Abundance and Enough

A garden teaches. It teaches failure and patience. The asparagus failed—miserably. The few sprigs that survived weren’t enough to feed anyone…well; maybe, hope for next year, but there’s so much to consider about replanting what didn’t grow. It was an experiment. Cost, time, effort and the space must factor in. Our garden is limited and we try to get the most out each little inch. We feed many with our little 20 x 30-foot garden. Four families, plus neighbors.

Years ago, the garden was more than twice that size, but I canned and put by a lot more than I do now. Over fifty-two bottles each of beans, potatoes, carrots, grape, apple and apricot juice, bushels of pears, peaches and apple pie filling. We were younger and we had captive help. Nothing teaches life lessons better than a garden and I took full advantage with my kids. They helped.

But we had enough and abundance. We have it still. Nothing is quite like going to the garden for ingredients for your dinner.
So, it was with sadness we pulled the tattered tomato plants, dug the carrots and scallions, cut the lettuce, maybe, for the last time. And picked the sugar snap peas. None of those got to the table though. I popped each fat green pod straight into my greedy mouth. The next day we rototilled the garden and raked a patch for garlic.

Garlic is a crop of complete faith and hope. Planted at the changing season with the crisp air nipping at your heels, but done (anyway the way I find best) on bended knee, close to the dark, rich earth, the paper dry skins fluttering away in the wind, the dirt moist enough to cling to your gloves, the earthy smell drifting into your nose. Sixty-three cloves planted. Next year’s garden all ready begun and banked on: that next year they’ll emerge after the thaw, that you’ll be here to watch the first green shoots.

Out front is another lesson of abundance and enough. The thirty-five year old walnut trees are giving up their fruit, in abundance and more than enough. We share. The neighbors, magpies, crows, blue jays and raccoons feast on the leftovers. We don’t mind. We can only manage to crack and use one small twenty-five pound onion sack full and for most of the winter, our cats and we… have free entertainment. Plus, my husband might forbid me to feed the birds because of the mess, but I have found a way around him once more.

How does any of this relate to writing? I write as I plant garlic, with hope in my heart. Hope for each piece I write, for its future. Hope for my dream. That dream of being a writer. Abundance: I write every day. I am a writer living my dream and that is enough.

How Will You Live Your Writing Life?

Are you like me? You know, even agonize over, the things you aren’t good at, don’t know or just cannot do.(you probably can) Now, I’m mainly talking about my writing, but it really pertains to anything we attempt to accomplish.

I’m not particularly good at grammar, I miss mistakes all the time, which just drive me crazy and I’m not much for the whole networking thing. I do this blog and I make fit and start entries in facebook, when I remember and when I really feel like I have something to say. I don’t feel compelled to do much more than that. For one, I’m just too busy.

Now, that’s not to say everyone else isn’t, it’s just that isn’t how I want to spend time usually. I’d rather go for a walk, work in the garden, read, fuss with my houseplants, do some baking or cooking, play with my pets, actually, almost anything else. It just seems more…active. Sometimes, especially after reading The Writer or Writer’s Digest, I feel a little guilty and a whole lot hopeless. It all has to do with your platform and getting it out there. That’s important in today’s publishing world. The common opinion is without a platform and a viable, accessible one, it’s going to be even harder to get published.

As usual, I seem to go at it the hard way. I guess my platform is: the only platform I have is writing. I love writing. I love rewriting. I love sitting at my desk and imagining invisible chains keeping me there, so I don’t figure out some stupid thing (like checking online, facebook, blog visits and all the other things around now that wastes time and that I really don’t get any joy out of. Something about all of those things feels a lot like a gun to the ribs. More so because we are told we must keep current, we want to be in the know, with it, in the digital age, in the loop.) I have to do, rather than sit and write.

I love banging my head against the desk trying to think of that darn word on the tip of my fingers that I cannot remember and realizing it was the, then wondering if that’s the first signs of Alzheimer’s or just some unknown writer’s condition. I love my thesaurus and I even love that word: thesaurus. It sounds positively Jurassic, dinasaurusic, prehistoric, solid and come-beforeic.

