I've been somewhat remiss on working in journals lately. Autumn and Spring do that to me, I guess. I'm too busy getting things done to sit down and write about it. I haven't written in my personal, handwritten journal since this summer. I've learned, over many years of keeping journals, that I'm just not the sort to record every single thing that happens to me every single day. My dad was. He wrote something every day, even if it was just a quick weather and health report. I've found that I'm much more successful if I just write whenever I have the urge.
I have been busy, however. This week I finished "Father Patrice Hears Confession", my Louisiana werewolf story, polished it up a bit, and sent it out into the wild. Hopefully I'll get a sale on it before Christmas. We'll see.
Some news to report as well. I've decided to move this blog over to WordPress. I've been thinking about it for a while now, researching a bit and reading what other people who use it have to say, and I think it will be a nice fit for where I'd like to go with this blog. I imagine I'll keep this one live, as an archive, if nothing else. Of course I'll link back, and send out an announcement when I've made the change.
In the meantime, Autumn marches on, even down here in the semi-tropics. It's a bittersweet time for me - on the one hand I love the relief from the oppressive heat of August and September, but it's the start of the time when I'm cold (literally, my hands and feet are freezing) all the time. I can never seem to warm up in winter, no matter how many layers I pile on. It's a constant battle to keep my blood circulating to all my extremities properly. So, while I love the season, I hate the cold.
We do, I'd like to point out, get some beautiful fall color down here in Louisiana, despite what many think. We just get it much, much later than our neighbors to the north. Whereas their leaves begin to turn in September, we usually have to wait until November before things begin to get colorful around here. In the meantime I've been perusing garden blogs from more northern climes, hearing about early snowfalls and enjoying their beautiful foliage pictures. When our leaves begin to turn, I'll post some pictures of my own.
In the meantime, here are a few pictures of interesting mushrooms I snapped at the Renovation Project last weekend. We've had an unusually wet October around here - it's normally our driest month - and as a result, lots of interesting fungi have been sprouting up.
October 23, 2009
in time of daffodils
in time of daffodils
in time of daffodils(who know
the goal of living is to grow)
forgetting why. remember how
in time of lilacs who proclaim
the aim of waking is to dream,
remember so(forgetting seem)
in time of roses(who amaze
our now and here with paradise)
forgetting if, remember yes
in time of all sweet things beyond
whatever mind may comprehend,
remember seeks(forgetting find)
and in a mystery to be
(when time from time shall set us free)
forgetting me, remember me
- e.e. cummings (1894-1962), American poet
Thanks to Helen Yoest of Gardening With Confidence.
09 October 2009
Another One Bites the Dust
Goodbye, Necrography.
Got an email today informing me of the demise of yet another small print 'zine. I'd submitted to them in the past, but ended up pulling my story because the lag time was far, far too long...
I'm not sure what the formula for a successful start-up is, 'cause I've obviously got no experience in that area, but I will say that as a writer I was kind of offended when they announced their last-ditch survival effort a few weeks ago:
Because of this, we're implementing a new submission policy. It's very simple. If you buy a copy of Necrography, then submit your work, we guarantee it will be read and reviewed with the utmost attention and you'll get a quick and personal response in a very timely manner. If, however, you submit to Necrography without buying a copy, we can't guarantee we'll respond to your submission or even read it in the first place. This submission policy will be in place when (and if) we re-open submissions again.Now, I can appreciate a lack of money as much as the next starving artist, and I surely can imagine the pain of submissions that far outstrip advertising or subscription dollars, but this just didn't seem like a great idea to me. Sure enough, it pissed people off:
The move we made nearly a month ago, in regards to our tiered submissions triage, served only to anger a few of our writers and friends.In any case, there has to be a better way. I find it sad that small print 'zines have such a low survival rate, but the fact is, the world is changing. Short fiction is becoming an online format, pure and simple. People don't buy magazines for stories much anymore - if they buy stories in print at all, they buy them in anthology format. That's just reality.
However, I think it is true that as writers and readers, we should support the 'zines we expect to stay alive long enough to publish us. Small press magazines have a long history of teaching wanna be's how to write professionally, and I think that's especially true for genre writers. So, maybe we do have an obligation to subscribe as well as submit.
Brandon Bell has an interesting post on the subject, and his idea is to subscribe to three 'zines, to lend his support to venues that support his career as a writer. I can get behind that, I think. Updates to follow.
