I am not Persian, but as a gardener in a northern climate, I’ve taken the Persian New Year holiday to heart because it’s usually when I can start my garden year again. Despite our spell of subzero weather in February, it’s been pretty nice these past couple of weeks. Sunny and 50s during the day, 20s overnight. And so … time to take these tall beds for a test drive. I didn’t blog about it last year, most of my garden rebuild went on Instagram, but I entirely rebuilt the garden last spring. I panicked as the pandemic hit. The…

Originally published on Substack, March 16, 2021 I planted tomato and pepper seeds yesterday and put them out in the cold frame on heat mats to germinate. I have a little greenhouse space, but, um, I’ve turned it into a writing room. This is an experiment this year, putting them out right away. I hung one of the shop light/grow lights from the lid of the cold frame. We’ll see. It’ll either work or it won’t. Which is sort of my core gardening ethic. It’ll either work or it won’t. I don’t go to enormous lengths to get things to…

Originally published at Substack: 2/23/2021 Hello people of the internets — just a little note to say that I’m finally writing again, I’m even sending things out — anyone who knows me knows that one reason my so-called writing career never really went anywhere, is that I am a giant chicken about sending things out. For too long, it was just too hard. Writing was the thing I’d always done in secret — ever since my Aunt Lynn gave me a little locking diary the summer I was 8, the summer our funny, adored, 2 year old brother was dying…

Originally published at Substack: 2/14/2021 I had a bunch of new project meetings this week, which inevitably lead to that sentence I hear all the time. Montana?! Oh! You’re so lucky to live there! I am deeply, profoundly grateful for the life I’ve built here in this small town in Montana. But it wasn’t luck that got me here.  It was a combination of claustrophobia and a burning drive to find a house. Some of my women friends describe feeling that drive about having children. I love kids, and nearly melted last week when one of the twin toddlers down…

Originally published at Substack: February 11, 2021 Last night we were awakened by something barking outside the cabin. Barking for a long time. I think it was a fox — Himself isn’t so sure. He thinks it could have been a coyote. It sounded to me like a fox that had treed something — one of the bobcats maybe? We spent one Christmas Day years ago watching a bobcat who had curled up under that tree. It napped on and off all day, supremely unbothered by my bird dogs (who we kept in the house). We see them on the…

Originally published at Substack: 1/6/2021 I’ve been thinking a lot about making things. That I have not managed to publish a book in the 20 years since Place Last Seen came out, is an ongoing source of frustration and shame. I’ve published some essays, and I’ve written a lot of blog posts. There’s a mystery novel manuscript that needs some fiddling with on the front end, and that half a novel about academia, farms, the horse business and social class. I haven’t managed, despite all those efforts, to publish a second book, but I have made a lot of things. …

Originally published at Substack: 12/26/2020 I was talking to my Beloved Stepmother on Christmas Day while watering the plants (oh! How I miss real phones, the kind you can pin to your ear with your shoulder) when a whole shelf in the greenhouse-office flipped and geraniums and dirt went flying, and knocked a glass jar off a lower shelf that was … full of light bulbs? It was a mess.  When Himself built me this room nearly 10 years ago, he didn’t set the shelves properly because I wasn’t sure where I was going to want them to go. I…

Originally posted at Substack, 12/13/2020 Wednesday about mid-day, I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize. It was the animal shelter.  Someone had turned in my black, one-eared cat who went missing in January.  I thought she was dead. My funny, noisy, oddball cat is back, although she’s lost a full 1/3 of her body weight. She’s just skin and bones.  But she’s back.  After almost a full year. No one ever comes back.  But there she is, on the other side of the room, asleep in her chair again. After a few days of being fed regularly,…

Originally published at Substack, 12/6/2020 I spend a lot of time thinking about home.  My driving ambition all through my 20s and 30s was to find a way to buy a house. Not just any house, but a house I could stay in. A house I could live in. I was the kid who went to six grammar schools, who switched custodial parents, whose brother died of cancer. Every time we got settled in, every time I made friends, some crisis arose and we had to go. As an adult, neither of my parents were much good at keeping themselves…

Originally published at Substack, 11/29/2020 I’ve spent much of the pandemic on a kind of crash course of garden design. It started when I went down the rabbit hole of Monty Don garden series videos on YouTube — Gardens of France, Italy, the World, America … what is a garden? What does it mean to build a garden? Is a garden a form of art? What do gardens mean in different cultures? When is a garden a symbol of power, and when is it a means of sustenance?  It’s something I was thinking about as I tore out my old…