It’s not quite a year since my mother passed. She was such a gift. If I started to talk about her, we’d be here all day. But here are two things.
That photo above? I snapped it in January 2024 when I visited her. She lived in southern Alberta and that particular week, the temperature had dropped into serious minus zones. That day it hit minus 30 F.
She was 97. And wanted to check it out. I’d driven up from my home in Oregon and had my emergency gear in the van, including a down sleeping bag. I bundled her up and took her out. I lasted almost two minutes. She was laughing when I took her back inside.
Second thing: The week before she died, she organized a luncheon with her two best friends.
Quarter-inch stitching on a queen-sized quilt. Photo by Susan Palmer
Oregon author Ken Kesey knew well what practicing noveists learn: Writing a novel, regardless of its quality, is hard.
Truth.
I’ve written four. The first one found a small regional publisher and came out to positive reviews and modest success. The second one, with the help of a New York agent, circulated the halls of the big five publishers for a year, got no traction and became part of my learning-to-write novels curve. The third one will be published this year. The fourth one is awaiting a polish.
I’m speaking from experience, two kinds, not one. Developing long-project completion chops in the real world also builds long-game muscles in creative work. These aren’t separate silos.
My examples: re-upholstering a barrel chair I love. Talk about terra incognita. That project involved a new power tool. But I managed to keep from stapling my hand to the chair.
And then there was the quilt. That began with excited-naive me buying a gorgeous hunk of fabric and falling in love with a swirling stitch pattern. Hand stitching the thing took a year. The picture above shows it on the dining room table at the basting stage, the bright red thread binding the cotton batting and the backing fabric together before the actual stitching could begin. It required more than 71,000 individual stitches, roughly a quarter-inch-long (I counted a square foot of it and estimated. Yes. I did. A person needs the data.).
I wish writing a novel didn’t take me as long as it does, but there you are.
Why isn’t it enough to enjoy the beauty in other people’s gardens? You walk by and drink it in. All the pleasure. None of the work.
Other people’s gardens full of black-eyed susans got me started with this color-saturated perennial and its dense drifts of bright blossoms. Desire drove me like a toddler who wants the other kid’s toy. I tucked three or four starts from the garden store toward the back of the dahlia bed for a little extra color. (And I do feel the dahlia lovers shaking their heads going “You stuck that in with your perfect chic dahlias?”)
My bad.
Rudbeckia did not understand the assignment. At all. Two years later, I am weeding the exponential growth. Black-eyed susans send out runners in every direction. If you don’t stop them, they form these matts of new starts in the spring. The slugs love to hide from the sun under them. When you’ve cleared them, the struggling dahlias trying to fight their way up have been all chewed on by slugs, who don’t bother eating the Rudbeckia.
Photo by Susan Palmer
I’m about half done. I would offer these starts to some other gardener. Trouble is I like all the gardeners I know.
Wanting vs. having. There’s some wisdom buried in there. Maybe it’ll come to me while I’m weeding.
Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now 