Summer is going by so quickly. I want to settle in and savor every moment of August, but fall keeps nipping at my heels. There is one month, before I am the mother of a high schooler. I am always losing time. Always wishing I could hoard it, storing it up, to spend how and when I choose. To decide myself the times that seem to extend on forever, and those that go by in a flash.
I spent so much time planting this year: new plantings, transplanting, dividing up my plants and putting them in areas previously the domain of weeds. The digging of holes by the hundreds. Well at least until mid July when tired of it all, I took a pack of zinnia seeds and just wind tossed them over a section of dirt. Perhaps I will see one or two of them. I have very little good to say about matting and mulch, weeds grow in it, and it is a pain to cut through as your plants expand and need more space, and when I need to make new spaces for other plants.
It is raining now. It was so dry here our grass was brown and felt like straw. I have never been so happy to see rain as I have been since July 10th. It was raining that day as we were leaving for vacation, my mother thought I might be upset about the lousy weather. I was thrilled. It takes me two hours to water the plants around back, and two for out front. So if God waters the plants twice a week, that saves me 8 hours of standing out in the yard with a hose.
I have been surprised that my eye is changing (what I consider to be visually pleasing). Which is the reason for all the rearranging of flower beds. Since I have spent little time working directly on my writing, I am hoping this is a sign that things are changing and shifting somewhere deep down within. That art, to whatever degree it resides in me, is growing, being refined. I think my mind, my plantings and my writing, have been more chaotic, a toss up or in, of whatever interests me, too much, and with disorganization, favored over the possibility of leaving anything out. But this year, the plantings looked messy to me. They lacked impact. Too many different things. I wanted rows of a kind. I wanted the impact of groupings of one color. I noticed where my scale was off; where things needed to be bigger or smaller. I looked upon the same beds I saw last year and took them in differently.
I don't even feel like my flower garden happened this year, with so many things being moved, and plunged into transplant shock. I've been gardening this year for next. I like that about it though, flower gardening is like dreaming, and it involves faith. I bought four purple salvias for a dollar each two days ago. Inexpensive because they look a minute or two shy of dead. But I look at them with hope and possibility, I will plant them, and tend to them. I expect nothing of them this year, except that that which lies below the soil stay alive now, and sleep nicely dormant over winter, and then happily burst forth like new in Spring. Gardeners dreaming, gardeners faith.
I do hope when I read my writing, my stories, that there too, I will now see where things look messy. How I need to change things to create impact, rather than throwing everything that occurs to me in. There is so much writing work to be done that it scares me. I only take the smallest steps forward. Which is sort of stupid as at this rate it will take forever, and just drag the most uncomfortable parts out. But at least I am taking some steps. And because of the reading about writing I have been doing, I am noticing more when I pleasure read. I notice choices being made, when this or that is done for impact. And now I realize I was never a careful reader. I don't write well with commas, semi-colons, periods, etc., because I don't take the time to truly read them as written.
So, it has not been the big writing summer it was supposed to be, and yes I am disappointed in myself....but..
