We’d heard about the auction not because of the perfection of the fish to be had but because it’s conducted in Valencian which is a version of Catalan which is different from Spanish.  So, unless they know Catalan apparently even Spanish speakers don’t have an advantage.

Despite observing from different points in the room for a good half hour, the how-to’s of this auction remained a mystery.  The auctioneer droned some words that sounded like, “datadatadatadatadatacuetacuetacuetadatadtadatadatdatadatacuetacuetacueta…”, never pausing for breath.  When he stopped, a man in rubber boots emptied trays of fish into plastic bags and handed the bags to someone in the room who had made no visible signs that they wanted that particular lot of fish.  Maybe it’s a system of blinks or gestures so subtle if you blink you miss them. I stayed very still, just in case.

I loved the mix of solemnity and hilarity of the auction goers.  It was serious business before they landed their bags of fish and congratulations all around afterwards.  Kind of like an anunciation for the every day.

When I declared 2009 my year of exploring writing through writing, I felt I couldn’t do it alone.  I wanted guidance.  Like when I was in graduate school.  Yet unlike graduate school during which getting feedback on my work was as fun as being fed to a wood chipper.

That was then and then there’s now. Although I’m once again feeling like I don’t know shit, it’s not as daunting as when I was a writing student in my twenties.  Perhaps because I’m crankier. Attitude is tremendously helpful in keeping one’s spirits up.  Also my handpicked tutor is someone who understands the eggshell nature of a writer’s ego and knows how to say what needs to be said without coddling or crushing that ego.  That is a rare talent.

Where does one find such a person?

Luck?  Fate?  Opportunity?  A couple years ago I hired a copywriter to help me polish a script for an animated viral video as a promotional thingy, something I could post on YouTube.  The collaboration process went great, but the project never got past the paper stage.  Long story as to why.  It was a bummer that the project had to end up DOA, but the silver lining to the whole affair was getting to know a wonderful writer who later agreed to be my writing coach/mentor/guide for a while. For a fee, I should add.  As it should be.

A bit about the nitty gritty, like considerations, organizing and asking.

I thought long and hard about what I wanted to achieve by working with a writing coach/mentor/guide sort of person:

• Write several articles and essays polished enough to have a fair shake at publication, even if I know the chances are slim the article or essay will be accepted.
• The ability to self-publish and self-promote is a Plan B I’m willing to fall back on.  But not without first giving Plan A a serious go.
• Write a more journalistic article.  For kicks.  For the challenge.  To see if I like it.
• Force myself to choose a central point for each article, research the intended publication, clarify the intended audience, organize an outline and actually use said outline as my guide.  Whenever I blog I pretty much write the post as I go, off the top of my head (ahem, as evidenced right here and now), very much in the moment (ditto).  It’s a pleasant, loosey goosey, unvarnished approach, but it’s been the main modus operandi for a while and it’s made me a lazy writer.  I can live with being lazy about certain things, like ironing or vacuuming the inside of the car. I’m not ready to surrender to being a lazy writer, at least not yet.
• Hone my abilities to assess what’s going on in my rough drafts.  Am I trying to be too clever?  Am I being a scaredy and skirting the raw material?  Am I blathering?  Am I mongering metaphors?  That sort of thing.

I also considered numbers and reality.  How many articles did I want to write?  Over what period of time?  How much lead time to allow from first rough draft to final product?  How much time could I realistically commit each week, each month?   How much could I budget for this assistance each month?  I didn’t want to suck all the joy out of my dreaming and scheming by addressing practicalities, but the practicalities would have to be dealt with at some point.  Better to do so while they were more manageable.

Then I put my thoughts into writing and emailed a request to my first choice (OK, only choice) in writing coach/mentor/guide, remembering to say please, and adding that there would be no hard feelings whatsoever if this wasn’t something she had the time or inclination to take on. If the answer had been no, I can promise you I would have been disappointed and a little sulky.  But no hard feelings. Happily, though, the answer was yes.

What About The Stinky Van And The Dog?
Last week we drove back to France in a stinky rental van to pick up the rest of our stuff.  I had eight hours on the outbound trip to analyze the smell but cut bait on that line of thinking for reasons I hope are obvious.  Instead, I focused on being a lap pillow for our dog and the scenery that gets more beautiful the closer you get to the Aude and Herault departments in France.

It was a quick trip. Three days. Sixteen hours on the road.  Five pee stops.  Four cans of Coke Zero.  Two bags of chips.  Two Kit Kat bars.  Two ham and cheese sandwiches (each.)  One small dog who had the best seat in the van.  Zero fruit.  Nutritionally we were very, very naughty.

