The classic, and in some ways definitive, advice on writing is this line by Mary Heaton Vorse, as chronicled by Sinclair Lewis: “The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.” In this era of standing and treadmill desks we might need to amend…
I thought about writing about these fall days: the glossy blue skies, the serene air, the landscape golden and splashed with umber and gilt. The temperature hovers in that curious cool-mild zone, so you go out wearing a jacket but you’re soon too warm and have to strip to shirtsleeves. You need keep the jacket…
I regularly lose control of the clock. Hours and even days seep away through pinholes and hairline cracks somewhere in my spacetime continuum. Lately though, I appear to have lost control not only of the clock but also of the calendar. Whole months are getting away from me. On the Fourth of July weekend, I…
Annual cycles come in every variety, and my yearly gardening procrastination routine is well underway. Every year, in the doldrums of “spring” promise during March and April, I vow that THIS YEAR I’ll get the garden put together in a timely fashion. This pledge seems eminently reasonable in those months when the weather is too…
I’ve been looking forward to January since November. Back then, I’d realized that the writing project I was working on had gone wildly off course. Although I knew it had made a wrong turn, I didn’t have the time or energy to chase after it. January, I figured: I’ll get back to it then. It…
For the first time in five or six years, I haven’t lost the garlic. I plant it in the fall, breaking a few heads up into individual cloves and digging them in like little bulbs. The garlic bed shifts from year to year, as do the locations of most of the garden crops. My riff…