This week in my garden and neighborhood–warm weather and wonderful colors everywhere!
Context for Poem “These Flowers” (April 25, 2026):
Today’s poem arose out of two ongoing creations, the garden Tim and I work on each year, and the draft of the first novel we are polishing up now, number one in a seasonal quartet.
Flowers are in their element now. Over the past few days I have been astonished (yet again) by the stampede of blooms that rush up before I am expecting them. One day, just leaves. The next morning, full blooms!
And there are always surprises. Where are the 100+ daffodils Tim planted in drifts? Will the special Poet’s Daffodil come back? (Shouldn’t it appear during National Poetry Month?) And here, at last, a few bluebells are blooming, after several failed plantings in different locations. (Thank you, Susan, for the hearty transplants!)
The photographs of flowers here are ones I have taken over the past three days, mostly in our garden, but also of a few of planters in the neighborhood.
This morning, I am realizing that writing a novel is rather like coaxing a garden. It is always more effort than one expects, and takes longer. And it is more interesting than one can know until immersed in the project.
One needs to have a plan, but things don’t go to plan. Or, perhaps, it is more accurate to say that plans are provisional scaffolding? Our novel, set in 1979 in northern California, has three totems–other than human icons–winding through its pages. One is the mountain that dominates the landscape where the story is set. A second is an affable, sometimes wayward Newfoundland dog named Hugo. A third is a small automobile, an elderly yellow Volkswagen Beetle covered with flower images and nicknamed “The Sunshine Bomber.”
A few weeks after we began this joint project, in the late spring of 2020,Tim and I traveled to a CVS to get our first Covid vaccines. On the way out of the pharmacy, I spotted this tiny metal toy car, clearly the Sunshine Bomber manifest! And so this small goofy item has cheered us on for years now. Today, as we are crossing the finishing line on the first draft, it gets to have its first taste of the garden and the open road. Who knows what lies ahead?
Until tomorrow,
LESLIE
