HOW DOES YOUR GARDEN GROW?

One of the things I like to do in my spare time is gardening. I'm not very good at it. I seem to lack the requisite green thumb, and because of my fibromyalgia, I'm not very strong anymore. So there's a lot I have to leave to my husband, John. But still, I like puttering around in our yard, planting flowers and trying to make our gardens pretty.

My folks have a massive flower garden in their backyard. But they've now reached the age where all this becoming too much for them to keep up. So they're in the process of scaling back and replacing a lot of their flowers with plants that will be easier for them to care for.

So this weekend, one of the things John and I have done together is to go over to my folks' house to collect a bunch of flowers, which we've now planted in our own gardens. My folks were getting rid of everything from irises to catnip. Since I already had a row of irises started in one of our gardens, I was able to fill that in. So now, the small border garden I began work on a couple of years ago along one section of our fence is looking quite pretty.

Other flowers went into other gardens, and I planted some around the little bridge spanning the small stream that flows into our fish pond, too.

Every year, John and I do a bit more in our gardens, and along with all the trees, our waterfall, stream, and fish pond, our backyard has slowly grown to be a lovely, pleasant haven for us to share. One of the things we especially enjoy is sitting out beneath my large flowering crabapple tree on summer evenings, watching the fireflies dance in the dark. Before coming to America, John had never seen one of these insects, and he's still fascinated by them. Equally beautiful are the big dragonflies that flit around our fish pond.

Every now and then, a snowy egret makes an appearance at our fish pond. Whenever that happens, our fish always go into hiding for a couple of days!

I hope you all have a happy Memorial Day!

IN SEARCH OF MISS JANE MARPLE.

This evening, I watched Mystery! on the PBS channel. Currently running is a series based on Agatha Christie’s novels featuring her elderly female sleuth, Miss Jane Marple. Tonight’s episode was the second part of What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw.

I’ve always adored British dramas. A&E used to run several of them on a regular basis, but no longer does so—which has really put a dent in the amount of television I watch. Now, I have to wait all week to see Miss Marple on PBS, played in this particular series by Geraldine McEwan.

Out of all the actresses I’ve ever seen in the role of Miss Marple, McEwan best fits my own mental image of the character created by Christie. If Christie were still alive, would she agree? I don’t have a clue—but I do think it would be interesting to know.

One of my readers used to send me letters in which she “cast” my own novels, detailing what actors she thought should play my characters’ parts in the event that any of my books should ever be made into a movie. I was always fascinated to read her choices, because they were seldom actors I myself would have picked for those same characters. So, obviously, her mental images of the characters I had created were different from mine.

The point is that when she read my novels, she took my characters and made them her own. So, too, when reading Christie’s books did I conjure up my own mental images of Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, and the rest. This is what readers do. That’s why I’m curious about McEwan and Christie, if how I’ve always envisioned Miss Marple is how Christie herself saw her when she created her. I think David Suchet is a marvelous Poirot, too. Again, would Christie agree?

Authors can give us physical descriptions of their characters and bring them alive for us in myriad ways. But as readers, we each bring our own perceptions and experiences to the novels we read, which color the mental images we see and the conclusions we draw about characters.

Miss Marple is a grandmotherly sort of character, but “grandmotherly” can mean many different things to people. When I remember my own grandmothers, I don’t picture either one as Miss Marple. But I do think that some of their traits, such as their sharpness, observance, wisdom, and insight into human nature, mirror Miss Marple’s own. So as a reader, I take what I know of those traits my grandmothers possessed and project them on to the character of Miss Marple.

But if you’re a Christie fan, your view of Miss Marple might be completely different from mine. Your “grandmotherly” mental image might be closer to how Gracie Fields, Margaret Rutherford, Angela Lansbury, Helen Hayes, or Joan Hickson portrayed the character. These actresses have all played Miss Marple in the past and brought their own interpretations of her to the role.

Which, if any, comes closest to what Christie herself actually had in mind when she developed Miss Marple as a character? As readers, we can only make our best guess. Whether we would be right or wrong is something only Christie, Miss Marple’s creator, could ever say for sure.

BROWSING THE BOOK RACKS.

Read my post, Browsing the Book Racks, today at Romancing the Blog!

WHERE IS SPRING?

I'm not sure spring is ever going to come this year. As it has been in several other places, it's been unseasonably cold here these past few months, and although the temperature finally climbed to over 90 degrees during the middle of the week, a couple of days later, it was again so chilly that we built a fire in our fireplace. So it's hard for me to believe it's already May.

It's time to be out gardening and doing other spring things! Having some months ago completed the restoration of one of our Victorian mantels, my husband, John, decided this month to begin work on an antique side-by-side secretary that also belonged to my maternal grandparents. But with the uncertain weather, he's barely got started.

Since the secretary's in pretty sad shape, it needs several coats of stripper to remove all the old varnish and stain, and because of the chemicals, that's something we only do outside. So, at the moment, the secretary's largely dismantled and waiting for spring. One small door has been stripped, sanded, and test stained to determine how well the wood's actually going to accept the mahogany stain we've chosen to use for the new finish. But that's as far as John's got right now.

I'm impatient to see the secretary done---not only because I think it's going to be a beautiful piece, but also because there's just enough room on the bookcase side for my Dickens collection and perhaps a few extra books, as well. That means I can do away with a bookcase that's taking up space elsewhere and that I will no longer need. :) In addition, the desk side has lots of cubbyholes that will be perfect for tucking away keys, mail, etc.

