Like most everyone else this year, my husband and I have been stuck in the house avoiding a nasty virus. And since we were unable to go anywhere, we both had surgery this summer; cataract for him and spinal for me. (Whoopee!) We spent most of the summer recovering. We’d planned a vacation in March for his birthday meeting my husband’s cousin and wife that was cancelled. We finally got the chance to go somewhere and we stayed in the state making reservations at Medicine Park https://medicinepark.com/ – the place we cancelled in March.
If you’ve never been there, I highly recommend it. It wasn’t overly crowded, probably due to the pandemic. We wore our masks inside and constantly washed our hands or used hand sanitizer.
One of the places you have to eat when you’re in the Medicine Park area is Meer’s Burgers. It is an old building and the food is mostly burgers and fries, but they are huge (filling a pie plate) and really good. The place was clean and careful about social distancing, masks, etc. Only so many were let in at a time. The food was delicious, and it never hurts to share a plate with someone since they are half-pound burgers.
We stayed in a nice vacation rental cabin with two bedrooms and two baths. 
We ended up traveling 20 minutes into Lawton for breakfast because Medicine Park, like a lot of places, has lost businesses due to the virus. There was nowhere to eat breakfast other than a bakery and it wasn’t always open.
We drove to the top of Mount Scott and also visited the new aquarium. My legs played out early in the walk through the aquarium, so I sat inside and watched a demonstration by a biologist as she fed an electric eel. It was interesting. We didn’t swim in the lake, but it was open to the public. We’re old people. But the cousins got a chance to catch up and might have had a beer or two at an outside bar. 
This is the second time I’ve been to Medicine Park, named after the medicinal purposes of the creek that feeds the lake. 
I don’t know if the water has healing properties, but the weekend did for us. It was great to get out and see the cousins and relax.
Now, back to reality.
This year I vowed to talk about new experiences. I was thinking of travel, but things have changed for everyone. Now that we are home most of the time, our new experiences could be just a new way of doing an old thing. My writing club, like many others, is learning to do something in a new way.
I was reminded this week how feelings and experiences can come back to bite you when you least expect it. Things you thought were over and done – you thought you dealt at the time – suddenly are there again.
Many years ago, I fell in love with the lore surrounding the Heavener Runestone and the YA novel Glome’s Valley was born. Since that time, I’ve written a sequel, Return to Glome’s Valley. I loved the characters and the setting, and the saga of Glome and the Heavener Runestone lived on.
Many of my books are published by The Wild Rose Press (TWRP). I also write for other publishers, but one of the things that The Wild Rose Press does is offer out stories to be written. For instance, the Deerbourne Inn Series that I wrote a novella for last year took place in a quaint Vermont Inn and many of their authors wrote stories surrounding the inn. I jumped on that band wagon and wrote Witches’ Cliff. The way this is set up, the publisher creates a setting and then invites their authors to write a story (any genre) around that setting with a word count limit.
Writing stories of experiences or making your own seems to be a natural thing for humans. Many never do it, though they think of it, and many do it without ever sharing what was written.
It’s been three weeks since my spinal surgery and I’m feeling human. I walk and practice my physical therapy exercises and I’ve even had to get back into cooking. I’m doing well.
I’m reading a new book, Big Magic, by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray Love. You might like it. It is about living the creative life and is mostly geared toward writers, but also other artists.
