I have spent hours this spring covered head to foot in dust, tiny branches, and dirt.

I love to garden.

To me, gardening is dirt therapy.

If I’m upset or stressed or jittery or anxious, I like to dig in the dirt. I like to tear up pesky weeds and plant pretty flowers.

My garden is far from perfect, but it always gives me the perfect place to cool my brain off, settle any prickly emotions I’m dealing with, and focus on one thing: Making things better.

There is so much in life that I can’t make better. Don’t ask me for my list because it will go on forever and it will get boring and tedious and you will see the dark shadows hiding inside my frazzled brain.

But even an hour working in my garden will make it look better and make me feel better.

When I garden I often get ideas for my books and characters. Sometimes they’ll pop in my head when I’m standing near my pink magnolia – the setting, the conflict, or who the main character is deep down, not the person she shows everyone else because that’s the person everyone wants to see.

Sometimes it’s a plot problem and, voila, while I’m holding up a worm, I know how to fix it.

Sometimes I’m ripping up weeds and I’ll figure out what needs to be ripped out of my book.

I’ve figured out who is going to die in my books when gardening. That can be a sad reckoning but I simply jump on a shovel and I know that that’s the way it’s gotta be.

When I’ve got the hedge trimmer roaring, I’ll think about word counts and goals and what I need to do to get my books written.

When I’m yanking out mint that grows like a sneaky weed, I sometimes think about the blonde woman with a temper who gave it to me. I liked her, but she later pulled a gun on the woman she was living with who sprinted down to my house like lightning to call the police.

Yep. Mint makes me think of guns and sirens, but it also makes me think of, for some reason, annoying people who won’t go away, and I wrestle it right out of the ground like the curse that it is.

I’ll talk to myself and often talk out loud while wandering amidst my yellow lilies and pink cherry tree. I like talking to myself and I don’t like being interrupted when I’m having my own two-way conversations.

Now and then I’ll think of someone who has ticked me off when I start lopping off pine tree branches with my clipper. That makes me sound dangerous in a botanical sort of way. I assure you I am not.

When someone lied about me last year, it was so painful and made me so angry, I cried into my rhododendrons. Luckily, later, while cleaning out dead leaves from a garden bed, I decided that I would give her condescending, judgmental, and patronizing personality to one of my characters.

I can’t stand that character, you’ll hate her too, and yet the inspiration came straight out of dead leaves.

There, that is the mean side of me. The vengeful side. But who wants to read newsletters by people who claim perfection? That would be so dreary.

When I’m cleaned off and don’t have cobwebs or spiders hanging from my hair, I’ll journal in my garden. I’ll grab my computer and write my books, staring at the pink magnolia and purple butterfly trees, the lanky columbines, the delicate violas and my late mother’s burgundy clematis.

They bring me peace.

Writing and gardening. In my life, those two go together like dirt and worms.