Often ideas for my blog turn up in emails or texts. This week is no exception.

A friend in Tucson sent me a photo of her beautiful purple sage in full bloom. Along with that she sent a photo of a rainstorm with the sun shining through the raindrops. Seeing both of those made me homesick for Arizona. I mentioned that I miss the desert, but I certainly don’t miss the summer heat.

Which caused her to remind me of the way the desert smells during and after an Arizona summer rainstorm. I miss that, too. In Seattle when it rains, it’s just wet. You can see it and feel it, but you can’t smell it! And that triggered another remembered smell from childhood—the way clean sheets smelled after being dried on my mother’s clothesline in the sun. If someone could bottle those two aromas, I’d buy them in a down-home minute.

This week a fan asked me where I got the vivid imagination that fuels my books. The truth is, I think I was born with it. My mother used to tell the story of how, one Saturday morning while we were still living on the farm in South Dakota and I was about three, our parents loaded my two older sisters and me into the back seat of the family Ford and headed into town.

We hadn’t yet reached the county road when I burst out in a blood-curdling scream. My father jammed on the brakes, sending the three back seat passengers onto the floorboard. Then he turned around and demanded, “What in the world is the matter?”

“You forgot my Lamby,” I told him. Since Lamby was entirely imaginary, there was every reason for my parents to have forgotten him, but as you can see, I’ve been creating fiction from a very early age.

The last glimpse came from my brother, Gary, in Phoenix, saying that Phoenix’s only remaining major newspaper, The Arizona Republic, is going out of business in both print and virtual editions. The Busks in Bisbee had a very long connection to that newspaper.

For years the younger kids, starting with Arlan and Jim had five-mile-long bicycle routes in Bisbee’s Warren neighborhood. One was on the west side of Arizona Street while the other was on the east. Weekday subscribers usually numbered twenty-five to thirty while on Sundays that number swelled to close to a hundred each. On Sundays the folks drove around town to deliver those.

By the way, the inside sections of the Sunday papers—the comics, the want ads, the magazines—would be delivered mid-week and stored behind the front door in a four-foot-tall stack where they remained until the front sections with the late-breaking news arrived on Sunday mornings. At that point they needed to be assembled before they could be delivered.

By the way, Evie was always in charge of making sure subscription collections were made in a timely fashion before the carrier manager showed up on Saturday mornings to collect his toll.

Eventually, whoever was in charge of picking up the papers from the bus station and dropping them off to the individual carriers quit, so the Busk family took over that part of the job, too. Doing the auto route meant delivering papers to the individual carriers in town, but it also involved serving customers who lived in the boonies where bicycle routes didn’t exist.

As one kid after another got their driver’s license, they took over the auto route. When I was driving it, one of customers was Smithy Alford, my high school algebra teacher. She was fierce in her own right, but her two Doberman pinchers were even more so!

My most vivid paper route memory happened when one summer’s day I offered to give my brothers a ride rather than their having to ride bicycles on their routes. For that, I drove while Arlan and Jim were int the back seat with a stack of papers between them which they were rolling, rubber-banding, and throwing.

We stopped at a house where the paper was supposed to be delivered to a back deck built on top of a garage. At that point both of them jumped out of the car and simultaneously threw a paper. Oops! That meant we’d be one paper short, so Arlan climbed up on my shoulders and managed to make it onto the deck to retrieve the extra.

Jim passed away in 2000 at age fifty due to an undiagnosed heart ailment. I wish he was here so the three of us could have a good laugh together about that one.