We stayed with friends, stocked up on olives, ate dinner at a restaurant with the most amazing mermaid tiles in the ladies WC, said our goodbyes to the village and some of its villagers, hit the road, our dog panting from the full sun filling the front seat as we returned to Spain.

To this chapter of our lives we can officially say “le fin”.

Last night I dreamed of a cobra. I was at a wedding at which apparently everyone’s pet dogs and cats were also invited guests. I’m having a conversation with someone when out of the corner of my eye I see a snake slither out of the room. I look around and no one else seems to have noticed. In the dream I imagine that I’ve imagined the snake, so I go over to the window next to the door under which the snake escaped. On the lawn outside, the cats and dogs are doing their thing. No sign of the snake. I lean out the window and beneath I see the snake attacking a squirrel. The squirrel is already stiff. It’s a goner. And then the snake puffs out its back, and then I know there’s a cobra lurking amongst us. I awoke at the point when I’m most concerned about the safety of the dogs and cats within striking distance and when I’m wondering how to alert everyone without causing a panic and ruining a wedding.

And yet this wasn’t a cold sweat dream prickled with anxiety. I woke with a sense that the cobra didn’t represent a menace or the squirrel a tragedy, and that to apply that literal interpretation to what’s happening in my life was off. Way off. It feels like something has been attacked and killed, but it’s not me. I’m safe and sound.

Anyhoo, our ducks, Claude and Mimi, have returned. For three years now a mating pair of mallards have camped out in the stream that runs along our yard. I can’t say for certain it’s always the same pair, but we use the same names. We’ve never seen any offspring, but we know they’re working on it. Duck congress is a raucous, rough affair. For the most part Claude is gentle and attentive, that is until he gets the itch to procreate. Then he’s a different duck, a duck who will not accept no for an answer. There’s all sorts of thrashing about, Mimi squawking as if it’s Armageddon. I want to interfere. I want to give Claude a good scolding. But I resist for all the obvious reasons.

They’re out in the stream now, the pair. It’s bucketing down and the stream current is pretty swift, but they’re side by side and by all appearances they’re taking a nap.

Here’s a photo of the pair on a nicer day.

For reasons that feel both fuzzy and synchronistic, over the weekend I broke my seal and read the book. Cover to cover, loads of hearty laughter, sick with jealousy. Now I understand what the fuss was all about, agree that in the book she’s real, drunk, broke but also exquisitely honest and human. A definitive inner hottie, too, pure and simple.

Go figure that one of my favorite chapters plumbed the topic of jealousy. I am now experiencing jealousy of that acutest kind, like a pile of burning tires, because this beautiful creation I’m slobbering over, that I might contemplate doing all sorts of evil to have as mine is not mine, will never be mine. It will always be the progeny of someone else. And it’s so unfair.

Because there was no intersection between me and this book until now, there are a few bitter pills to choke on. I’m late entering the game of finding kindred spirits with whom to gush and swap favorite passages, I missed out on Lamott’s Salon.com era, and I have a whole bunch of her other books to catch up on. Just desserts. At least this book has been added to the pile bound for France.

If you don’t have Bird by Bird, get it. This instant. I insist.

Yesterday evening another of the neighborhood’s big pines crashed. Not a lick of wind. Not a drip of rain. No reason for it to fall. But it did, across the road, just missing a house.

That’s the third tree to pitch itself this year. Late summer, the back half of a house up our street was taken out by a red oak, out of the blue on a sunny, calm afternoon.

There’s never a warning with these trees, no suspect creaking or shifty groaning. One minute they stand. Boom. Next minute…boom. And these aren’t young, stripling trees, either. They’re mature, thick-trunked, with 75, 100, 125 years to their credit. They fall, these red oaks and pines, because they’re root systems are shallow and eventually they just give out and give up, yielding to the forces inching them slowly and surely to their inevitable crash.

In this neighborhood the “act of God” most likely to kill you, or at least impose some damage, is a red oak or a pine that’s reached its tipping point. Not fire or flood, not earthquake or monsoon, not tornado or ice, but a tree falling at some random, unpredictable, unstoppable moment.

Up until about a week ago, Georgia (the whole southeastern US actually) suffered from extreme, exceptional drought conditions. In June, Atlanta imposed watering restrictions, meaning once per week you can water your garden. No one is supposed to wash their car. We’re supposed to be rationing the laundry.

Early July brought some rain, but towards the end the rain died off and in August the temperatures soared into the triple digits. I began walking the dog at midnight because it was cooler. That’s when I discovered all of the midnight watering taking place. Neighbors who we commiserated with by day about the drought and heat were out in baseball caps and dark pajamas pointing a hose at their flower beds with the porch lights turned off.

