A Different Garden

Nora rhapsodises about gardening.  She can spend endless hours attending to the state of plants, the growth over two days, the size of the squash.  And the garden isn't fussy, by any means.  I don't intend to indicate a sort of fastidiousness or victory over nature.  Quite the contrary, the garden is understandable only at two scales, the broad swath (that tall stuff over there is corn, and I can see that a corner of the garden has purple flowers now) and the microscopic detail (two bugs on the brussels sprouts; the way a cauliflower head does or does not bunch).

I, on the other hand, have no emotional socket for the gardening hobby to plug into.  It does nothing for me.  I can admire a beautiful garden, and I can admire a working farm, and I can admire the agreeable miscellany that Nora produces so well (and can also enjoy its bounty of tomatoes and basil).  But I have no interest in producing it.  For me, it's only a chore.  I actually take more pleasure in shoveling snow and stacking wood.

However, I have been hard at work lately on my own writing, for the first time in ages.  I've had a good month pushing forward with a story idea, Nora and I played all weekend with a thought for a children's book, and then there's this blog.  It's kind of my own gardening, and equally a kind of agreeable miscellany.  I can understand it at the largest scale: there are three projects, a novel, the children's book, and the blog-nonfiction-thing-a-jig.  And I can understand it at the microscopic detail: the way that the novel's character Joel speaks is very different than the way that Melissa speaks, because they're different ages, grew up in different families and areas, work in different businesses.  The way that I write a character for an eight-year-old reader is very different than a character for a five-year-old reader, or fifteen.

I can't tell you yet what any of the three are about.  Stories are only about something when the reader reads them.  My job is merely to make things that are fit for reading, to tend to their growth and their shape.  That's been my own summer garden.