Still Growing ...

Listen To The Episode (My segment begins at about 45:00)

This week I'm honored to be featured on "Still Growing", Jennifer Ebeling's wonderful gardening podcast. If you have any interest at all in gardening, do yourself a favor and subscribe to her weekly episodes. They are a great way to catch up on all things horticultural and hear some great interviews with interesting folks in the field.

I chatted with Jennifer a couple months ago in a phone interview for this episode. She was so easy to talk to I had little problem discussing the silly details of my book with appropriate levity. Since then, my life has ... changed. "Changed" is the wrong word, really, but let's not blame language for life's shortcomings. With the death of my brother, I find large parts of me missing or inaccessible. They may return, someday, but for now it is strange to listen to myself speak with such a light heart when it's still, at present, so hard to raise a smile for the world.

I've written many things in my life, in many genres, but I set off on this weird tangent of Gardening Humor thinking that maybe I could make a few people laugh and not take the world so seriously along the way. Now, this mission seems like an uphill struggle going forward. Recently, I've given thought to abandoning the whole thing. I have a good portion of a sequel to 20 Reasons written already, but I don't know how to return to that voice and humor that once came so easily. All those hilarious little absurdities that used to pop up around every corner have since gone scurrying into the dark. So what do I do? Give up?

No. Because it's not what Griffin would want. (Now there's a guy who could make people laugh.) He would joke that I should hurry up and become a famous writer already so my wife and I could quit our jobs and move away from the city to live near his family. When I told him, a lifetime ago, about this interview I was doing for a neat gardening podcast, he was excited and, maybe, I hope, a bit proud of his little brother. I think he'd want me to keep going with this gardening stuff. Either that, or start working on that epic, hard sci-fi trilogy I never wrote. But that sounds exhausting.

So I'll keep writing (whether you all like it or not). It may take a while to navigate the minefield of double meanings, hair-trigger memories, and emotional explosives that lies in my path, but I'll get there. Gardening is, after all, too ridiculous to be ignored for long. I mean, just thinking of rutabagas almost makes me smile.

Almost.