In February, I’ll be headed to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA). This residency feels like a second home to me. I like the cows (not the bulls!) and I like having access to Sweet Briar’s swimming pool, exercise equipment and hiking trails. When I visit VCCA, it’s a time to work on poetry and it’s also a time to take care of myself with good food, fresh mountain air, and relaxing evenings with tea (or wine) by the fire.

In more good news, I received a Mid Atlantic Arts Fellowship to cover my travel expenses to the VCCA as well as the expense of my stay.

At the VCCA one afternoon, I walked up to the campus of the school to use a printer. I did not have a car or bike with me. I took a shortcut, and there my problems began. I managed to jump a creek with slimy banks and then crawl over a barbed wire fence unscathed…until I landed on a rock and twisted my ankle. Oh, the pain! I was nowhere near a human, a road, or a house.

Only a cow could help me, and she was no help.

What I had not noticed when I started on this “shortcut” is that a thick thorny patch of bushes stood between me and the open field that would lead to the campus hotel. Using all my powers of creativity, I managed a creative passage through these scratchy bushes and hopped and limped my way across the hay-colored field to the hotel. The desk attendant called me a taxi — just a man’s car with a magnetic sign on the side — and he told me to put heat on the ankle. That is the worst advice I’ve ever received.

At dinner — a person who can now pretty much ask me for anything he needs but never does — lent me a contraption that kept my ankle iced down all night long. The pain was so bad that I felt nauseous, and this same person gave me some of his meds.

Since health insurance did not cover crutches — you have to love a doctor who tells you to stay off the ankle when there are no other options besides walking or hopping to my car after the appointment — so I borrowed crutches from the Federal Government agency where I worked. This was a co-worker’s clever idea. The only crutches they had left in the infirmary were different sizes, but it meant I could hoof it the one block to the bathroom inside the cavernous office building. Even getting to the cafeteria meant two blocks of walking.

When I graduated to a cane, people looked at me with such concern. While I thought I looked dapper (ha) they thought they might catch something from me.

Now, I always take a car.