05 October 2009
Goodbye and Good Riddance
The hulking mass of rusting metal and tornado fodder that's been the bane of my existence all summer is finally gone. I'm extremely happy, because instead of the solution we expected, having to pay to get the thing towed away for scrap, someone actually took it - a man who plans to renovate it and give it to his sister who currently has nowhere to live. So, not only did we get rid of it, we recycled!
In celebration, we spent the day Saturday cleaning up the aftermath. The movers left the porch and its roof (second photo). The LOML dismantled the porch, but we're still up in the air about the roof section. The tin is still usable, so we put the whole thing off to the side, hoping some brilliant idea will come to us about how to use it. In the meantime, this area of the property looks sooooo much better.
September was the six month anniversary of the start of The Renovation Project, and so far I'm more than pleased with the results. We've reclaimed huge sections of the lawn and flower gardens, started on the wooded areas, and even done a little of the demo work on the house. For a project done on odd weekends and days off, I think we've made lots of good progress.
The novel is coming along nicely as well. Out of my literal mountain of notes and scene snippets, I have cobbled together three good chapters so far in draft one, and the words have come steadily every day. My goal is to finish a draft by the end of the year, but ideally I'd love to be done long before that. I'm thinking hard about doing NaNoWriMo again (yes, I love torture), so to be done at the end of this month would be great. We'll see, though. I'm not going to beat myself up over it - I've missed too many self-imposed deadlines to think that might work.
Rain, rain, rain since we got back home Saturday night, and I'm not complaining. Rain is good for contemplation. It cleanses the mind. And if there's one thing about me that's dirty, well...
'Til next time.
September 18, 2009
A little more traction this week, though not by much. I have managed 1600 more words on my new story, a werewolf tale called "Father Patrice Hears Confession." That title's subject to change, of course. It's what I'm calling it now, anyway.
What else has happened...let's see. I went to the Friends of the Lafayette Parish Public Library semi-annual book sale and picked up my usual sack or so of books. Didn't find as much as I normally do, unfortunately. It wasn't that there weren't a lot of books available, just not as much in the categories I'm interested in. Science Fiction and Fantasy take up one tiny table in the corner. Other speculative genres and horror are kind of spread around here and there. It's fun, a giant garage sale of books twice a year (and what bibliophile wouldn't love that) but I wish I could have found more in my favorite genres.
Yesterday I read "Brokeback Mountain", by Annie Proulx, from her collection Wyoming Stories. I wanted to read it for two reasons - one, because Annie Proulx is a master of beautiful prose and I wanted to study her style, and two, because I'm interested in including more GLBT characters in my own writing (my recent story "Becoming" being my first attempt). It was wonderful, of course, heart-achingly beautiful and poignant. It evoked a level of emotion in me that I hope to one day achieve in my own writing. The movie was wonderful, I loved it, but maybe because I'm a reader and a writer the short story - condensed, tightly written and powerful - had a much stronger impact on me. I think it's one I'll come back to.
Facebook continues to be interesting. Despite privacy concerns, it's been wonderful for connecting with people I thought were lost to me forever. Old friends, connections broken by life and circumstance, have been popping up everywhere. Makes me nostalgic for my old hometown, and for at least some parts of my childhood.
My son and I are working on growing some little pumpkins for Halloween, though I fear we may have planted the seeds too late. Today I found a female flower, little green baby pumpkin attached, so I hand-pollinated it. We'll see what happens. If push comes to shove, I'll buy a little pumpkin from the store and shove it among the leaves sometime in October. Hopefully he won't catch on that it's a big fake-o.
If you're of the liberal mindset and interested in politics, check out my friend Diane's website, The Wild, Wild Left. I've posted some essays there before, and hope to again eventually, but there are lots of good writers hanging out ranting about this or that. Caution, though - if you're conservative and looking for a scrap, you'll get one - they're pretty devoted over there.
In any case, off to write for a bit. The book sale is ongoing through Saturday, so I may sneak back over there in a little while. Shhh....don't tell anyone, ok?
Image © 2009, Lynette Mejia, all rights reserved
18 September 2009
Is District 9 Racist Against Nigerians?
I loved District 9. I'll admit, however, that I kept wondering throughout the whole thing why the gangster-types were all Nigerians. I figured there must be some kind of cultural reference I was missing. It bothered me somewhat, even though I still loved the movie. I think it had some important things to say about the nature of the "Other" and what it means to be human. We use that term as a synonym for kindness and mercy, but by and large I don't think humans tend to act in accordance with how we like to view ourselves.
