Some geese coursed through Columbia Heights as I lay, cheek down like a restrained patient on my little bed. The dogs, giddy at wilderness come true, barked well past their visit.

And so, after a trip to see my brother in Wyoming, I’m moving to Downeast, Maine, to my family’s century-old cabin on a lake in the truest woods I know. If I bathe, it will be on a rock and with fish. If I’m awake after dark, I will have a small flame to carry. If I touch anything, I’ll be tracing private property, not rented space, but land so dense and personal you can only rise up from it.

In weeding a garden, if you wait too long, you’re liable to have so much work to do that your momentum bowls over the actual flowers. Some flowers root so closely to weeds that you can’t take one without the other. Morning glory, blades of grass, dandelions aside, in Maine I’ll be in soil years worked over. I’ll have no garden there, but tall, hard pines with root systems meant for sitting and writing in. I’ll net the beginnings of a book, that ancient dream — I am an old fighting dog eating through chain link as if the soft bones of wild game.

All week, I’ve been having salads with lead-laced romaine I sawed out of my garden with a bread knife (the soil lab came back roughly amenable to eating). While the zinnias bore flowers like bright, frozen, textured spit fanned out at the tips of their stems, and while one cherry tomato swells out, a bunch of tightly rounded veins at the end of a vine in a cover of leaves, these benchmarks demonstrate nothing but a late blooming spring. 

Though I am going to miss the zucchini and tomato harvest, though I would have been proud to eat them, I have been given the chance to grow something heirloom, to write a book about the land’s history and my own. I have to leave the fledgling garden behind, ferret out of the dirt yard, and pioneer past roofscapes towards the simple beginning of things.

Carolyn Petri

My days begin: coffee, water garden, breakfast, write. I can never get these straight. I look out the window at the dry, yellow parsley and put down some toast. I drink enough coffee to sink a ship. Eventually, I pull watering buckets out from the coat closet.

The diminishing hopefulness of my vegetables fits with my prevailing view of the world: pitch stories, prep soil; write and sow; suffer the results. My plants are standing, but in a questionable bed. After the various keys, pieces of glass, flattened cans and sheets of plastic I pulled out in the beginning, I can almost count on a poisoned harvest. I currently have a thick row of romaine that I water every day and cannot conscionably eat. I have begun four articles and have spoken to zero editors. Writing to freelance before pitching the story might as well be growing food before testing its soil for lead and arsenic.

Last night at close to midnight, I cooked tofu with garlic, thyme and paprika. Earlier in the day I made my own ice cream, roasted potatoes with fresh rosemary, baked a dozen banana muffins, mixed cole slaw and sautéed apples in cinnamon, sugar and butter. While I perceive writing success, and while my lettuce gleams and looks crisp, my culinary feats (like my freelance delusions) are still an alloy of others’ work and my dreams. As I eat, I think about Nabokov: "The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible."

The other day I shipped off a soil sample to an agricultural analysis center in Richmond. And I met a fellow freelancer: "If I know my story’s air tight, I just write it. If not, I pitch."  My city soil and journalistic naïveté warrant heavier pitching, prepping, less cooking, less resting on the laurels of my hopes.

My days begin with these lessons from my garden. Without them, how would I learn to write? I am reading The Art of Truth, an anthology of contemporary creative nonfiction. The first section consists of excerpts from seven writers’ journals, and most of them end up in the natural world:

May Sarton, wrote mostly on her lesbian experience, but logs her back yard in Journal of a Solitude:

After another week of lecturing, home at last to melting snow! There are tiny bunches of snowdrops out by the granite front steps, and a few crocuses blooming between the spruce boughs…I saw a huge woodchuck out by the barn. Has he already eaten the first tender shoots of hollyhock? Last year he devoured them all.

I like this, even though it is tedious and personal. Right now, I am looking at kinked up daisies in a jar on my kitchen table. Cut flowers, quotations from journals from lives of writers. I do my best to feed them, but out of context almost everything dies.

Gretel Ehrlich, Wyoming rancher, writes herself a mineral in From the Journals:

If the bicameral mind is two very different things, then the heart is also-like the towering split rock through which a creek patiently drives…Walking there today, on my birthday, I see that a huge chunk of ice has dropped out of the middle of the frozen cascade, leaving black, wet rock exposed. And so it is with me.

Interrogating the natural world seems as necessary as living itself. These writers are severely connected to the weather, animals, trees. George Dennison wrote about the education of poor children , but in his journal, Temple, he kept a litany of weather patterns:

The winter began early…Spring began early…Temple Stream floods almost every year, often during the winter thaws…There are fat buds on all the trees (they began as little swellings in the depths of the winter), and the poplars, some of them, already have tiny leaves.

Even John Cheever (more alcoholic than naturalist) who kept diligent (presumptuous?) track of his life by typewriter, winds up by the garden:

I sit on the terrace, watching the clouds pass over, watching the night fall. What is the charm of these vaporous forms, why do they remind me of love and serenity? But look, look. There is no glass in his hand. Is it under the chair? Nope. Is it hidden in the flower bed? No, no. There is, for the moment, no glass within his reach.

Watching. I do that. I look out the window. Today is sunny. There are birds. Two days ago, I got caught in a rain storm on my bicycle, eyes half shut like an infant all the way home. A friend of mine working in law said, "Storm? What storm? Is it over?"

In my bathrobe, with just a bit of misfortune (clothes in the drier), I embraced my position and typed back, "Not yet." I would tell him when the weather cleared, when he could head home, and wondered, looking at the punished romaine outside my front window, if this natural world or my writing of it would ever conjure that ever-distant bed of accomplishment.

Carolyn Petri

I have this great writing life.

I have this great writing life where I actually produce sentences by breathing, mostly. If not, then by eating or going in to and then back out of rooms.

I have a few electronic and physical folders where I put nonce phrases. The slowest, most personal mid-week hours produce them. It is just like the plants in my garden: from a barren, cakey bed (otherwise fertile, if mismanaged) sprouts appear. No thanks to me, they just must (earth, water, sun, seed). When I notice that one has broken through the ground, I play a sound in my head, audioizing growth: crumpling paper bags or a limp celery stalk crushed under foot. My sharp pen briefly dragging across soft, cotton paper.

Muddling through, I often water my garden at night. Equally bad, I tend to look for writing work in the fridge. When the silence reminds me that I am alone, just two eyes and stocked shelves, I decide to get on with other chores to clear my day for work. I get that reading done. I make sure I’ve taken a shower. I wipe down the ever-filthy bathroom sink…

Ick. Clean.

At the end of the day, hands on my hips, I tell people (if I see them) that I am pursuing a writing career. Then I sleep and start over exactly the same the next day. In bed, I tell myself I am surviving.

"I’m worried about you," someone said.

So, out of thin air, I decided to write or die. And lately, I’ve been watering the garden before the sun comes around.

Pulling together a writing life and a productive garden requires a few well-documented habits. On writing, Annie Dillard will tell you about them, or Natalie Goldberg or Stephen King. On gardening, I follow Barbara Damrosch and my father.

If you’re interested in either or both of these struggles, unpolished, you can follow this blog.

This year, the number of active blogs approached a plateau. I find the stasis inviting, like rubble, a flushed toilet, trees at mid-summer foliage — these and the blogosphere are the welcome mats of aftermath. So’s the wake of my writing life.

Carolyn Petri