Weeds

I've been out all morning doing spring cleaning, picking up branches, edging, mowing the lawn and weeding the garden.

Weeding is a job I absolutely hate even though I love having a garden. I tend to ignore it... out of sight out of mind, right? Until one day I go out and there is no garden, there is only a large patch of weeds. As I'm standing there, one thought runs through my mind.

I should tear everything out, spray weed killer and then go and hide in the house until everything is dead and I can start over from scratch.

Real mature, I know.

Then I look to the corner where I know all those beautiful lilies I planted last year will come up soon. Or they might be up already and are simply lost among the ugly weeds. I find where the plants should be that my mom dug up from her own garden and gave to me... the Solomon's Seal, the irises and those bright yellow flowers that I love, but can never remember the name of. Somewhere in the mess is the white Bleeding Hearts plant that took me two years to finally find, the Trillium bulbs (my favourite flower) and the black and green Gladiolas that I bought and gave half the bulbs to my sister so we both have the same flower.

And I give in.

I know that no matter how much I don't want to, I'm going to put on my gloves and dig out every last growing thing that I don't want in my garden because there are a precious few things that I do want and I can't give up on them.

I've been thinking about weeds a lot lately because I am alternating between writing a new story (project #3) and working on re-writes for a story I started about a year ago (project #2). I started that project #2 so I could avoid doing re-writes on another story (project #1), promising myself that when I finished the first draft of project #2, I would go back and do my re-writes on project #1. So I finished project #2, my writing group tore it apart about a month ago and I was all ready to go back to project #1.

...and then I started writing project #3.

I know project #1 is absolutely packed full of weeds. Whenever I open the file, I sit there and one horribly familiar thought runs through my mind...

But I also know that there are treasures hidden within that mess, things I love that I don't want to give up on. So maybe when I'm done with my spring cleaning outside, I might open project #1 and read through it once to see if I can see past the weeds.