So I’m not good at networking and there is this touch of desperation that I really must do it if I want my writing to go anywhere. I do, but do I really need to do more than the best writing possible? That seems wrong. I keep hoping, but because everyone says different, I do the minimum I can. It’s probably not enough. I acknowledge that, but I feel I’ve made the compromise and I, sometimes, recent it. I wonder, am I alone?

I did something about my lack of grammar skills. I’ve taken a course, I’ve bought and read books, I keep some great references close at hand. Still, I’m uncertain, would never tell anyone not to or how to split an infinitive. (See, you’re not suppose to, are you?) I suspect I do it all the time with utter ignorance. Saying sorry doesn’t help a thing.

Mistakes are made. That’s my bitter truth.

I don’t network much, choosing to spend my time the way I must. Writing, carving out time for those things in my life I love as well: doing my daughterly due diligence, doing due diligence to my life, reading, distressing, staying well and remembering there is more to life than being published.

And I try to remember the things I can do:

I can write every day.

I can make sure I read often.

I can read my writer’s magazines, but not take to heart those suggestions that do not work for me.

I can work hard to remembering what is truly important to my happiness and life.

I can honor my love for writing by concentrating on the writing, by producing the best I can.

I can let go of the guilt about those time stealers I don’t enjoy. Maybe, I’ll be sorry I don’t spend more time blogging, facebook, networking. I don’t think so. Down the road, I could blame my failure on the fact I didn’t do enough of it, but I won’t.

I want a writing life on my terms. I can do that.

Pink
It must have rained during the night. Not unexpected. It had been raining most of the last three day, but I had really hoped the rain, at least, would stop. It was cold. Clouds masked what little light false dawn provided. I pulled on bottom thermals, black running pants, black V-neck shirt with pink patch, black jacket, socks, walking shoes. I ate a yogurt, a cereal bar (homemade. To be honest, just a cookie, but it had peanut butter and Rice Krispies™ in it. That it, also, had butterscotch chips, chocolate chips and powdered sugar, was beside the point, don’t you think? Me, too.) I packed gloves, hat, pink hoodie, umbrella, water, tissue, antibacterial wipes, wallet with money, credit cards and ID, camera, notebook and determination. A good pair of walking feet, too and a goal.

Picked up a daughter-in-law and granddaughter and headed for the Making Strides Against Breast Cancer walk. If you know me, you know the challenge is the driving. Once driving to Salt Lake was second nature to me, but as my mother has aged I’ve found the distance I drive has narrowed, a little more each year and when you don’t do something, you don’t stay comfortable doing it. And I’ve never liked driving in the dark. My sense of direction is so bad when there are no landmarks. I am directionally challenged and always have been, but off we headed.

The drive was much easier than I worried about and thankfully, the rain had stopped. It warmed up, too. The crowded wasn’t quite as big, most likely due to the weather, but the experience was just as inspirational. I don’t know all the personal stories, but, with my writer’s mind, I imagine them. And it is not just the survivors, though their stories are the ones you see most clearly. The story, any one of the stories, is about the supporters, too.

And you see it there: The grandmother with the survivor sash across her chest being helped along the 5-mile walk by her granddaughter, the woman…no, the girl, really, with a survivor ribbon walking with a man wearing a shirt that said: I’m walking for my girlfriend. ( I say, hold on to that man) The ten women walking with shirts that said: for Amy. The tall, blonde in the middle with: for me on her shirt, surrounded by them, looking strong and healthy and protected.

It’s October. Save the ta-tas, Save second base, Save the breastesus. Get your mammograms, do self-exams (ignore the recommendations and take the battle into your own hands, so to speak) eat right, get out there and walk. Fight the battle. Fight like a girl.

A Blue Pencil Year

I think I said it before. My goal for the year was editing and not just my writing. Truly, I have lived up to that goal. I have polished, modified, reworked and condensed little by little my garden, my office, the organization of my desk, including my computer. Right now, I’m in the middle of cleaning out my utility cabinet in my office. My office looks like a tornado hit.