In any case, I've been following some of the reactions to the same questions I had. One author who's blog I follow, Nnedi Okorafor, was very offended, and the whole Nigerian thing ruined the movie completely for her. Here is her post. And she's not the only one. There's been a lot of backlash on the internet by people who resent Nigerians being portrayed in such an unflattering light by the filmmakers. Some are calling for an apology by the film's director, Neill Blomkamp.
From Tola Onanuga at The Guardian UK, however, comes another perspective: Why District 9 Isn't Racist Against Nigerians. In it the author makes a case that the director portrayed the white corporate types and "MMU" employees as much more evil, that the film is intended to be a reflection of the inhumanity of all the humans in the story, and the evolution of the aliens from the ultimate "Other" to creatures who have more in common with us than we'd like to think.
Both of the above authors, by the way, are of Nigerian descent.
So what's the opinion here? Is District 9 racist? Are some humans deliberately set apart as "worse" than others?
I tend to think the originality of the story, the relevance to issues the whole world faces relating to race, and the superb film-making that went into the movie ultimately override any concerns I have about which human group is depicted as the most evil.
Still, though, it nags me...did it have to be Nigerians?
11 September 2009
The Point Game
Found this article today, published in the New York Times a few weeks back. It's about the Accelerated Reader Program, and I think it makes some good points. Both of my children go to schools that use Accelerated Reader, and, I have to admit, I have mixed feelings about it myself.
On the one hand, I think anything that promotes kids' interest in books is a good thing. AR, through its point system, gives kids reading goals to work toward, and at both my kids' schools, meeting those goals is rewarded at the end of the year. It's a big deal to get an AR award, and, after growing up in a school system in which only athletic achievements garnered attention, I think that's a wonderful thing.
On the other hand, however, I remember as a kid having a stack of my favorite books, and reading them over and over until they were dog-eared and falling apart. They were dear to me, priceless even. Some of them I still have, all these years later, and every time I look at them on the book shelf I'm 7 years old again, reading on a drowsy summer afternoon.
My kids have the same habits, but with AR in the picture, I can't allow them to follow their natural reading instincts. In order to get the points, they have to stay on reading level, constantly read new things, and rush through books in order to get the required points by the end of the grading period. There is no lingering over a beloved book. There is no rereading. There is only the numbers, and what the numbers can get you. In some ways it turns reading into a chore, something else to be checked off on the homework page. Reading isn't an escape for them - it's becoming part of the grind. We can't even have a break in the summer, as both schools now have a "Summer AR" program.
I'm still of a dual-mind about the whole thing. As I said, I think anything that encourages kids to read, to discover new authors and to broaden their horizons has merit. But to turn it into something quantitative, something to be measured and compared and reduced to a data set for the gratification of schools...that just seems fundamentally flawed.
10 September 2009
September 3, 2009
I keep nearly all of my fiction books in my bedroom. Since they number somewhere around 600-700 volumes, you can imagine what that looks like. The walls are lined with bookshelves, which are themselves crammed to overflowing. I designed it that way for a reason, however. Books are my talismans. They make up the fortress that surround me when I sleep. I find it comforting to wake up and see them all there, quietly waiting, sentinels whose magic and knowledge keep whatever lurks in the darkness at bay.
I write in there too. Though most of my business is done in my office, the meat and bones of what I do take place in that room, where I can curl up on my soft bed with my laptop, surrounded by all those voices, some of them still speaking after hundreds of years. Shakespeare keeps me company. So does Dostoevsky, and Milton, and Stephen King and Neil Gaiman. Jane Austen keeps my time. Isaac Asimov types furiously along beside me. Hemmingway and Poe drink in the corner.
They're good company, if a little daunting. My prose wilts like a weed in a forgotten parking lot when I really stop to think about how it compares to what surrounds me on the walls. Most of the time, I try not to think about it, but occasionally it gets to me. I look at those words on the screen, and I wonder, who am I kidding? This is horrible, a monumental waste of time.
But then I stop, and I look around, and I remember that at least some (if not all) of them went through the same thing, or at least something close to it, at one point or another. Everyone has self-doubts. And truthfully, when it comes down to it, I don't write because I think I'll make money at it, or because I think I'll have some sort of fame or illustrious career down the line. I write because I have to, because, for as long as I can remember, it's been my vocation, whether or not I wanted to admit that. I write because, well, what else would I do? In the end, though we all look outside occasionally for validation, the only real opinion that matters is mine. Who gives a shit if anyone else ever reads what I write?
