At the beach, sunrise rewards early risers with a glorious panorama of mother-of-pearl sky and water. Mother-of-pearl: the nacreous pastel shimmer in shells, replicated in gleaming water and glowing sky.

Every sunrise shows us that the sun is the father of us all, the giver of energy. Then isn’t the sun the father-of-pearl?

But then what is the pearl? The round orb of Earth? No, that’s too simple for something as complex and interconnected as our planet is known to be. Animal, vegetable, and mineral—we are all of the above. If the pearl is our living earth, Gaia, then we are all part of that pearl.

The true pearl, hidden until sought for, is the gem of our consciousness. That consciousness, that intelligent understanding, is, as Carl Sagan said, “a way for the universe to know itself.” We know we evolved here on Earth and could have evolved only here, on this planet in this universe. However, like the tiny piece of grit at the heart of a pearl, the knowledge that we are also Earth’s users and abusers must prod our consciousness.

May we continue to expand our conscious efforts to love and respect the importance of every element of our planet and our part in the universe. When we focus on being Earth’s restorers and guardians, our consciousness will be a true gem. A perfect pearl.

A local cherry tree in lovely full bloom.

Living as Lou and I do near Our Nation’s Capital, we’ve experienced first-hand one of the joys of spring: the famous cherry blossoms downtown. Many times I’ve walked along the Tidal Basin under the trees’ lacy canopy and marveled at the intensity of their beauty.

Cherry trees also grace many suburban neighborhoods, including ours. As we’re a little north of D.C. and higher in altitude, our local trees extend the flowering season.

What reader, turned on to poetry as a romantic teenager, can forget the beauty of A. E. Housman’s ode that celebrates the wild cherry? This picture shows my beloved boxed copy of Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, bought so many years ago. The second poem in the collection rejoices in spring’s blooming cherry trees.  Here’s the first stanza:

My copy of Housman’s poetry.

    Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

    Is hung with bloom along the bough,

    And stands about the woodland ride

    Wearing white for Eastertide.

Housman was writing about wild cherries, like the little black cherry in our own woods and the trees along our local “woodland ride,” the Matthew Henson Trail. The beautiful downtown or neighborhood cultivars have many more flowers per bough, of course, but I love the wild ones that decorate our springtime woodlands. I’m happy to say with the poet,

A blooming black cherry in our woods.

    About the woodlands I will go,

    To see the cherry hung with snow.

My book about books and life that took me almost 25 years to write is about to take its first steps out the door. A quarter-century! How can anyone write that slowly? Well, okay, I wasn’t working on it the whole time. There was a 22-year lapse in the middle.

The working title: A Reader’s Journey – and What Happened Next. It’s about turning fifty (which I did in 1990) and using books as signposts to relive and even reinvent my life. And it’s about meddling with the manuscript more than twenty years later, in a two-person book club with my younger self.

Our books are organized because I like being able to find a particular book fast, either for my own pleasure or to lend to a person who deserves to read it. Children’s books plus books about writing are in my study, in orange bookcases that used to belong to my son.

Books about birds are in the foyer and the kitchen by the window, near the binoculars.

Fiction and natural history are also in my study, in these white bookcases. I bought them with money from an article I sold to The Washington Post, the one about the annual return of the buzzards to Hinckley, Ohio. Our Maryland friends snickered when we made that pilgrimage to Hinckley. However, the buzzards bought bookcases.

Mysteries are in our bedroom, travel and humor in the guest room, science fiction and philosophy in the family room. There’s even a stack of books in the hall bathroom. I feel vaguely guilty about the house resembling a used book store, but the good news is that there’s brilliant writing wherever I look.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that I’ve written a book about reading books….

You’ll find an overview, the book’s introduction, and part of Section 1 here on my website. Check it out!

Ever thought of using a pen name? I saw a suggestion that if a writer needed a nom de plume, she could take the name of the pet she had as a kid for a first name, and the name of the street she lived on as a last name. I’ve always published under my real name, but what if I wrote something so different I wanted to use another one? (Think J. K. Rowling and Robert Galbraith.) Maybe I should have another name ready, just in case.

The first pet I remember was a sweet gray cat named Mitzi. I don’t remember the street we lived on then, but when I was seven, we moved to 20 Hanover Road, in Mountain Lakes, N.J. Putting those together, my nom de plume could be Mitzi Hanover. I like it!

What sort of books would Mitzi Hanover write? I’m thinking superior romance novels, playful and sexy but with an undercurrent of serious plot. A sassy nurse-and-doctor romance in a teaching hospital, or a romantic suspense story of art-fraud or espionage.

Here’s another possibility. When I was a teenager, my parents briefly fostered a German shepherd that my young brother, going with the obvious like most little kids, named Shep. What would Shep Hanover write? Perhaps heart-warming animal stories, or he-man Westerns, with a main character who could be played by John Wayne or Gary Cooper.

The inspiration for Max Wild.

I brought Lou into the pen-name game.  He grew up in the District on Patterson Street and his first pet was a kitten named Timmy. Timmy Patterson might be a friendly name for a children’s writer or a cartoonist. Much classier, though, would be a name borrowed from the tuxedo cat Lou brought home when he was older. He named the cat Osiris. Osiris Patterson — what about historical novels about Egypt, or startling stories of the occult? Cool!

Not all pet-name + street-name combinations work. Editing might be needed. When my sons were young, we had a dachshund named Max. That would be a fine manly first name for an author. Unfortunately, we lived on the somewhat pretentiously titled Wild Olive Drive. But the guys could blue-pencil it into a good pen-name: Max Wild. Perfect for articles on conservation or mountain-climbing, or thrillers about conspiracies, car-chases, and cops.

This is fun!  What would be your nom de plume?