The Best Office

I am tremendously fortunate to be able to do the things I love best: writing and gardening.  Writing only seems like work when I'm assigned a piece that I really don't want to do but need the money, and gardening only seems like work when it seems like it was assigned by the devil on a hotter-than-hell August afternoon when transplanting won't wait another day. Maybe because I've already put it off since July. Did I mention that if you look up procrastinator in the dictionary there is a picture of me?

I digress.  My home office in the summertime is our downstairs guest room. It's a very cool retreat from the heat and humidity of summer, but too cold to work there in the winter, even with a heater at my feet. Our home is a split-level ranch on three acres of mostly wooded land, and my office window is eye level with the flowerbeds in front of the house, providing a wonderful, ever-changing display all summer. Right now I'm looking at bright orange daylilies, dusty pink foxglove that a hummingbird just visited, deep magenta sweet william and pale lilac spider wort.  Just a few weeks ago it was pink columbine, cornflower-blue knapweed and white bleeding heart.  It can be hard to concentrate on writing when I look out just in time to see the sun glinting on a dewy spiderweb or a mouse passing through.  And if that's not hard enough, opening the window makes the air as sweet as a dream.  A bunch of chocolate mint is just out of sight, but not out of scent range, and the sweet smell of the spring hyacinth has the power to scent my entire office.

Even when it looks like I'm just daydreaming out the window, my mind is actually hard at work. I find these times to be some of my most productive. It's as if the scent and the scene clear my mind of those irritating bits of useless information that put up roadblocks when I'm trying to concentrate.   This morning, as I watched a honeybee busily visit each flower of the sweet william, my mind was on  how I could work out a passage in my novel that has seemed impossible for well over a week.  Just like that, it came to me. 

Soon the purple bee balm will bloom, probably at the same time as the pink oriental lilies I planted last fall.  I had to move the Stargazer lilies that were close by--as beautiful as they are to look at, the scent is just too much.  When they're in full bloom, you can smell them anywhere on our land. 

Yes, I am indeed blessed to be able to enjoy two of the things I most love at the same time.  Maine summers are far too short and in September I'll move my office upstairs where I look at a wall.  Even if I stayed down here in the guestroom I'd still be looking at a wall--a wall of snow. (Insert shiver here)