I still have a long, long way to go, but I see how much the work has improved my writing and my life. I’ve worked hard on the edits to Ella and the Tie-down Man, even to the extent of sending it out and then, giving it another look. Something was bothering me, nagging at my sense of accomplishment.

That second look has proven such a good call; I’d almost like to say it was providence. It’s delayed me getting the novel back out there, but not by much. As I put in place the finishing, polishing changes I feel a ton better. Not to say I’m not still anxious and wary of the whole process, but whether it’s published or not, I can confidently say it was the best I could make it.

And that’s really the key, for me. I’m not stupid, blind, or unaware of the difficulties of being published in this day and climate. My chances suck. But, see, I can take suck, I can ‘fail’, if I’m certain I did all I could. Earlier this year, I just didn’t feel that. Something just kept nagging at me. Nothing concrete, nothing I could put my finger on, but, listen: the publishing world (really, a whole lot of ‘worlds’) are going through a kind of revolution. There is change afoot. The internet has changed everything, some in a big way, some small. And how I fit in is anyone’s guess.

The act of reading has changed. We’ve been hearing the doom drumbeat about the paperback books and just hearing it saddens me. I was reading paperbacks during the paperbacks hey days. I have a stored box of old paperbacks if I open and take a whiff of the dried-out, yellowing pages, it take me back to shopping trips with my dad when I was a teenager, shopping trips with my mom, my babies in tow, stay-up-all-night books (Thanks, Lavyrle Spencer)I just couldn’t put down, books that helped me stay awake while I put up the last batch of green beans, books that kept me company as my husband traveled on his job. I couldn’t have bought the books I did, if they hadn’t been in paperback.

And the act of writing has changed since I first started writing in earnest. I’m one of those writers who always knew I was born a writer. I have always written poems, stories. Always fed on words. But translating that or even keeping up with sending your work out and publishing—that’s another story. A challenge. First, after, raising my kids, (although I wrote every day as my kids came along and grew) I had to catch up with the new world and I had to do it by DIY. That was the only option at the time. The romance genre was in constant flux. It still is.

Truth of it is. I really just want to write. The idea of all the schmoozing, promoting, online presence overwhelms me. In fact, it scared the bejesus out of me for more reasons than I’m shy. It also scares, worries and overwhelms me when I think of actually selling one of my novels and dealing with my own life's little reality. Oh, believe me it is a reality not so different than anyone elses. I’m a mother with adult children struggling with the new economic world. I’m a grandmother, a sister, a friend and I’m the primary caregiver to a ninety-four year parent. Each year I’m spending more time caring for her needs and less time on my writing. No pity party, just the reality of what is right now. But, and this is a big but, the writing keeps me sane, less stressed, less bogged down in the caregiving. It’s the thing I do for me.

Like I've said so many times, I feel like the parts of my life are not compatible. Yet, I can’t stop any of it, nor do I want to. That reality has always caused me worry and no little bit of stress. I tell myself it will all work out. That it is really just me calling the shots. I write and I don’t have to do anything more than that, even if I’m eventually published.

So, editing is a bit of getting rid of the things that no longer work, isn’t it? Books you’ve read and won’t again, blank floppy disks, old cable cords and worries. Editing it all, make it what you want it to be, including your life.

Then, do it all again the next day.

Composting Poetry

In the garden, compost is black gold. Since I started gardening, way back when…back when my kids were small and I was buried in diapers (cloth, this was the olden times), breast-feeding, (really olden times), canning, sewing, cleaning, cooking, I was gardening, too. It was necessary. Times were tough, the economy was tanking, lots of men out of jobs, (this was before most women worked…the real olden times), no one could afford to actually invest in stock. That was for the wealthy.

My husband took his lunch to work, including coffee. I cooked everything from scratch because there just weren’t packaged meals (aside from TV dinners). I even ground my own wheat and baked bread. Oh, but that was such a tactile experience that every now and then I still bake my own bread, only now I use a bread machine, thought I do like to get my hands in there. I love kneading bread. Somehow, trouble seems to get smaller and smaller until I can handle it. A lot like air bubbles in dough.

