San Antonio averages 300 days of sunshine a year. Last Friday wasn’t one of them. The white patch in the chair is ice. My patio is somewhere under the lake. The scene begs for cliché. When hail hell freezes over. When all hail hell breaks loose. Or to paraphrase Steinbeck, “I’ve lived in good climate, it bores the hail hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate.”

This isn’t the first time I’ve disagreed with Steinbeck.

Yep. It’s August 2. Right on time. The first moonflower of the season bloomed a little before 8:00 p.m. Last March, out of an entire package of seeds, four sprouted. The odds of a bloom were lousy, but at the top of an arched trellis–a gift.

The family got crafty this afternoon and put together an outdoor chandelier over our patio table. On a pot rack, we hung a string of solar star lights, a few birdhouses the girls painted at a friend’s birthday party, a ceramic fish Cherry made at school, and a fish-shaped clothes hanger that was too cool to throw away. The prisms were collected from a light fixture, trashed from my drama teacher days, and beads were strung on stainless steel wire, an artistic staple around our house. It’s creative, and we made a memory too.

I think the place I’ve learned the most about writing is my own backyard. I don’t mean that in the Dorothy, click your heels and say there’s no place like home, way. I’m fairly stuck right now. I know what has to be done, but it’s really hard. It means inserting stuff in a couple of million places. It’s right. But not easy.

What do I do when I know something is going to be just awful? I stall. This morning I realized the herb garden, where I have a carpet of creeping thyme growing between pavers has grown out of control. So, I grabbed the hedge clippers and started hacking–searching through the turf for concrete blocks while trying not to split a buried soaker hose that makes the whole thing possible.

My back and hands are sore, but an hour later, the hardscape is visible. The soaker hose is on and the bird in the nest above is chirping at me in high alert. Why is this about writing? It reminds me that, no matter how bad the task, the reward for chopping back the thyme is an improved story. Everything must reinforce the snapshot of the landscape. If a stray lambs ear–despite its feathery beauty–falls out of the line, I clip it back. Is this what Hemingway meant by killing your darlings?

That’s when the garage sales started. For three consecutive weeks, junk spilled out of the house and onto the lawn. It was obvious. They organized garages by taking the clutter home with them. At the end of the third week, a driver dodging a bookshelf, ran into a tree, cracking the largest limb into the street. Another neighbor called code compliance.

The garage experts are gone now, leaving a pile of unsellables by the curb. I made this out of some of their garbage.