I look up, and they're nodding and smiling. I smile back, and look down again, down at the terrible prose on the screen, the stuff I write, the stuff that makes me happy. I put my fingers on the keys, and I continue.
03 September 2009
Dead Winds' and Spent Waves' Riot
And our newest feature - guess which poem today's title was snurched from! A bit of a game I play sometimes, for those of you who know me well. Several of the blogs I read use song lyrics, snippets of poetry, etc. in their titles, and I get a little thrill when I recognize where it came from. A clue to a secret message; a shared wink, as it were.
1300 words on "Limbs" yesterday, wrapping up my first draft. Today I need to jump back in and start the revising process, though that can be a tricky thing. Sometimes you need to step away from a project in order to see it clearly again. I also hate to do it because I know that, in its current form, this thing sucks, and as many times as I tell myself that first drafts are supposed to be awful, that every piece of art starts out as a crude approximation of its final form, it's still hard to look back at what I've written and see it so mangled and crude. In some ways, it's easier just to look away. It has to be done, though. I need to get some fresh stuff to market.
So here I am, in this bright morning time when I'm groggy and fuzzy-headed and not quite all there yet. I normally like to write in the afternoon, sunset or thereabouts, but the time between 3pm and 9pm is taken every day by homework, extracurricular activities, and the like. Things have definitely ratcheted up a notch this year, for both my kids. And, as a consequence, for me.
Still, I'll do it. In a few minutes I'll rattle into the kitchen for a fresh shot of caffeine, then screw up my courage and open that file. I do it because, despite the anxiety, despite the uncertainty of a paycheck and the nagging fear that I'll never be as successful as I want to be, I still love what I do. Time to get to work.
27 August 2009
August 25, 2009
1200 words yesterday on my new short story, "Limbs", inspired by a chopped up live oak tree I glimpsed along the side of the road Sunday while bringing the kiddos to visit their dad. This will be my first horror story in a while, and I'm happy to be back in the area. I like writing horror, or, as I suppose it could be called, "dark fiction." It's a place where I'm comfortable as a writer - peeking into the darkness we all know is under the bed or in the closet. It appeals to my inner child (and yes I know I was a weird kid. I still am.) For a while the only stories that came to me were fantasy. I'm glad that black-eyed kid is back. I missed her.
In other news, a very unusual August cold front arrived over the weekend, bringing in dry, crisp air with the tiniest taste of Fall. It's my favorite time of year, my most productive as a writer, and it cheered me a great deal to feel the first, tiny yawn of Nature. She'll be going to sleep soon, and I'll be waking up again. But, isn't that always the way of it?
25 August 2009
Review: The Red Tree by Caitlin R. Kiernan
I've been a follower of Caitlin R. Kiernan's blog for a year or so now, but The Red Tree is the first of her books that I've read. I follow her blog for the same reason I follow other authors - to get a glimpse inside what the process is for them, how they write, create, and manage to move in and out of the world of their art. I think I like her blog best, however, and I find myself looking for her posts every morning, mainly because she doesn't gloss over the life she leads, and the difficulties she has as an artist. It's all out there for the world to see - the bad days, the periods of writer's block, the fears she still has about whether or not she's good enough. She lets her readers into her life in ways I'm still not brave enough or comfortable enough to do yet in my own writing, or even here.
Yeah, I know, I know, this is a book review. I'm getting to that.
My point is, over the course of reading her blog I've come to know a few things about her, and when I read somewhere that The Red Tree was autobiographical to some extent, it interested me. It's a tricky thing, injecting some of what you are into a story - it sort of sets up a "is it real, or is it memorex" kind of situation for readers and fans. I started reading the book with that mindset, and the feeling stayed with me throughout the experience. The reality of it, however, turned out to be much more layered and complex than that.
Let me say first of all that I loved the book. Not in the way one loves Shakespeare, or Hemmingway, but in the way one loves Poe, or Lovecraft, or Swinburne. The Red Tree left a mark on me, a feeling that I know I'll get every time I see it sitting there on the shelf. Even as I type this, and look down at it here beside me, I'm drawn into it, into the atmosphere the author created, and I feel myself slipping into a memory of that world - the world of Alice - through the looking glass, as it were. A world where "everything we see is but a dream within a dream."
