So, this morning I found a mystery in my yard that I recognized as an inhabitant of my books, every time I write one.

To set the stage, I have to explain. You see, we live in retirement in an 1812 founder’s cabin at the top of a hollow in central Pennsylvania, which we bought as an occasional vacation place at the height of my professional income, years ago. It’s moderate in size, with two floors (we have lots of storage in a nearby city), and it has an old small plumbing/kitchen addition to bring in modest but adequate mod-cons. Most recently (most of a century ago) it was an orchard for the local Banana King and survived as his country place and market garden, before we bought it from the estate’s 16 survivors of his 20 children.

All the original log walls/structures are as sturdy as they ever were, and the local intramural inhabitants flourish discretely as they always have (red squirrels in the attic, mice in the basement, visits from confused reptiles, and so forth).

The cabin is inserted into the slope of the ascending immediate grounds (dozens of acres), with a large field downslope, and green slopes on either side of the cabin that rise to surround it and then continue reunited together up to the remains of one of the orchards upslope.

From the main (only) downstairs room we face the fireplace in the wall embedded in the slope, as well as the TV just to its left, and the chairs offer a fine view of the just-described ascending slope on the left, a source of great extramural activity.

What sort of activity? Well, the birdfeeders are there, for one thing, and the seasons vary between the activity of the nest builders and the seed eaters, both natives and migrators. Thirty feet out from the cabin, the slope is walled on the far side by the edge of one of the many patches of woods and the terminus of a path therein used by the deer, the bears, the wild turkeys, and so forth. Through the grass of that slope slinks the occasional rattlesnake, black snake, cucumberly copperhead, etc., and the warmbloods are represented by groundhogs, foxes, coyotes, and no doubt various rodents.

When the grass is mowed, this is like having a wall-sized aquarium to amuse us, all laid out on the tidy and trimmed slope for our delight.

But just today… We’ve had weeks of near-incessant rain, so the vegetation has exploded and exposed the upper parts of leaves usually lost to mowing, making a more obvious mystery of the plant identities. As I sat there watching, idly trying to identify something green-leafed halfway up the slope, suddenly a pencil-thin black-colored snake (not a Black Snake) elevated a foot of himself out of the ground behind it, for all the world like a periscope, and took an active interest in trying to survey what was going on. His small raised head on its straight neck/body bounced about in all directions like a groundhog as if wondering when that grass would finally be reduced to its proper height so that he could go on with finding his buggy/wormy meals.

In a flash, my brain presented to me the cutaway X-Ray version of that slope with all of its critters and plant roots underground or hidden in the covering layers, like a terrarium. I hadn’t expected that little snake, didn’t know that he (or his kind) existed, despite my supposed familiarity with the world he inhabited, the world that I saw every day. He was an invisible thread of something underneath the world I thought I knew, and of course my writing brain immediately started fabulating his species, his story, his ecosystem, his opinions (he seemed so put out when he surfaced in the too-high growth, that I had no difficulty assigning to him will and desires).

And, of course, I recognized the same process from when I ruminate about one of my stories, and suddenly I somehow discover something I hadn’t suspected, some potential thread or relationship underneath the story that changes everything, illuminates everything, as if I’d accidentally dropped a stitch beyond salvation, and was offered, in exchange, a rebuilt world, with different and better premises and directions.

I enjoy writing my stories, of course, but I also enjoy watching the psychology of the process, things I would never have noticed if I’d never started writing fiction.

How about you?