan Townships when Lumbermen took local government from their control. The Board of Supervisors retaliated by withholding funds for a new jail at Harrison and the sheriff was not compensated for transporting lawless men to jails in Midland or Osceola Counties. The County went feral following this interval."
From "A Brief History of Clare County" (italics mine)

Uhm. Okay.

Yes, of course, Michigan was once the frontier. I get that. And my grandfather and his brothers were called the Wild Cook Boys for a reason, having grown up in nearly lawless lumber camps and having a penchant for fighting (yes, my gentle, wonderful grandfather; it was shocking to find this out, and yet, it made perfect sense). But.

FERAL?

Cool.