The rain we needed in April and May and early June finally got here; my corn is getting tall, and the beans are producing like crazy (as is their wont). My musing about allowing the garden to be all-volunteer this year was a bit of an imaginative stretch, but I did permit the veg patch to do its own thing a bit more than I usually do. I revised my initial garden plan to let the amaranth, nicotiana, cosmos, Thai basil, bee balm, agastache, dill, cilantro, and some of the tomato seedlings stay where they emerged. Then I planted around them. Oh, and a cantaloupe vine, too. And some garlic and tatsoi greens that sprouted on their own in odd places.

The weather’s gone from dry to wet–we are experiencing the region’s much more typical summer now, humid and hot with frequent rainstorms. As for my writing, it’s gone the other direction…I am in a dry spell. Garden gets prolific; I get, well, not prolific. The heat takes motivation and inspiration right out of my body, it seems!

But I’m accomplishing tasks of other types which may, eventually, lead to drafting poems and revising work again before too long. Tackling my “office” at home (it is actually a book-lined hallway) means that I’m finding forgotten drafts and ideas, folders of possible inspirations, old letters and cards, and lots of duplicated documents I can happily discard. The challenge is to remove what’s no longer necessary while at the same time figuring out a simple and easy-to-recall strategy for organizing what I want to keep.

I have even managed to give away a couple of cartons of books. Not so many that my existing collection actually fits on my current shelf space, but hey–it’s a start! Getting rid of books is hard. It is much easier to give away zucchinis….

~

Meanwhile, I am trying to be patient while my brain re-calibrates: summer, retirement, climate change, frail mother, house maintenance, yard work, gardens, revisions, submissions, promoting my forthcoming book (the proof copy arrived last week!!), and just trying to consolidate the rampantly-reproducing STUFF of contemporary life. There is nothing here to complain about. What is dry now will be moist & fertile in the future, and what overwhelms now will eventually abate or decrease in priority. It’s not a wet/dry binary. It’s a whole cline or spectrum, changing every atom and molecule of the way.