My Garden of Writing

We all have one -- yes, we do.  A garden. 

You can deny it all you want but everyone has a garden, even if it is nothing more than just a single plant.  Of course, for some, it could be that questionable science project in the refrigerator with the strange hairy growth -- but it is a garden.

My wife, at one time, had a lovely collection of African Violets and they were beautiful with all their blooms and then, one day, it all started to die and nothing she did mattered.  Suddenly her plants were gone.  She even attempted to save some by new leave growth, but to no avail.  The truly strange part of this story is -- the leaves she gave to friends to start new plants; they survived.  So when the plants were healthy and large, my wife attempted to take a leaf and start her violet garden again.  It failed.

Over the years I've attempted to start seeds... only to see my efforts fail a few weeks later as the plants spring forward and grow about 6 inches tall with their little seedling leaves.  That is about 5.5 inches too tall.  They fall over; they die.  Better luck next year.

This year, as I stated on an earlier post; it has been good using the miniature indoor greenhouse.  Well, it stands about 5 foot tall and is about 4 foot wide.  I have more plants than I know what to do with.

I LOVE IT.

I will probably be planting outdoors next week if all goes well.  The evening temps are a little cool but not freezing.  I have the ability to cover the plants in the garden IF it does frost.

And, like my indoor garden, my mind has been sprouting new ideas and thoughts for my writing world, too.  I spent about an hour today doing something I haven't done in quite some time -- I made writing notes.  Yes.  I typed in outlines, notes, tidbits, whatever struck my fancy on things to write.  And my mind traveled some roads I wasn't too sure I wanted to travel, still, I wrote the notes down and now I have a file of seedlings to write future stories.

Fortunately, these seedlings don't need water or light to survive and since I have them written down, to some extent, they have an existence and I should be able to keep them in a 'dormant' mode until I need something to write or I find the free time to write on them.

As I worked on the notes I was reminded of an old movie ... way back to a movie about the Grimm Brothers -- not the dark one of a few years back, but back to the 1960s.  If I remember correctly, there is a scene where the Grimm brother is fighting an illness and the stories yet to be born come forth and rally him on.

That was how I felt today -- these little tidbits, odd thoughts, whatever -- they wanted to be put to paper and stored away for future use.  They are now electronically saved.

Has anyone else ever had a situation similar to this?  How did you handle it?  Did you save your ideas or have they gone like my prior years of starting seeds -- struggled to grow only to die?  I hope not.

Until next I ramble on...