I extended the paycheck with coupons and by doing-it-myself. One of the best things I found to stretch my food allowance was growing a garden and putting by what I could. I grew green beans, carrots, peas, zucchini, sugar snap peas, corn, peaches, raspberries, tomatoes and peppers. I was given pears and apples. The challenge was time. Tending to the garden, peeling, slicing, pickling, water baths and pressure cookers took tons of time. The picking, the watering and even more, there was the kids, the house, the pets. I had to come up with shortcuts.

As always, I turned to books and when I fell into <em>Ruth Stout’s “How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back” I knew I fell into the answer. You can see how the name caught my attention. I had the aching back and no time. Ruth Stout (Rex Stout’s sister) mulched between and around her vegetables and flowers with straw, newspaper, grass clippings, coffee grounds, vegetable peels—whatever organic matter worked. This cut down on watering (a big money saver there because we had to use culinary water), weeding and fertilizing.

It turned out all this organic matter feed and improved the soil. I was amazed the next year the difference in the dirt I’d used mulch on and the dirt I didn’t. Now, Stout’s idea was to layer the organic matter where you need it first, without composting it in a pile or bin. This worked great, but it was sometimes hard to have enough mulch for all my gardens and often the vegetable garden didn’t always get the best layer of mulch.

Of course, through the years things changed: family grew up and away, I stopped canning, sewing and was able to bury myself in writing more and more. I started a compost pit for my flower garden. It just seemed to me to make so much sense. The leftovers, you know the carrot peels, the leafy tops, the bean snipping’s, the coffee grounds, the onionskins, the banana peels gathered together to make rich garden dirt. Every time we take something from the earth we put some part of it back—a tithe, of sorts.

That compost pile seemed like a miracle and a duty—put garbage in and receive this dark, rich, loam soil thick with worms that feeds my gardens with something akin to magic. Today I use both methods in combination, but more I’ve learned to use the same kind of thing with my poetry.

I gather, use, discard, reuse words, ideas and experience, but some don’t fit the poem I’m working on, so I put in a separate file titled: compose file. It might be a whole idea or just a word, phrase or sentence. It might be a whole stanza or just the end that didn’t work. It sits in that file until I begin work on another poem. Then I go to the file, sift and sort and read, let my mind get fertile, rich and loamy. It’s organic and real with hands on, just like the miracle of compost.

Sometimes It's Not the Writing, But the Living

Arrr! It’s National Talk Like a Pirate Day, actually I think it might be International Talk Like a Pirate Day. In any case, we should be practicing our Pirate speak, if for no other reason than it’s supposed to be fun, but why not celebrate?

I’ve been on a vacation, of sorts. It was not restful, it was not perfect. I wouldn’t even say I completely enjoyed it. It was one of those vacations we’ve all had, where everything just goes south. Like seven days of rain on a vacation to the beach, but it’s the good you find. I guess that’s true of life too, isn’t it?

Vehicle trouble, forgotten needed items, a sick grandchild, bee stings and frustrating fishing. That was the bad, but the good outweighed all that. Marvelous sunsets, big, yellow moons in inky skies. You forget how distant and faded the stars have become until you get into the wilderness and see the unlit night. Then you just feel smaller and bigger than yourself.

There was helping two stranded boys on the archery hunt, one of which looked exactly like a fifteen-year-old Ricky Schroder. His companion looked about seventeen. Well, I couldn’t help thinking about my own sons, hoping they would find someone that would help them jump their battery, too, if they were ever in the need. It was so refreshing to see two super polite boys, so worried about worrying their dads. Sometimes we forget how great the younger generation is, but I have had several incidents that just make me have all kinds of faith in putting things in their hands.

There was the wind in the aspen. How I love that sound and the shiver of the leaves. And of course, the food: the best grilled pork chops I’ve had for ages, Catalina chicken, messy and sticky, just as it should be, fried filleted fish for breakfast, plus bacon and egg breakfast cooked by my son, watching my most miracle granddaughter introduced to camping, cold and all, hot chocolate, grilled steak and of course, s’mores.

