scenery

I keep my laptop in the kitchen. I can sit at the table and look out the double windows to my right and into the flower bed that sits outside. Today the coneflowers are blooming along with the rose campion, the alliums and the salvia. My liatris has the flowering spikes on it, but is a week or so away from starting to bloom. One of my favorite things is to drink that first cup of coffee, read the paper and glance out the window into the flower bed. In the front beds, the astilbe is in full color and some of the hostas have their flowering spikes ready to go.

Inspiration comes in weird ways. Like the other day when the ice cream truck meandered down our street. I'm old enough to remember when orange pushups were sold off a cooler strapped to the front of a bike. To a kid in Aurora, Ill. those bits of frozen goodness were heaven. Memories flooded through me and then came the scene. A kid sitting on the curb of some suburban street watching an overweight woman get run over by the ice cream truck. Don't know what I'll do with it, if anything, but there it is.

Every so often, okay, probably daily, odd scenes like this pop into my head. For me it often revolves around some memory, some real connection which then morphs or evolves into some fictional event.

Back to the flower beds. I just now had a flash of an old woman sitting on a bucket holding a trowel in a worn gardening gloved hand.