The Journey Goes On.

On October 19, 2010, I sat in Nikki Kallio's class on blogging. The first thing I did was to post this photo with the caption, "The Journey Begins".


Years ago, I had a weekly newspaper column.  Back then, people asked me, "How do you come up with a subject every week?" Sometimes it seemed next to impossible, but I kept at it.

Now I have this blog. I've posted every day with three exceptions since I started. Some nights it takes me a while to start typing, but I usually have something on my mind:  politics, the environment, my family, my craft.  This blog has become the journal of my life. As I progressed, I wrote longer and more thoughtful pieces.

As of tomorrow, I will have had 15,000 "hits" from people all around the world.  I have readers in every continent except Antarctica. (And maybe those in Antarctica get on line through some other country, I don't know.)

With Wade Peterson, I started writing short stories at Black Coffee Fiction.  There, too, I realized that the more I wrote, the better my writing.  Before we began, I might finish two or three short stories a year.  Now I can churn one out every other week.  Are they any good?  I don't know, but again, people are reading them.

What I have found out is that the more I write, the easier it becomes.  I now know how Stephen King and others who write so many novels do it.  Just one word after another until the job gets done.

One Big Idea

Director Mike Nichols once said that if he has a good idea, he quits for the day because he won't get another. I've found that that is true for me, too.

All this week, I knew it was my turn to write a short story for Black Coffee Fiction http://blackcoffeefiction.blogspot.com but the week was so delightfully warm I wanted to be outside.  We gardened, we birded, we canoed.  I procrastinated, only making a few notes about my story and making an outline. I did have a second short story I could use in a pinch, but I want to save that for this summer when writing anything will be more difficult.

This morning, I woke up at 4:30 a.m. and wended my way down the stairs.  I fed the cat.  I ate breakfast.  I read the news.  Then I set to work.  It helped that it was raining so there was nothing going on outside to distract me, not even birds at the feeder.  

On Monday, I mentioned to Wade that though we have been writing our short stories since September, neither of us had written a love story. I asked him, "When did you know you loved your wife?"  That led me to my love story.

I thought about Gary and remembered so many events of our own romance.  I put bits and pieces of those memories together to write "Phenology: A Love Story".  I wrote the story in two hours, finishing about 8:30 a.m.  I put it aside, re-wrote it once and sent it off to the critique group for comments.

Gary and I went to the fitness center, then I took a nap to let the story simmer in my mind.  When I woke up I had Wade's comments and corrections and did the final re-write of the piece which I posted just before 4:00 p.m.  As you read the story, you can hear echoes of how Gary and I became a couple and how I learned to become an environmentalist as he educated me.

Once my story was posted, I did nothing but read and watch television.  I had my big idea and nothing else has been going on, brain-wise.

I plan on writing several more love stories, so tomorrow, I start again. 

March continues to amaze us.  Today the first tulip bloomed.  It's not much of a tulip, just a short scraggly thing,but a promise of more to come.

The daffodils are here, too.  Every year I have around a thousand daffodils in the back yard and that show is about to begin.  People drive by my house just to see them all.

The gardens now are filled with the scent of hyacinths.  It is too dry for them to have filled out completely, but they still do their major job, which is to fill the neighborhood with their sweetness.

Hyacinths can be overpowering, so I never put them in a bouquet. I did that once for a friend and she said she had to get up in the middle of the night and throw the hyacinths out the door.  But outside they are lovely, bringing spring to the Mathom Gardens.

We could use rain.  The Pasque flowers should be a deep purple, but this year they look gray.

The rains are forecast for tomorrow.  The Pasque flowers will get their color and more flowers will bloom.

And all of this in March. 

An Even Earlier Spring

This morning, an e-mail from the Department of Natural Resources greeted me as I had my morning cup of tea.

Originally, Gary and I planned on guarding on April 15, the first available date, we thought.  Then we were moved up to April 8 because of the warm weather.  But the water temperature on the Wolf River kept climbing and now, the DNR wants us to guard the night of March 25, which is three weeks earlier than we had planned.  Since we look at this night as our first camping of the season, it is wonderful to start so soon.  We returned from our last campground on October 15 so that's only a little over five months since we last sat before water to watch the sun set.

The warm weather has hurt some of the garden.  The snow drops are over and the crocuses and dwarf irises are wilting.  The daffodils will be in their full glory by tomorrow, again almost a month early.  Scilla and putchkina have made their appearance, two weeks early.   Neither is doing well in 80 degree F. heat.

