July 5, 2025

My latest book, a grief memoir about Skip’s death and making my new life as a widow, is now officially one year old. I just had my last local in-person author reading last month, so I’m officially no longer working on writing, editing, or promoting a new book. Unfortunately, the university Richard and I thought might produce our play with their students has decided to “go another direction.” So we are left looking for other production alternatives, and Richard is taking the lead in that work.

So, what am I doing now, since I have no new book project on the horizon? I’m writing essays. Essays about my life, my experiences, my thoughts about the future, about just about anything. Because magazine and journal publishing has changed, along with the book publishing industry, I’m not even trying to get those essays published anywhere. Instead, I’ve entered the phase of writing in my life simply because I’m interested in sharing my thoughts, and I don’t feel a need to do that widely, so my main audience has been my women writers group. And now I’m thinking of sharing them on this website as well.

I should explain that writing has never been a way to make money for me. Of course, I used writing regularly in my professional life as a college professor, even taught a few undergraduate classes in various kinds of writing, especially playwriting and narrative essay writing, but I have never made much money with my own writings. The journal articles published while teaching, and usually accompanied with national or regional conference presentations to my fellow theatre educators, were mostly to prove my credibility in the field, especially to my departmental colleagues and to bring me a positive tenure review and promotion. The plays I have written through the years have had productions (workshops, staged readings, and semi-pro or student productions), but they have never had fully professional productions, been published, or brought in any significant income. And while I do make royalties on my non-fiction book sales, it’s not a living wage, simply an occasional supplement in my fixed income retirement years. Writing isn’t about money for me; it’s a form of expression that makes the most sense to my head and my heart.

Another form of expression that has made sense to me through my life is gardening and my relationship with nature and growing things. From time to time in this newsletter, I’ve shared with you photos or anecdotes about my gardening adventures. In fact, because gardening is one of my passions, and because I’m thinking of adding essays to this website, I’m going to share an excerpt from a longer article I’ve written about the creation of my meadow a few years ago as the first “sample” for you to check out. I’m hoping to have more essays to share by the fall newsletter. Actually, I have quite a few of them well on their way to completion: essays about aging, dementia, youthful adventures, friendships and other relationships, and lots more. It will take some time to decide which ones I’m ready to share with the world and then to get them ready for their close-ups.

Here’s a sample from the opening of “Making My Meadow”

“If you ever thought having a meadow full of native plants in place of a grass lawn would cut down on yard chores, think again. Though that idea was part of my early thinking about replacing my side yard with a meadow, it has not been my lived experience, at least not yet. When I first started reading articles in my gardening newsletters (yep, I’m a dork who reads a lot about gardening) about replacing lawns with meadows or native plantings for the sake of the declining pollinator populations, I was immediately hooked on the idea. I loved being able to make a difference to our environment, even if only a small one, and I loved meadows, which seemed to me to be the epitome of self-managed Mother Nature. Some of my most treasured memories of trips with my mom involved wildflower meadows, mostly on the hillsides of the Columbia River Gorge near Dufur or The Dalles, Oregon, and once in an alpine meadow in the Olympic National Park in Washington State. Mom knew almost all the flowers by name because she’d been interested in them since her childhood on a farm in rural Oregon, and she’d passed that passion on to me, though I was much less conversant with the flower names than she was. So, the idea of making a meadow started percolating around in my head, but I wasn’t sure how best to go about it.” (Image below is from three years ago, the first spring my meadow came into flower with lots of annuals that didn’t necessarily come back in the ensuing years.)

“The first thing I did was to visit a local native plant nursery (Nasami Farm in Whately, MA) where I was impressed with their pollinator garden kits, so I decided to start small and bought two kits (a total of 100 plugs with a mix of native flowers and grasses) to plant between the few (non-native) shrubs and flowering trees I’d planted during my first couple of springs in this house as a privacy screen between my deck and the street. I bordered that area with granite bricks as edging and was hoping the pollinator-friendly plants would become an effective ground cover. In addition to the love of wildflowers, my mom had also taught me to experiment in the garden, and she modeled for me that any and all plants can be moved around, sometimes over and over again until you find just the right place for them. So I was confident that this experiment would be something I could play around with in the future, and I planted the plugs in clusters through the area in hopes of creating waves of color beneath the branches. It worked! The remaining side “lawn”–and I’m using that term very loosely–was now much smaller (approximately 20’ x 44’ of green remained, with a mulch pad around the base of a bridal veil spirea on one edge and a narrow mulch path on the house side), and it was still a nightmare to mow. I used to tell friends it was a “broken ankle waiting to happen” because my little battery powered mower was especially hard to push around on the uneven, weed-filled ground. So, mowing that section, with a sidewalk on the short end and a gravel street edge on the long side, felt more like an obstacle course than anything. I knew something had to change; I just didn’t know what that change might be yet. And this side area got the best sun in the entire yard, so it seemed a shame to waste it on grass, especially not-so-nice grass.” (Image below is from 2020, the first spring with my pollinator garden inside the circle of stones and with the side yard in the background, still just grass)

“The more I read, the more I thought a meadow in my side yard would be a wonderful thing to create, both for the pollinators and for myself. So, the next thing I did was to stop mowing that area for a season, to see if there was anything growing there worth keeping. There wasn’t. Not really. I’d been letting the dandelions thrive because I knew they were an important source of food for the bees and other pollinators, but there wasn’t anything else there worth saving and there were still plenty of dandelions and volunteer violets in other parts of the grassy expanse that currently surrounded the house on three sides. So I started reading about how to make a meadow from scratch.” (Images below start with the previous ugly lawn, which had to be torn out with a rented sod cutter, then we added new soil and seeded the flowers and grasses, then mulched it all in for the first winter)

The essay goes on to detail the making of the meadow in the first full year of its existence and the spring results, including lessons about meadow maintenance that followed. Who knew you had to weed a meadow?! But one of my biggest unexpected challenges was getting rid of unwanted volunteer invasives. Check back in with my fall newsletter to see if I’ve managed to get the full essay on the website, along with a couple of others, by the end of September. In the meantime, enjoy the photo below of my meadow from the height of the summer last year; something new and interesting seems to always be happening there as each season progresses.

Not much else to share at the moment because my book-publishing journey has come to a slowdown, perhaps even a close, for the foreseeable future. Further, the political reality in our country has consumed a lot of the oxygen and energy all around me, and most of what I’ve been focusing on this spring and early summer is in the garden, not on the page. I do intend to keep writing, but who knows for sure to what end?

Enjoy the rest of your summer months. I’ll be back in touch again in the early fall.