Barb filled me in on some of the particulars. She’d been to last year’s conference and was going again this year. “It really is pretty up there. You’re at a higher elevation so it cools down at night. The river has a little inlet for swimming. But everything depends on where you sleep.”

The main lodge and the conference center and the newer cabins were upgraded, central heat and air, good ventilation and so on. But most conference attendees were housed in the old dorm buildings. Last year she’d stayed in one nicknamed House of Spiders. This year she’d booked a hotel room in Placerville, twenty minutes away. She might miss some of the late-night hijinks, but at least she could go to bed without first wrapping herself in plastic.

“Late-night hijinks?” I asked, passing over, for the moment, my questions about spiders and sleeping quarters.

“Somebody always goes skinny-dipping and then loses their clothes. Or people wander off into the woods and get lost. There’s always a bear scare or a rattlesnake scare. Or somebody gets comatose drunk and needs to be hauled off to the medical center. Oh, don’t worry. There’s probably only one real crisis per year. The rest of the time it’s all these amazing writers talking to you and each other. It’s fantastic.” She paused and gave me a measuring look. “You’ll be fine. You won’t let yourself get too carried away.”

“Thanks,” I said, though I wasn’t sure it had been meant as a compliment. Someone really should have mentioned bears and rattlesnakes in the job description.

I was used to Barb by now, as I guess she was used to me, and though I wouldn’t have called us friends, I at least respected that she was serious about her writing. She was a few years older than my mom, and divorced, “of course,” she said, and her kids were grown and out in the world, making their own mistakes. One day she woke up tired of feeling sorry for herself and decided to stop caring what anybody else thought. I guess that accounted for the hair and a few other things.

She wrote on her own at first. All of it the purest crap. She began going to workshops and conferences. She’d been at it for a while now, she’d gotten a few poems into small magazines. Nothing she was going to brag about. Viridian’s workshops were the best thing that ever happened to her. She’d learned so much. And Viridian was always so patient and helpful.

“I worry about her. I wish she could afford to slow down,” Barb said.

“Afford?”

She stared at me. The pink glasses made it seem as if she never blinked. “Nothing.”