This is your brain in bloom time

Cherry blossoms, writing while gardening, and Say Something In language lessons

There is no more perfect shade of pink

Our first March in the new house. This time last year we had an offer pending and were in the thick of home inspections and mortgage paperwork. I was trying not to fall too hard in love with the house in case it fell through. The two flowering cherry trees bloomed during the interval between visits to the house; I caught a glimpse of the blossom-time and hardly dared hope those trees would be mine. 

They are blooming now, gloriously, showering petals on the sidewalk. The forsythia on the front lawn is a cloud of gold: magnificent. The daffodils are up, and grape hyacinths. I planted a red flowering currant in the side yard last fall, and it’s sporting pink blossoms. It looks like everything I planted for the beginning of our Backyard Habitat Project survived the fierce January ice storm. I did lose the two jasmines I moved over from the rental house, where they’d done moderately well in pots on the porch. Here, I put them in the ground and they were thriving, but from chatting with the neighbors I gather nobody’s jasmine survived that storm.

I am so, so, so ready for gardening weather. But gosh, how it upends our routines. I can see that my morning creative practice is going to catapult right out the window as the days get warmer. Which is fine. Garden magic carries me a long way. I wrote my bestselling book weeding a San Diego flowerbed, and I’ve mapped out miles of plot terrain while digging and watering. No matter how different our routines may be, most writers agree on this point: an enormous amount of the writing process takes place away from the computer. 

Some writers favor long walks. It’s funny, but I can’t do any real thinking on a walk: I’m too focused on watching for cars and gawking at the neighbor’s gardens. I need to be in my own yard if I want to do any kind of mental noodling. Weeding is an ideal background activity for writing.

This weekend, though, I opted for an audiobook (Wolf Hall) instead, and I also got into a really enjoyable groove with the newish iteration of the Say Something In language program: what SSi calls “Automagic.” It’s the same brilliant learning method but the separate lessons have all been rolled into one continuous program (easily paused, unless you’re wearing muddy garden gloves). I let SSi Welsh lessons play while I cleared encroaching grass out of a bed, and since I couldn’t get precious about getting things right, I made a ton of progress. I found phrases coming automatically (automagically!) without my having to reach for them—which is the point the instructor makes repeatedly in the short interstices. You learn faster when you make mistakes.