And that's the point of The Red Tree, I think. Throughout the novel, I went round and round with the story, in and out of reality, in and out of what might be true, what might be dream. I thought about how many things the protagonist had in common with the author, and I wondered - what is real here?- with every chapter I read. What is real for Sarah, the protagonist? What is real for Caitl in? What is real for any of us?
Throughout Sarah's journal entries and dreams, her research and her memories, I was kept slipping, looking for a foothold into reality. As it turns out, this is both the draw and the magic of The Red Tree. It's a book about finding oneself lost, even though the path may appear straight; about the confusion and pain of losing our way, and how anger and pride cloud things even further. It's all of those things wrapped in an atmosphere of dark fantasy and gothic sensibility, and it was a great read. Five Stars.
18 August 2009
I Love the Night
Homework done. School papers and forms signed. Time to write.
Terrible time waking up this morning. I've always been a night person, and this is not something one turns on and off with a switch. The first day was taken care of by the fact that I was excited for my kids, but three days in and I'm suffering from severe time-warp shock. It's still dark when my alarm goes off at 5:30am, and, I don't know, that just seems to me like an affront to nature. My body fights it with everything its got. Unfortunately, I know myself well enough to understand that I won't ever really adjust. Oh, well. Guess I'll just play catch up on the weekends.
As it turns out, my best-laid plans of writing all day while the kids are at school have gone predictably awry. Due to unforeseen circumstances, I have to be with my son at school every day, which doesn't leave much time for fiction. During the day, anyway. So, as an alternative, the LOML and I have worked out a schedule whereby he takes over when he gets home from work, and I disappear for a couple of hours to write. I'm sure it will be a fluid thing, changing here and there as need calls, but the point is I have set aside time. Everything else be damned, I have set aside time.
This experience I've had the past year or so, the experience of "becoming" a writer, has really opened my eyes to the balancing act most of us have to perform to practice our art. We have jobs, families, a million things that call us from the pen, a million distractions waiting right there at the edge of our vision. That some of manage to do all of these things, play all of these roles, and still find time to create worlds in the time that remains is absolutely amazing to me. It's a balancing act to be sure, a delicate dance, whereby I try to avoid alienating my family, keep up my obligations, and write a book. Oh, yes, and make sure everyone has clean socks to wear.
Yesterday I used my apportioned block to begin a new story, "The White Crow". It's based on another story I started last summer on vacation, one that ended up losing it's focus and being shelved. This time around I managed to pick up the spark I'd somehow lost, and finished the outlining along with a few paragraphs in one sitting. So now I have a plot, and tonight we'll see how closely I end up sticking to it.
You have to want to be a writer. You have to want it bad. Turns out it's not really a choice of careers - it's a vocation.
13 August 2009
My Thoughts Were So Loud...
Everyone is gone this afternoon and I am alone for the first time in weeks with my thoughts. It's a good feeling, this - everyone should be comfortable rattling around in their own heads once in a while. For me, it's peaceful - the constant need for conversation and interaction when other people are around is hard for me to maintain indefinitely. I imagine I could do rather well as a hermit, though I'm not interested in a cloistered life. The little silences I come by from time to time are enough.
It's been a long, hot summer. I haven't written much at all, only collected ideas on little scraps of paper like a squirrel saving up nuts for winter. I have them all over, in my journal, on my desk in a little shuffling pile, even as voice memos on my phone. I just spit them out, from time to time, as if my writing self is just trying to remind me she is there, waiting, albeit not terribly patiently.
The weather this summer has been uncommonly hot and dry. Louisiana in summer is normally hot, yes, but not Arizona hot. Not West Texas hot. It is supposed to rain here, nearly every day, in afternoon thunderstorms that darken the skies and send cool breezes. Most of this summer has instead been dry, and eerily quiet. Tempers are on edge. Lots of people are angry, and restless. So far even the hurricanes have been kept at bay, though as we learned with Andrew in '92 that type of summer can end badly.
My kids and I have spent a lot of time down at my mom's old place, cleaning up and restoring her gardens. We sweat buckets, work until we're about to drop, and then have a picnic lunch followed by a dip in the local river and later on, a visit to Sonic. My children have had a taste of what my summers were like as a child, and that makes me happy indeed. My daughter calls herself a 'country girl' now, and wants to move there permanently, and to that I laugh, though a little sadly. Not yet, my girl. Not yet.
