Still Putting Off the WIP, Creatively

Last week when I boasted to you all about my new landless gardening efforts I wanted to show you the actual garden. Alas! my old camera, one of those flat little guys you can put in your back pocket, was malfunctioning. My phone, while it does take pictures, won't email them, but sends them only to other phones. And so I was reduced to stealing images from other people's sites for my container garden piece.

What I took away from this experience was that we needed a new camera.

Being a child of the twenty-first century (or an old lady of the twenty-first century) I went at once to the internet to see what we would like that we could afford. Hurrah! Amazon was offering a Canon PowerShot SX130IS for $159.00, which came to $200 after adding a 32 gigabite flash memory card, an eight-pack of rechargeable nickel-cadmium AA batteries, and a case. (I should also get a lens cap, I think.) This was exactly what I made on Tuesday by working at the polls from 5:15 in the morning until 8:15 at night; as soon as I get the money from the county I'll turn it over to Amazon. But I have the wonderful camera in hand and now I'm in business.

First I took some pictures of my actual container garden.

Then Harold and I went downtown for a bite to eat and a cup of coffee. We stopped in Karen's, AKA Ennis's, on Union Street. The day was so fine that she had the door propped open, inviting the breezes. As we were sitting there a dragonfly the size of a small helicopter came in, buzzed around, and flew back into the window, where it got stuck. The creature had a wingspan of seven or eight inches, too big for that maneuver one does with the paper cup and the cardboard to save it and let it out.

All I could think to do was to take a movie of it with the camera. I would show you how amazing the telephoto lens is (of course I used the long lens. What, you thought I would get close to a terrifying bug?) but it turns out that the camera consumes so much battery life that the batteries die before you can finish uploading a movie to YouTube. So you'll just have to imagine a fantastic movie featuring a huge bug. In case I want to do that again I'm getting a power cord for the camera. It clearly needs a power cord for downloading and uploading.

Maybe tomorrow I'll get back to work on my book.

Kate Gallison

Yardless Gardening

I plunged into a new craze this week after seeing a lady on TV explaining how to do container gardening. I can do that, I said to myself. Even I, although I have not a square inch of dirt to work with nor any plot of ground to call my own. I can put big flower pots on the sidewalk in front of the house. They can be as artistic as I like. Then I can stuff them with potting soil and growing plants, in the hope that as the summer progresses I won't kill them.

This being Lambertville, I had my secret sources for the various elements of this project. It began with a glorious Mandevilla that I picked up at the Giant Foods in New Hope. It had a small trellis in its plastic pot, but it was begging to be put in a handsome container and trained up a string onto the porch. So off I went to the Homestead Market on North Main Street. There I found some pretty pots glazed in various colors, quite inexpensive at thirty or forty dollars apiece. (The TV lady said they would cost about a hundred.) So I bought three. Having dragged them home, I went across the river to New Hope and wandered around the Living Earth at 234 West Bridge Street, looking for company for the Mandevilla, falling in love with one plant after another.

They had some gorgeous things there. I saw a long table of handsome plants with a sign on it promising that the deer wouldn't eat them. Not a problem for us, but folks on the outskirts of town have trouble with deer. I saw all kinds of beautiful flowers I'd never heard of, plants with pale green foliage and feathery pink spikes, plants with bright round blossoms in impossibly bright colors, plants in the sunlight, plants in the shade. Then I saw a healthy rosemary bush a foot and a half high, pungent with sticky resin. Suddenly I realized that I'd loved it all my life. And if rosemary, why not lavender? And creeping thyme. I didn't have to make a gaudy garden to impress the TV lady, in the unlikely event that she ever came through Lambertville and eyeballed my containers. I could fill my garden with things I've loved forever. It turned out to be one of those moments when you remember who you really are.

You may ask, what does all this have to do with crime writing? Here's what. After your pencils are all sharpened, your software updated, your itchy places scratched, and the lighting in your office adjusted just so, gardening is an elegant way to put off writing.

Kate Gallison