It’s spring in Texas again, the fourth we’ve experienced in this house. And every year, like clockwork, the rains have come. The front field fills with water and frogsong consumes the night.

The growing season starts earlier down here than it did in Utah. That means we can actually start planting early parts of our garden, though we’ve missed the boat in years past. I guess the habit of waiting for that last, deceptive frost to kill off your plants finally took hold. Now we actually have to remind ourselves to get the plants in the ground sooner.

So, this weekend we took advantage of a few rainless days and got a good head start on the season. 

I didn’t get as much writing done as I wanted to, but we did plant a few tomatoes, a few peppers, and got a couple of the kids’ garden boxes going. Princess wanted to grow some flowers, so I built a special flower bed for her and got it installed in front of the large chicken coop. Then we headed to the store to buy some nice perennial flowers to fill it with.

I spent some time mucking out some of the chicken areas, but there’s still a lot more to do. One nice thing about the chickens is that they do produce a lot of high quality compost fodder! We’re actually starting to get a lot more eggs, too. The Delawares have started laying and I love seeing their dark brown eggs fill the basket.

Tara’s wisteria got a good pruning. She did a great job with the saw, all I did was point out the limbs I thought she should trim. We got it staked up with a nice post and fixed it to the coop. It which was much easier than I expected due to how damp the ground is right now. I’m really looking forward to seeing (and smelling!) those beautiful, fragrant flowers bloom this year. I think it’ll be amazing!

Our oldest has decided to head off to the University of Utah this next school year, so I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about a possible move in the future. Chances are, our second oldest will probably go there as well, so moving back home seems like a decent idea. Of course, it’s never quite that easy.

Things at work have been crazy lately. Our team just lost another member, so we’re now down three bodies with ever-increasing workloads. I guess that’s the way of things. I honestly see it getting worse before it gets any better, but I suppose we can hope for the best. If that doesn’t work… well, I don’t really have anything else. Haha! To the grindstone!

I think I’ve made some pretty decent progress with my stories lately. The books are coming along well. Final Hope is inching closer and closer to being done and I’m very surprised with how many words I’ve been able to write on my other project.

I’m not ready to reveal too much about it right now, but it’s something I’m working on with my second-oldest. Kind of a shared world project. We did some serious planning this weekend and captured a lot of good ideas. Since we’re using Scrivener as our writing medium, I was able to write all the notes in the Research folder in my project and then copy them over to his.

I can’t say enough how proud I am of this kid. He’s really been working hard to get his words and it’s pretty inspirational. I mean, it’s certainly pushed me to sit down and get my words done. I’ll be sitting on the couch after dinner, ready to slink off and burn some time before bed and he’ll boot up the laptop. That’s when I know I’ve got to show up and put down some words. So I do. We both sit and type away, chiseling out our stories one word at a time.

Maybe Spring has a habit of jumping out at me, year after year, but writing is much different. It’s the slow burn that does it, at least for me anyway. The biggest part is showing up and putting in the work. 

That’s how stories are made.