This morning, I did a little clean up on my mother’s grave.
See that little juniper tree to the right? We planted it about twenty years ago, the intention was to keep it to bonsai size as a tribute to our mother. But… a lot of us lived out of town. The ones who lived in town didn’t want to tackle the task of a yearly trim, which entails digging it up and shaving off the roots, among other things. The one who lived away but was reasonably close and was interested in keeping the bonsai shape maintained the tree for a few years, until she got pissed at all of us and dropped off the face of the earth. Before today, when I hacked off some sucker limbs and trimmed the rest of the greenery, our little “bonsai” had become so monstrously huge and thick that it obstructed the right side of the headstone. This monster bush also obstructed the left side of the next plot (thank goodness family friend). Plus, weeds. Thigh high weeds. What a mess.
(Oh, yes, I know. I’ve been in town now for almost a year. When I visited the site last fall, shovel and garden snips in hand, the mosquitoes beat me back to the car before I could get out of it.)
I wanted to remove the thing, but the ground there was like a clay cement. I’d need a backhoe. Instead I made it as pretty and as compact as I could, given the fact that the mosquitoes hadn’t gone anywhere in the last eleven months and I didn’t want to be completely covered in bug bites (only 85% covered now).
So I’m futilely swatting and whacking and clipping and chopping at weeds, thinking that cremation is definitely the way to go (drop half of me off Ocean Beach, please, the rest beneath a redwood), when a few truths come to me.
One, I’m at the point in my current work in progress where all I have to do is fill in a few holes (I’m thinking four or five chapters, totally doable), but I’m balking a bit because holes are like mosquitoes at the cemetery. It’s unpleasant and you don’t want to battle bloodsuckers.
The upside is that once you’ve completed the task, you’re left feeling satisfied and with something aesthetically pleasing.
Two, there’s never enough time. My mother was 58 when she died. That’s young. I wake up every day wondering when my time will be up. In fact, the question of time and lack thereof is being written into my novel even as I type this blog post (not at the same time, of course, I only wish I had four hands!). The clock ticking is the only thing that motivates me to plunge on and complete the writing I want to.
This month the time constraints have been brutal. My daughter visited. My husband needed surgery (he’s okay, but still healing and kinda cranky). Yet, I’ve managed to squeeze in 40 minutes here and and hour there and twenty minutes here. Yes! I even took my laptop to the waiting room at the surgery center and managed to write there!
The thing is, there is never enough time. You think when you retire your entire world will open up and vast prairies of time will be available for you to pick and choose – um, NO. I know when we owned businesses and rental properties and I was working seven days a week, I still managed to eke out a few minutes to write. Enough to complete two novels and a book of poetry I self-published, and more.
Writing is a commitment, to choose time for your craft, to force yourself to sit down and do it, because if you don’t make the conscious effort, you’ll be sitting in front of the TV watching Dr. Phil or playing annoying games on your iPhone or something else which might entertain you for the moment, but ask yourself the important question. What will you have at the end of it?
And now, I will be delegating some time for my current work-in-progress’s completion.
Happy Monday! Happy July!
