A Long Time Coming…Wild Muse Bids Adieu.

Cypress trees reflected in water, Devils’ Hammock, Florida. (Photo by T. DeLene Beeland 2004)

This is the last post to appear on Wild Muse. It’s been a fun few years writing here, but things are changing and I’ve decided the time is right to mosey on along. Wild Muse was born as a science blog in the summer of 2009. I was just getting started in freelance writing and enjoyed the idea of having my own little sandbox to play around with in cyberspace. A few years later, as work responsibilities grew to encompass a book project and my personal life expanded to encompass a baby, I had much less time than ever before to blog.

A year after my son was born, Wild Muse was reborn as a science, nature, and nonfiction book review site. It was the summer of 2013. I wrote reviews sporadically, when I had time, for every second or third book that I finished. My posts became more and more spaced out. Infrequent publishing is often the death rattle of a blog, and so it was with this one. As my family continues to expand, and we prepare to welcome a second baby into our home, I’ve taken a long and reflective look at what I spend my time on, as well as what I envision my time budget to be in the near future. This reflection allowed me to see that posting to Wild Muse has begun to feel more and more like a chore, and less and less like the invigorating outlet it once was.

Not many people know that after finishing my nonfiction book on red wolves, I began working as a financial oversight coordinator in a dental practice. I’m as trained in bookkeeping as I am in beekeeping. Ditto for human resources management, dental practice operations, and small business strategic growth management. But that’s what my time has been consumed with since October 2011. It was in that month that my life pivoted, and my path forever changed: all within a few weeks time, I discovered I was pregnant, I submitted my completed book manuscript to UNC Press, and I began working for the dental practice.

My path to working in the dentistry field was wholly unplanned. It was a byproduct of my marriage to a dentist who struck out as a sole practitioner in 2011. It often feels like we’ve been fighting to keep our heads above water since then. I won’t divulge specifics, but let’s just say that every single step of the way to getting this business going has been a struggle — every week, and every month. My husband works 60-70 hours per week. I work about half that while also being the primary caregiver to our beautiful son and running our household. There is so much to unpack in those last two sentences, it humbles me knowing the meaning with which they are suffused.

On being a Good Reader

Can you read and ride a bike?

In March I began reviewing nonfiction science and nature books here on Wild Muse. There were a couple of reasons this came about. First, after experimenting with blogging for several years, I’d grown a little bored with the model of writing a post about a published science paper. Second, my life shifted in ways that precluded being able to do even that when, within the span of a few months, I finished my first book and became a new mother. Suddenly, my time was too limited and too fractured to write regularly in a meaningful way. It was not just my blog suffering from neglect, it was my professional writing too.

Slowly I learned to be okay with the fact that I’m a Writer who is not currently writing. At first, it felt like my identity had been stripped away. If I wasn’t writing, then who was I? What was I doing with my time? Could I still say I was a writer? In addition to being a full-time mom to a rambunctious toddler, I continued to help my husband get his business off the ground; I found new depths of meaning in each of these roles. But a part of me still groped blindly in the dark for something to hold onto from my writerly life: I keened for time and mental space to write again and was repeatedly frustrated when this absurd venture turned into something akin to Waiting for Godot. I’ve been a cyclist for long enough to know I was simply spinning my wheels, doing nought but going through the motions. And so I settled down, and I listened to the Reader Yin of my Writer Yang, the part of me who yearned to be a Reader again. I became comfortable with putting my writing away for the time being; I imagine this scene as a wild bird released from a rattan cage that I watch as it careens out of my window . . . and I must trust it will come home to roost again. Someday. I then learned to curl up with a book whenever the opportunity arose. 

We were almost roadkill. Almost.

Point of impact.

