Mock orange v. forsythia

The mock orange is picking up where the peonies left off. Such a nice plant, covered with four-petalled white flowers and smelling sweet on sunny days. (Or at least in the few hours of sun between thunderstorms.) The poor thing was so smothered by that ugly pile of forsythia, when I first noticed it, there […]

Peo-not

It’s not exactly comforting to make it home after getting caught in a frog-drowner, only to hear the weather guy on the radio saying this was nothing like the tornado-spawning storms of last week. Just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill severe thunderstorm.

The muse is a useful fiction

I don’t really believe in the Muse, but I do think that allowing yourself to believe in visitations from an external “muse” or “genius” is a useful fiction. It’s like when practicing Taiji, if you allow yourself to believe that qi energy is flowing through your body, it makes it easier to relax into the […]

The something that happens when you write every day

I’ve been thinking about a quote from Flannery O’Connor that ran in Writers Almanac a while ago. I write only about two hours every day because that’s all the energy I have, but I don’t let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place. This doesn’t mean I produce […]

Caught by a wave

All day yesterday and today, I’ve been working obsessively on a story that could be a sequel to the big fast mess of a novel I wrote a few years. Or it could be another big fat mess. It feels like I’m riding a wave and I don’t want to come down. The cool part […]

Fledgling chickadees

This afternoon I heard a faint peeping high in the yew bushes. I looked up and just made out two little grey balls of fluff sitting on the boughs. Fledglings. Every few minutes a grown-up chickadee would zoom in and the fledglings would call out and flutter their wings, begging for dinner. In a few […]

Can there be too many peaches?

My big project for today was to go out in the yard and play. First I admired how much bigger the pears and apples are already. Then I took one last look at the amazing number of little peaches on the peach tree. I learned last year from the plum tree, that if I don’t […]

Not overwhelmed by the ACBF after all

So I went to a beer festival today. A really big beer festival. The American Craft Beer Festival boasts of over 100 brewers and over 500 beers. I was afraid it might be too much, so beforehand I had dimsum with a friend to build up my strength. After that, a short ride on the […]

A strangeness of peonies

For all the talk of crazy weather, what’s been going on isn’t as odd as you might think. Snowy winter with drifts that last into May? It happens. Wet, cold spring? Totally normal. Massive thunderstorms, both scary and awesome? Seen a few. Killer tornadoes in Massachusetts? Rare, but this is exactly when they strike. But […]

Damselfly

When damselflies drop by, I always wonder where the pond is that they grew up in. Is it in someone’s yard? Do they spawn in the Charles river, and fly as adults far and wide? All I know for sure is they are beautiful little hunters, and I hope they catch lots of bugs to […]