As Rufus and I passed they turned their backs, and I looked the other way. No understanding nods passed between us, no apologetic glances.

Now I understood why a freshness emanated from certain yards when I walked Rufus in the mornings, why their yards smelled sweet and the ones next to them smelled dead. For every three or four yards where the grass was browned out or even the ivy looked stressed, there was at least one yard where the vinca bloomed profusely and the fescue thrived. Uh huh! Midnight waterers.

Truth be told, I was pissed. And envious.

As my midnight dog walking continued and midnight waterer spotting increased, questions arose. Should I make my outraged sentiments known? Should I try to politely and lightly persuade them to do otherwise? Should I lay down the mother of all guilt trips? Should I call the city who trawled the neighborhoods during the day looking for violators. Should I look the other way? Should I join them in this defense of our poor, thirsty gardens? I hemmed, hawed, grumbled, stewed. There were no easy answers. As time went on guilt flared; I felt like a collaborator. That pissed me off even more.

By early-August, the rain supplies in our rain barrel were used up. That’s when Tim and I caved, and began using buckets and watering cans to save our plants. Our methods didn’t waste the way hoses and sprinklers can, and we did our illicit watering before dinner, not in the dark. These were some of the justifications we crafted to make ourselves feel better about choosing our own interests over the common good

It’s not as if the reservoir was dry, we said. If it gets that bad, we promised, we’ll straighten up, fly right, and let the garden go.

We’ve had some good soaking rain nearly every day for a week. The rain barrel is full again. But, I’m finding there’s some muck that won’t wash away. It’s like a seal has been broken, and now I’m one of them.

I’ve lived in Atlanta for 11 years, and that’s at minimum 9 years longer than I ever thought I would. (It’s also the longest I’ve ever lived in one city.)

I arrived here after completing an MFA in Fiction Writing from Penn State because I was broke in bank account and sense of direction, and my parents had moved from PA to Atlanta the year before. Atlanta was supposed to be a rest stop, a pause, a blink between now and a shimmering future on the west coast. With eleven years under my belt, obviously other things have intervened between me and that vision.

If we were a pair of jeans, Atlanta and I are an OK-make-do-for-the-price sort of fit. We aren’t made for each other, though. There isn’t that kind of sympatico, home sweet home, like-a-glove sort of feeling. There’s no blame to pass around here; it’s just that way.

While sometimes I’m flat out fatigued by it, I certainly don’t hate the place. There are many things I like about Atlanta. I love the wooded oasis that is our back yard: you can see the Midtown skyline in the winter, but in other seasons it’s positively pastoral — trees, wildflowers, songbirds, great horned owls, red-tailed hawks, possum, chipmunks, voles, even a fox. It’s fun watching a city design itself. It’s like watching a teenager stumble and bumble their way to maturity. Prior to the 1996 olympics, Atlanta didn’t have much of a skyline. Now there’s a new high-rise of interesting architecture going up every day. New cultural institutions are setting up shop, and decayed neighborhoods are experiencing rebirth. The city park is undergoing some serious expansion and there are plans to create another large city park on the opposite side of the interstate that divides the city into east and west. There’s an air of prosperity and pluck.

All this growth, to no surprise, has some significant downsides. Traffic absolutely rots. Public transportation is absurdly inadequate. Despite all the money floating around, the homeless population gets bigger all the time. Every day an area of trees the size of a football field is cleared for new development. As a result, Atlanta is in jeopardy of losing one of it’s most unique characteristics: it’s canopy of trees. The city has only a few neighborhoods where a historical designation is in place, and that means everywhere else homes of extravagant proportions are thrown up against cute, more modest Craftsman bungalows. Very quickly, some of our most funky neighborhoods are losing their quirk and their character. It really does seem that for every plus there is a minus.

All in all though, what stands out for me that some of the most significant changes — internal and external — have happened while I lived here. For that reason alone, I focus more on what I like about Atlanta, than what I don’t: the movies and improv in the park during the summer, all of the arts festivals, some really good restaurants, the aquarium, its reasonable distance from the beach and the mountains, mild winters, the good friends I’ve made, etc.

In April of next year, I’ll be moving to the south of France (exact location TBD). This very exciting change will unfold during the last year I’m in my thirties. I get to close out one decade and ring in another with all adventure that moving to a place where everything is unfamiliar affords.

I keep pinching myself, asking how did I get so damn lucky with that timing! Dunno. Does it matter?

Melissa, 38, Atlanta, USA