At this time of year, I love anything green. Found this symmetrical, spiky beauty growing beside the path one gray morning when I was out with the dogs. The thistle is a nuisance for farmers, maybe, but she's beautiful in her own right. Later in the year, she'll look like this, and the insects and I will love her even more.
As I step carefully around her, I think: there's a lesson here, about starting small. About roots and seeds and seedlings. I often think we often want too much, too soon, that we want to be instantly gratified. But most glories come slowly. They take a while to bloom. And you can't always tell what's going to be beautiful, sweet, and nurturing by looking at its small, bare beginnings.
The last two weeks have been all about the Story Circle conference for me. I'll tell you all about it in a wrap-up on Wednesday. Totally wonderful--but more about that later.
Sporadically working on Mourning Gloria, with too many interruptions. I'm sure that other writers manage interruptions better than I do: for me, a couple of days' absence from a writing project is a major setback. A couple of weeks is huge. I'm really reluctant to try to get back to it: the copyedited file of The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree will be coming in another week, which means another big interruption. So I asked for (and got) a couple of extra weeks on Gloria, through the middle of April. In the meantime, I have some Story Circle work to do (the next online class term will be starting in a few weeks, and there's still plenty of conference wrap-up and related planning), and the garden.
Oh, yes, the garden. We've been eating winter greens, onions, and carrots. As soon as the soil dries out (maybe mid-week) I'll be planting spinach, carrots, kale, and potatoes. The seed potatoes are sprouting (in trays on the bedroom dresser, where else?) and will be ready to go into the ground in another week. So there's plenty to keep me busy.
Thanks so much for your comments on the previous blog post. Lots of good books/authors mentioned there, and some excellent comments on the nature/evolution of fictional formulas. Somebody ought to write a book about this, don't you think?
Reading note: from my memoir, Together, Alone: A Memoir of Marriage and Place:
In order to have the kind of life I wanted, I had to leave the life I had. And on the day I walked out of the university, I felt astonishingly, astoundingly free—as free as those wild birds—and I could sing my own glorious hurrah. It was only a step, but it was the first, and it was necessary.