It's also been the summer of the vampire around here. The LOML and I have been watching True Blood on HBO, and reading Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse novels. Last night I finished Let Me In, the book upon which Let the Right One In was based. My kids have been dressing up in an old bat costume and running around pretending they have fangs. It's lent an air of surrealism to this place, but I consider that a good thing. I'm happy that my kids are inheriting a penchant for the fantastic.
In any case, though the heat refuses to let go, summer will be winding down soon. The kids go back to school on Tuesday, and after settling them in, I'll go back to writing. I'll miss them, but I've missed that creative outlet as well. It's never been about the money for me (that's a good thing, too, cause I make practically zippo); it's about loving to tell stories. About finding magic in the world, and, failing that, creating magic myself, stories and people and lives out of thin air. I wouldn't change my life for anything, and I gladly give up my summers to make those memories with my children. I want them to remember these days when I'm gone, remember me as more than just a shadow at the computer. But there's another side of me as well, and she's calling to me. She has always called to me. And sooner or later, I always have to answer.
08 August 2009
Burnin' Down the House
Spent yesterday working on the renovation project, which turned out to be a very long day in very, very hot weather. Luckily, the entire yard and attached forest is extremely shady - otherwise, we just wouldn't be able to work 8+ hours in 100+ heat. Even with the shade, however, we still have to take frequent breaks and down gallons of water and Gatorade. It's slow going. Still, progress was made.
At this point we have pretty much given up on the house. Everything, and I do mean EVERYTHING, is falling apart on it. It wasn't well-built when it was constructed in 1973, and now, 30 some-odd years later, it is well and truly falling down. The floors, roof, electrical, plumbing - you name it, it has to be replaced. So, for the time being, we've just put the house on the back burner. It was my childhood home, the only house I remember growing up in, and so it makes me sad to think that we'll have to tear it down, but that's what it's starting to look like. Getting it back into shape would mean basically tearing it down to the studs at this point, and for that kind of money, we could rebuild something that more accurately fits our needs, and reflects our style. Therefore, in typical fashion, I'm just leaving it for now.
Instead, we're focusing now on the 10 acres of lawn, gardens, and forest. The current stage is clean-up and demolition, the latter encompassing about 400 miles of rusting, rotting fencing. Yesterday we took down part of the back fence, and the entire creosote fence across the front of the property. It was hot, sweaty work, but for once I was glad for the lack of rain. It meant the ditches we had to work in to get at the fence posts were dry and snake-free. This is a very, very good thing. I also managed to do a bit of pruning, and my sister Laura cleaned the pine straw and muck from the top of her little house. The LOML, meanwhile, got to operate a chainsaw for the first time, and took out two dying trees (one dogwood, one pear). It was a good day.
At the end of the day we were all tired, but happy. We got stuff done, stuff we can see and measure. Each time we go it looks a little bit better. Photos with the next post.
05 July 2009
Some Results
So I've been going on all spring and summer about the renovation project we've been working on at my mother's home in the wilds of western Louisiana, promising all the while to post pictures when I have them. Problem is, at the end of the day we are normally so dead-dog tired that I either forget to take any photos, or forget to upload them when I get home. Finally, though, I've managed to get a few off my camera to share.
I had the foresight to take some "before" pictures just before we started work in late March. Unfortunately, instead of planning my pictures around future projects, I just walked around randomly shooting things. Therefore, some of the after pictures correspond to before shots, and some don't. Still, it's amazing, even though we are still so early into the project, how much impact our hard work has had. It looks totally different, and that makes it very much worthwhile.
I'll also post these on my Facebook profile, if anyone is interested...
Front of House Before
Front of House After
Front Bed #1 Before
Front Bed #1 After
Front Bed #2 Before
Front Bed #2 After
Front of House After
Front Bed #1 Before
Front Bed #1 After
Front Bed #2 Before
Front Bed #2 AfterAs you can see, we've mostly limited our work to outside the house for the moment, cleaning and replanting my mother's flower beds, gardens, and removing 40 years worth of pack-rattery and just plain stuff that has accumulated. It's hot, dirty work - but it more than makes up for it with sheer psychological impact. We are watching the landscape literally transform before our eyes, and whenever I feel like we are spinning our wheels, so to speak, all I have to do is go back and look at these photos again to see the difference our work has made.
