Did you know that Archibald Query invented marshmallow fluff, right here in Somerville, in 1917?

Quaker query and book publishing agent query today join a brief, grateful tribute to “the ‘Ville.” My hometown.

YAY!

“Friends have developed the Queries to assist us to consider prayerfully the true source of spiritual strength and the extent to which the conduct of our lives gives witness to our Christian faith. ["Faith and Practice of New England Yearly Meeting of Friends]

“We prefer to see only a query letter first. If we are intrigued, we’ll ask to see a portion of the manuscript.” [Posted on a literary agency website re submissions.]

Query, query. My worlds collide. For after finishing Welling Up, a 262 pp. musing on that “true source of spiritual strength,”  I must now submit. Such a good, spiritual-practice word, huh?

And I’m going to need some strength: FYI: some literary agencies receive over 150 queries a week! How’s that for competition?

But last night, listening to my spiritual advisors, i.e. the men and women who come to our Wednesday night meals-and-sharing gathering for the formerly incarcerated and those who care for them, I was “renewed and refreshed” (that’s Faith and Practice language.)

So I know I have done, as an agent in a recent, pre-submission dream told me, “wonderful and important work.”

“Onward and upward,” as dear Sara Sue Pennell, beloved member of Friends Meeting at Cambridge, exhorts.

Okay, technically, it’s a new month and “Winds of Change” is so last month. But with a possible hurricane bearing down on the Northeast this weekend, the same weekend as daughter Allison’s outdoor, on the Cape wedding, who could resist?

Instead of obsessively consulting weather websites a thousand times a day, this MOB arranged for a “Hurricane Earl” Google alert. The kind that gives you one report/day. Pretty smart, huh?

Not really. And yet brilliant.

The “not really” is because a Google search, I now realize, is about hits. So the sites that have come up  track this mighty storm’s process as people living in the middle-Atlantic states consult their computers.

What I really wanted to know was: Will this hurricane hit Cape Cod and if so, when, and how bad will it be? But what I’m really learning is: We’re connected. All of us. (And, oh, yeah, as precious and wonderful as Allison and Dustin and this wedding are, there’s all that other stuff happening, too.)

In case you didn’t pick up on it—that’s the “brilliant” part.

* Allison will be wearing pearls once belonging to my Aunt Katherine and borrowed from her Aunt Deborah.