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| Hummingbird Visit 2011 Linnea Heaney |
I had two ladies to tea, iced, on my wide southern porch this week. One was a passionate gardener, and the other, a writer whose passion is finding the right phrase.
We looked over my gardens—the meadow, the wildlife habitat, and the secret garden. The overflowing pink Texas skullcap, salvia, wood rose, trailing periwinkle, and drifting Mexican feather grass in the planters edging the perfect white columns in comfortable disarray. My mission was to make the gardens look like they had just happened. The gardener understood with an unspoken keenness. Of course, getting any garden to just happen in this day of drought and brutal heat is almost a miracle.
My spring yard work came to a close this week with the pruning of my favorite antique roses—Old Blush and Duchess de Brabant. I positioned the cuts to encourage new growth and erased dead wood. I checked that the overall shapes and heights were pleasing to the eye.
Later that day, I approached an old manuscript with the same vigor. I cut out the lines that didn’t need to be there, shortened lines to a point, and left room for thoughts to grow. Do my sentences flow the way I need them to go? Is the story satisfying? Do the words look like they just happened?
A writer and once my teacher, Marjorie Facklam, said that “writing should be invisible.” How hard a writer must work to have the words and sentences look like they just happened, to be clear and enlightening, so the reader sees only the true story. What talent the reader might say, when, in fact, it is more dedication and perspiration. Any talent lies in being able to see what could be in the barren land or the white space of paper or the blank computer screen.
The secret in the garden is to work passionately with what you have, what will grow in the soil that is your life—to find that comfortable disarray that is your voice. A secret understood by my fellow gardener and writer friends.
