A Berlin Baby and Other Joys

I'm back! It's been an amazing few months: An end-of-summer trip to Berlin, Germany to hold my brand new grandbaby Cecilia, who of course, is strikingly beautiful, and coos in both German and English. You may suspect I'm stretching it just a bit, since Cecilia is just two months old now, but that's how it sounded to me Saturday, as she told me a long story in her coo language.

Cecilia is richly blessed with a trumpet-playing papa (my son) and a dancer mama: Christiane who was born in East Germany, and who you will soon see is quite beautiful. Besides the great joy of being with this loving family for three weeks, I had the remarkable experience of writing some of my chapters for Finding Nonna sitting on the rocks by the waterfall at Victoria Park, my home away from home in Berlin. Not only are there wooded paths for wandering as I pondered just what Ellie would do to discover Nonna's secret, Victoria Park also has a great outdoor cafe with lecker eis (delicious ice cream). Each day I rewarded myself for my roughed-out chapter, by ordering " eins waffel mit eins kugel vanille und eins kugel erdbeere." (one cone with one scoop vanilla and one scoop strawberry.)

All in all, it was a lovely three weeks.
Less than 24 hours after I returned from Berlin, I welcomed my 4 year-old grandson from Santa Fe, New Mexico, along with his mommy and daddy, for ten days of blackberry picking, visiting with cousins, going as high as we could on the swings, buying two new swordtails for our aquarium, going to the Turtle Park, making muffins, making a magic wand, and other such delightful pursuits.

I rejoice in saying I suffered little Jet Lag from the Berlin trip--there just wasn't time for it!

And now the third Rejoicing I want to share with you all: I finished my revision of Finding Nonna this week. My writing group, the Diviners (see picture with the blog entry before this) gave me a round of applause. I was a little startled when I got to the end--somehow it just didn't seem that could happen, after all the time I've been working on this book.

Yes, I still have some rewriting to do--I've been at this business long enough to know that. I will be printing the book out this week and reading it all the way through to see what I still need to do before I begin marketing it. But for now, tonight, I am smiling, my heart happy at all the surprising insights, and the unexpected action scenes (who knew that Mark was going to be a skateboarder? Not me, at least not when I started.)

As I sign off from this first entry after my summer absence, I promise to be back much sooner this time around. In the meantime, my hope is for all of us to keep our hearts open to the Rejoicings all around us, be they cooing babies, double scoop erdbeere cones, or finished chapters of our books.