I have been busy clearing the gardens.  I needed the wheelbarrow to move lawn trash.  Gary had placed it over a stack of firewood to keep it protected from the winter snow.  It was protecting something else.  When I lifted the wheelbarrow, there was a gray blur of something diving into the logs.  Then it popped out again.  It was a gray field mouse, one of the fattest I've seen.  I suspect he's been helping himself to the seeds that fall from the bird feeders. He just sat there, inches away, looking up at me.  I promised him I would return the wheelbarrow when I was finished.  He seemed to think that was fine and slipped back between the logs to await future developments.  

Word Delivery Systems

After clearing another bed, I drove over to the farm where Gary stores the camper.  He is cleaning it out for our summer's adventures.  

He had the awning pulled out and underneath were comfortable chairs.  I sat down with my Nook and read more of Langston Hughes The Ways of White Folks, a collection of short stories from the 1930's.  These stories illustrate how the races view each other.  They are amusing and sometimes tragic. It seems that race relations have not changed all that much. When I finish the short stories, I'll start a Nevada Barr mystery, also in my electronic book.  

However, that is not the only word delivery system I use.  There are still the paper books, especially good when there are photos involved.  The People of the Sturgeon includes at least one photo per page.  I even know some of the people involved in the care of those giant fish.  I'll be reading this book right up to the time we go on guard duty on April 8. 

Then there are audio books.  I particularly like the Playaway books I get at the Muehl Public Library.  These are compact little cases that hang by a cord around my neck.  When I plug them into a headset, I can listen as I work out at the fitness center.  Listening to a book is preferable to the loud music that blares at us.  

Currently, I'm listening to Umberto Eco's The Prague Cemetery.   This is a grisly tale of conspiracy and espionage in nineteenth century Europe.  There are forgeries, massacres, racism, and plots galore.  It all sounds far-fetched, but in fact it all happened, as I know from listening to a previous Playaway book about the time period.  In this book, however, one fictional character is involved in it all, an evil genius who from time to time stops his plotting to enjoy good meals.  

As long as there are writers sending words my way, I don't mind how they arrive. 

Spring Clearing

I have about forty different flower beds on my property, none of them big, but still, many flowers over the year. Some just bloom here for us, but others will be made up into bouquets for friends.

But first all those beds need to be cleared.

Two years ago, my knee was so  badly damaged that I walked with a cane and wore a knee brace.  That spring, I didn't do much clearing at all.  Last spring, we had rain, rain, more rain, interspersed with snow storms all the way to May. I still had a sore knee though it was improving.  By mid-May, we began our camping trips and of course, I did a six week summer tour.  The result was two years of weeds.  That is what I am trying to rectify this spring.

I've set myself a goal of clearing two beds a day.  If the weather holds, I could have the job done by mid-April, but of course, it is still spring though it seems like summer.  We can still expect snowstorms or rain and then their are those nature adventures that keep cropping up.  

I can only work when I can and hope that by the end of May the gardens are restored to what they once were.

The Early Spring

Warm temperatures are making this an unusual March.  Crocuses, snowdrops, periwinkle,dwarf irises, and pasque flowers have been  blooming in my backyard for several days and the daffodils should pop open in a day or two.

Last year the snowdrops first bloomed on March 20, and were followed almost immediately by 18 inches of snow.  Periwinkle, pasque flower and dwarf iris didn't arrive until mid-April.

I walked over to the sidewalk north of St. John the Baptist Catholic Church this afternoon and found hundreds of violets.  Last year I didn't have violets in my back yard until May.

Last year, the sturgeon in the Wolf River/Lake Winnebago system spawned late. Gary and I found ourselves guarding their rocks in May.

As we do every year, Gary and I sign up for the first day of the guard which this year should have been April 15.  However, this afternoon, the Department of Natural Resources sent out an emergency e-mail to the sturgeon guards asking if we could guard on April 8, Easter.  Sure, we said.  We'll soon be spending the night on the river bank watching passionate sturgeon.  "Hello, ladies," I say every year to our friends.  

Finally, some of my readers might remember that last June I was forced to remove all the flowers in my terrace strip because someone had complained to the city.  It turned into a week long party with friends coming from all over to dig up the strip and move the flowers to new homes.  They are now all over northeast Wisconsin.  Gary roto-tilled the strip twice to make sure that all the flowers were gone.  And that, we thought, was that.

Then this week, greenery came up all over the strip.  Soon there will be tulips, hyacinths, daffodils and irises, and as of today, the crocuses are in bloom.

Should I let the flowers go or have Gary kill everything or brick it all over?  Friends and flower lovers are urging me to let them bloom.

Yes, this is a very early spring. There could easily be a snowstorm yet, but for the moment, we are in heaven.