So I'm keeping my fingers crossed that spring will finally arrive!

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!

Today is Mother's Day, and I'm especially glad to be celebrating it with my own mom this year!

Recently, in honor of Mother's Day, more than one friend has sent me a copy of Temple Bailey's wonderful parable on motherhood. If you aren't familiar with Bailey and her work, you can learn more about her at a number of different sites on the WWW. Her parable, A Mother's Way (often found as A Mother's Walk), has become an inspirational classic, and, I think, beautifully captures the true spirit of motherhood.

To all who are moms---and most particularly to my own mom---Happy Mother's Day!

SO MANY BOOKS, SO LITTLE SPACE!

Like many people who love to read, I own thousands of books. Whenever he sees my collection, my stepdad always teasingly asks me when I’m going to open my library to the public. Although he’s a great reader himself, he doesn’t hang on to books the way I do. No one in my family does. When they’re done reading a book, they’re done. So, unlike me, they don’t have bookcases crammed into every corner of their houses.

My son, Shane, who’s not a big reader, always wants to know when I’m going to get rid of all the books I’ve collected over the years. I suspect that my husband, John, who doesn’t read at all,unless it’s a technical manual, would be happy if I parted company with them, too—because, obviously, they consume a whole lot of space. It also takes a great deal of time to clean all my bookshelves and dust all my books, so I always tackle this task a few bookcases at a time. Yesterday, in between bouts of writing, was one of those days.

Periodically, I have, in fact, attempted to pare down my library. But the truth is that at this point, I’m not sure what else I could bring myself to discard.

Because I’ve always been a relatively organized person, I’ve got my library divided into sections and all my books alphabetized by either author, title, or both, so I know where to find whatever I’m looking for at any given moment.

One large section is devoted to the history of the Celts and Picts, and includes everything from medieval Arthurian literature to Pictish symbology. Several of these books are rare. I searched for well over a decade for one nineteenth-century work on the history of Scotland, which I finally found in a tiny antiquarian bookshop in York. So, needless to say, I’m not giving up any of these books.

Another large section is devoted to esoterica, which, like the history of the Celts and Picts, I’ve studied all my life. There are some rare books in this section, too, so I can’t part with any of them, either.

Then there are my shelves of classics, everything from Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy to Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. This section has a subsection of children’s classics, too. When the movie The Black Stallion came out, my son wanted to know how I knew all about it when I hadn’t even seen it yet. I told him that some of us didn’t need to see the movie, that we had in our childhood read Walter Farley’s entire series of Black Stallion books. Ditto for Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, long before the television show was conceived. How can I get rid of any of these beloved books?

With the advent of the Internet, I really have tried to do something about my reference-book section. With all that information out there on the WWW, do I truly need volumes of books on the arts, history, philosophy, religion, and science, etc.? How about a dozen books on castles? Hmmm. Well, maybe. I mean, I might want to write another medieval romance someday, and who knows what real castles I might want to model my fictional ones on? And what about all those books on the American West? Well, you never know. I might want to write another western romance, too. No, I’d better hang on to all these books, just in case.

So, now, I’m down to my extremely eclectic section of keepers. There’s nothing in this section but modern fiction. I bought all these books new—and some of them are now so old that the cover prices are always a shock when I see them. Now and then, I go through this section to see what I could possibly part with. My son insists I’ll never read any of these books again, so out they should go. But he’s mistaken. I have, in fact, read many of them many times.

Not being choosy about genres, I’m as happy to take a peek inside the Texas Governor’s Mansion created by Billy Lee Brammer in The Gay Place as I am to be chilled to the bone by Minette Walters’s The Ice-House. But of course, I’m especially fond of romances. Like so many romance readers, in addition to the genre classics, I grew up reading authors like Daphne du Maurier, Victoria Holt, Helen MacInnes, Mary Stewart, Phyllis A. Whitney, and dozens of others. One of the wonderful things about having kept all these books by these authors is being able to read them again whenever I want. Each rereading is not only a trip down memory lane for me, but also a fresh journey, because I invariably discover something new about them. So, yes, you guessed it: I’m not going to dispose of them, either.

Which kind of a reader are you? Do you have only a couple of books on your own bookshelves, or if your bookcases ever pulled their bolts from the walls, would you be buried in the avalanche, too? *g*

HECTIC SCHEDULES!

For a number of reasons, I've had a very hectic schedule these past few weeks, which, of course, is one of the last things anyone with fibromyalgia needs. So I'll be glad when things begin to slow down for me again.

The good news is that my mom's surgery for breast cancer went well, and the cancer itself had not spread beyond the lump that was removed from her affected breast. However, understandably, she's been very sore and has suffered some post-operative swelling, which resulted in a trip to the doctor today.

Mom and my stepdad are fortunate to have a number of wonderful friends and neighbors, who've helped out by cooking some meals for them, and one of Mom's friends made a little pillow for her to put under her arm, too, to help ease her post-operative pain. I'm deeply grateful to them all for their assistance, and I know Mom and my stepdad are, also.

In addition to worrying about Mom and trying to be as supportive as I can, I've been immersed in attempting to finish up my latest novel, THE CRYSTAL ROSE. So between that and Mom, everything else has pretty much been set on the back burner for the time being.

Thanks to all of you who've sent your best wishes for Mom's recovery! We both appreciate it!