Discoveries too, that fall begins at the bottom. The grasses have turned golden, the banded-winged grasshoppers make their short bursts of flight with a loud clicking ahead, the wild strawberries are beginning to turn scarlet and the willows, amber. Touches of golden quakies have just begun and when it rains the smell of dry grass and wet pine gives me all the aroma therapy I could ask for. And everyone looks beautiful by campfire.

Shiver me timbers, it sounds a bit like I'm a land lubber now, don't it, me hearties?

Rejection -The Least of My Worries

This week is the end of a beautiful, productive poetry workshop: World into Word-Poetry Editing with Melanie Faith. As I scan my old rough drafts, I’m finding gems and new ways of looking at old ideas. My enjoyment of poetry writing has sparked again, which helps spark all my writing—couldn’t happen at a better time. I feel a little more confident in not only my editing but also my writing decisions.

Not really. My tenacity, my determination and even the reason to keep struggling to publish is flagging, big time. Oh, there is not one thought to stop writing. I don’t think I could even if I wanted to, but I’m finding just the thought of dealing with the reality of my life as it is right now enough. Do you remember the scene in Regarding Henry when Henry (Harrison Ford) at the end of the show tells the secretary, “I’m saying when.”

I wonder, more and more often, if I need to say, “when.” It isn’t the writing and hasn’t been for a long time. I love the work, the writing. I have no trouble coming up with something the write about. In fact, I will never have enough time to get all the things already in mind to write actually written.

No, it’s my life. I’m blessed with a supportive family, a great life. At some point shouldn’t that be enough. Do I really need to keep reaching for impossible? Everything I truly care about is right here where I live. I’m lucky and blessed to be able to say that and what’s more, I know it.

Do I want to complicate what has become a very complicated time with another major wrinkle that publishing would be? I’m not alone in my feelings or realizing the impact being a caregiver has on one’s work. I just finished reading an article about the impact caregiving has on the workplace. How many workers are impacted and how it affects promotions, wages, and the wealth and health of the caregivers. Many workers are afraid to mention they are caregivers, afraid how their bosses will see it as affecting their work.

And the thing is I don’t think it would be fair of me to blame it all on being a caregiver. It’s often a struggle to keep the rest of my life on some kind of an even keel, too. And always has been. I have, technically been a widow all my husband’s career as he worked out of town, more than half the time, which gave me a unique view. I know what it’s like to be a single mom and a mom who has to learn to compromise with a husband who has different views on things. Neither is easy. Both have their difficulty and their blessings.

And now, since he’s been retired, it has been not only an adjustment to having him around all the time, but another complication. He’s spent his whole life working and has some things he’s been planning to do.

The fact is many people of my age, more every day, are struggling with the job of caregiver. It’s a strange place to be, caring for those who cared for you; making decisions for them while letting them keep as much independence as they can. It’s a lot like being a parent of a teenager—a grown-up, but not really. There isn’t an instruction manual and if there was, I’m afraid it wouldn’t have anything in it about my particular model.

I’m one of the lucky ones. My husband has taken on a lot of the chores involved and I know he does so because he loves my mom and because he loves me. While that makes things easier for me…it, also, makes it harder.

I’ve wondered if these feelings are just fear. You know there’s as much to fear about success as failure. And truthfully, I do fear. It’s not what you’d think. I can take rejection. I have had so many now, it is only a small blip and success isn’t one of those jump up and down things around here either. The best way to describe how I feel when something I’ve written is praised, accepted or wins a contest is stunned drunk. You know, a little slog, soggy, bewildered and gratefully the win, the good didn’t stumble up the not-so-well-oiled machine of my day to day.

Do I want to rock the boat? I’m scared to death, if I do, I might just drown. I’m taking on water as it is. So I sit here at my desk wondering if I ought to just work on my novels and poems and put them away. I lie awake at night worried that I’ll get the call that someone wants to see the whole manuscript of Ella and the Tie-down Man and then what? It’s ready, true, but then what? It seems the least of my worries is rejection.