Mini Mental Summer Breaks

I spend my days researching, typing on a keyboard and looking at a computer screen.   

Some days the hours pass quickly; other days not so much.   Some days the next step I need to take in my manuscript is clear; other days not so much.  Some days the words flow onto the screen; other days not so much. 

But every day I’m thankful to have a big window in my office, so I can look out and see something other than a computer screen and piles of books and papers.  Looking out the window in the summer is the best.  The flowerbed outside my window is treat for me.  I admire the purple coneflowers and black-eyed-Susans growing there and see bumblebees and butterflies float around and visit bloom after bloom.  Hummingbirds flock around the feeder just a few feet from my chair.  I watch their antics as they fly around fight each other.

All through the day this hummingbird feeder right outside my office window is a busy place.  

Just a few feet away from all that activity around my flowers, I work on my new book with the working title of 

Buried Lives: 

George Washington’s Slaves of Mount Vernon

(Holiday House, fall 2017)  

I think about the lives of the enslaved people I’m writing about.  I imagine what they may have seen and how they may have felt.  I struggle to find the best way to tell their stories without having any of their own words and thoughts to use.   Sometimes in my mind’s eye, I’m at Mount Vernon more than two hundred years ago. 

Then I look out my office window and watch hummingbirds for a while.   

I turn back to my keyboard.  I’ve got some stories to tell about some folks I’ve gotten to know really well.   

Carla Killough McClafferty

While I'm working behind the window, the bumblebees, butterflies, and hummingbirds are doing their own work.