Some readers of Wild Muse may know from my tweets or Facebook page that my fiancé and I were in a very bad car accident last Sunday afternoon. We were traveling home from Asheville with the cruise control of Matt’s Toyota 4Runner set to 70 mph near Morganton when a Honda civic rear ended us. In broad daylight. With zero traffic around us. We were the only object on the road (we were driving in the right lane of a two-lane eastbound section of I-40), and the driver rammed right into us.  We estimate the other car was traveling in excess of 90-100 mph based on our first sighting of it cresting a hill (when we were at the hill’s bottom), and the speed with which it overtook us.  Matt had remarked to me, “Some bozo is driving with his hazards on,” when he had seen the car crest the hill. By the time I turned around to look out the rear window, the car was mere feet from our bumper. I saw it hit us, just as the words were forming in my brain to say, “He’s going to hit us.”

The other driver pushed us off the pavement into the grass. Matt managed to decelerate the truck a bit, but then we flipped several times and landed up-side-down in a ditch at the tree line. I remember thinking that he might control the truck to slow down and that it would be bumpy, but that we’d be okay. I remember seeing nothing but grass in front of us. But then the truck bucked, there was a cloud of dust in front of the windshield, and then we were up-side-down and spinning. The windows exploded. Glass flew everywhere. Dust streamed into the cab. I couldn’t stop screaming. I don’t know what was coming out of my mouth, but “No!” was the thought running through my head. “No, this CAN’T be how it ends,” I was thinking, because in the instant that we started flipping and the glass began flying, it occurred to me that one or the other of us, or both, could die. Right then. My head was slung to the right and the left, and I remember thinking it felt like we were in a flat spin. At some point, my head hit something and I remember the feeling of something soft splitting under pressure, like an apricot bursting. It was the side of my face, near my right eye, splitting open.

Gustav the Great Cat

Gustav in 2006

Helping a beloved pet to pass on is perhaps one of the hardest journeys I’ve been on. Several times now. Gustav was our family’s cat, and he was decidedly the smartest feline we ever lived with — my whole family agrees on that one. He understood people and his emotional intelligence baffled me throughout his life. My parents are both cat lovers and when I was a little girl we always had cats underfoot in our small, warm home. When I was in college, I adopted two siblings from a pet rescue, and one of them grew into the greatest companion we’ve ever known. He was always full of mischievous surprises. At the height of his reign, he patrolled at least three, perhaps four yards in our neighborhood. His size intimidated most other cats, but really the only thing that was fierce about him was his love for life and people. Gustav had a regal presence. Visitors often remarked upon his size, his golden mantle and his auburn mane. Once, when a friend was helping me move furniture into my apartment, he glimpsed — from the street — Gus’s mug in the window.

“I didn’t know you had a golden retriever,” he remarked.
“I don’t, that’s my cat,” I said.
“That’s a cat?” He gawked.

When I think of him now, I’m reminded of the John Mayer song “Comfortable” where he’s lamenting that the love of his life was also his first, when he was naive and didn’t know what to do with such a greatness. He crones, “Why’d I have to / practice on you….” That’s how I feel about Gus in his golden years. He was the biggest cat love of my life, and I regret having to practice learning a deep love on him. I messed up a lot. I loved his sister, Zeut too — she was a brown and orange tortoise shell cat — but Gus was just different.

Gustav the Great Cat. June 1996- June, 4 2010

When he was two, he still hadn’t stopped growing. He’d grown a large, chunky frame very quickly. But he kept filling out until he was about five or six. He matured into a tall and lanky cat with narrow hips, wide shoulders and a glorious poufy mane. At his biggest he was about 15 pounds, but not fat. He was large boned and full of brawny muscle and mirth. He grew so tall that he learned to pat the tops of counters with his wide, feathered paws, searching for stuff. Anything. Whatever he found up there, he’d circle his paw around it and drag it off. I’d come home to find spaghetti noodles, cups and spoons strewn on the kitchen floor. He dragged rings and watches off my night stand, and mascara tubes and blush brushes off the bathroom counters. He ate my blush brushes. I’d find them chewed to pieces and enmeshed in poop in his litter box. He was furious in his curiosity sometimes.