Tag: Monticello

  • Water & Word: Understand and believe

    I’ve been asked why I wanted to write Water & Word, the novel I’ve just completed. Although I’ve attended church most of my life, off and on, I wandered aimlessly in the wilderness of American churches for at least forty years. At some time in the early 2000’s I found a companion in the White…

  • Field Notes: Nuccio’s Nurseries

    In March of this year I was able to offer some assistance to my younger son as he took on landscaping his home in SoCal. He had done the research, drawn up a design, soaked up information from the locals, and was ready to clear out the old, revive the planting beds, and welcome the…

  • Field Notes: Transplanting season

    The meaning of the word is clear. There’s a plant. It’s been planted. Then it needs to move to another location. It’s being “transplanted.” Simple. However, in practice, there’s another word that is more descriptive of the process: “Uprooted.” To be fair, I don’t take this lightly. I know, from practical experience, that the likelihood…

  • Takeaways: Robert Earl Keen

    Macondo, Stonington, CT My introduction to Robert Earl Keen was his 1996 live album No. 2 Live Dinner A spirited performance of “Gringo Honeymoon,” a rowdy ballad tinged with melancholy performed before an appreciative audience hooked me. There’s always something special about hearing singer-songwriters performing their own work. The emotion is personal, the phrasing confident.…

  • Commonplaces

    I acquired journal #1 to jot down ideas for Kind of Plaid, my first novel. I commuted into Boston most weeks but also spent a good deal of time traveling from Boston on project business to places like Spokane and Cincinnati and Wausau, so I had plenty of time to let the “what if?” improvisation…

  • Now What?

    About a year ago I started work on another novel. As that work gained traction this blog was one of the things I simply set aside. We still made visits to both coasts to visit grandkids (and their parents), I still maintained and expanded landscaping operations, I served our little church as Deacon, and I…

  • Gardening chose me

    Before you know what’s happening, you’ve been drawn through the looking glass, hit 88mph in the DeLorean, swallowed the red pill, and entered another dimension. When you go to your local big box home store you unconsciously park near the Garden Center even if you’re only buying drywall screws. Especially if you’re only buying drywall screws.  You have…

  • Fifty shades of shade

    There was a curious, odd-shaped corner of the yard I studied all winter that begged to be rescued from the banality of growing grass. It longed to be free, the kind of free that produces perennials and flowering shrubs. I had some ideas including the perfect color palette. Finally, it was spring. The forsythia did…