For those of you following the ongoing saga of our attempts at killing grass (1, 2, 3), we’ve gotten the flower bed cardboarded and mulched.
Before:
After:
Now it’s time to work on the herb plot.
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My phone dinged Thursday when I was out of town for work. It was a text from my husband.
Did you hear about Prince?
I did. I had. A colleague from Minneapolis had gotten the news when we were exploring the Duke Gardens. An appropriate place to receive that kind of news, given the cover art of Purple Rain.
Yes :-(. Purple Rain was my first cassette tape that I bought with my own money.
I remember listening to that tape over and over and over again as a pre-teen: popping open the clear cassette case, hearing the clean scrape of plastic hinges, the satisfying tap of dropping the tape in the carrier, the clack of closing the cassette deck. Depressing the Play button. Pulling the liner notes out, unfolding them, reading every word. Staring starry-eyed at the picture of Prince on the cover while I listened. I don’t remember another cassette tape as vividly as I remember Purple Rain.
Brian took our son to his soccer game yesterday while I worked in the garden. When they returned home, Brian said, “I bought you a present.”
He presented me with Purple Rain.
My first record in our new collection.
I stopped whatever I was doing and sat down with the jacket while Brian put the disk on the turntable and started it spinning. It has probably been 25 years since I’ve listened to Purple Rain in its entirety. You know how when you listen to an album enough times, your mind jumps to the opening notes of the next song when the previous one ends? That still happened. After 25 years, when “Let’s go crazy” ended, “take me with u” queued up in my mind in the silence before it actually began playing. I remembered the words to every song on the album.
I’m listening again now, as I type this, before I go back out in the garden. I’m on Side 1 again for the third time in two days. I can’t help but be moved. Purple Rain is a beautiful gift, both from my husband and from a barrier-breaking artist.
A tribute from my new favorite visual artist, Flora Forager:
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“You know how you can spot a dogwood tree?” I ran my hand down the trunk of one at the Duke Gardens.
“By its bark,” I said. And then giggled. It’s dumb, I know, but it’s one of those things I remember from my ecology classes at the University of Georgia.
Dogwood bark I can identify dogwood trees now, thanks to that joke, and ours is finally blooming. When the cherries, pears, and redbuds were blossoming, I couldn’t figure out why our dogwood wasn’t full of flowers too. Shouldn’t it come early with the other blooming trees?
In my home state of Georgia, I remember dogwoods being my favorite part of spring. They were the only flowering tree I knew, and when I was in college in Athens, where trees stripped bare in winter, dogwoods flowered before any green reappeared in the woods. I’d drive the three and a half hours from the foothills of the Appalachians to my home on the Georgia coast, and all through the forest, in the otherwise brown understory, I would see small trees dotted with white blossoms. Dogwoods.
I photographed our dogwood here in Virginia during the time of the cherry, pear, and redbud blooms. The dogwood flowers were small and green.
Dogwood flower, April 2 I thought they’d be peaking the same time as the other flowering trees, so I wondered, Do we have a different kind of dogwood? I had never watched a dogwood flower up close before, so I didn’t know if that was all they’d do, or if the flowers would grow.
White dogwood flower, April 23 The flowers grew. They took their time. Over a period of three weeks, they slowly spread their celadon petals, and they deepened to a rich white.
Maybe I’m remembering wrong about the earliness of dogwoods in Georgia. Maybe they seemed first because they were only. Either way, I love that we have one in our garden. I’m sitting with it now, in fact.
Birds trill, a breeze moves the branches, white clouds drift in a blue sky, and we have a flowering dogwood tree.
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I hate feeling disappointed in people, especially when I know they have huge potential but don’t take initiative, they don’t motivate towards their talents or skills, or simply when there’s work that needs to be done and they don’t take action to do it.
After reading Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, I understand more about motivation, and particularly that motivation must come from within for a person to be productive or achieve any kind of success. I always wondered, though: is there a way to help someone become more self-motivated?
It doesn’t seem possible to inspire intrinsic motivation from the outside. That doesn’t make any sense. When I read Drive, I wrote about the seeming paradox that though I am driven from the inside, I still appreciate recognition from the outside; it seems equally paradoxical that self-motivation could be nurtured via external forces.
Then I listened to the latest episode of Freakonomics Radio: How to Be More Productive. In the episode, they once again touch on the recurring theme of internal vs. external motivation, and they take it a step further to talk about how to help someone become self-motivated:
Give praise and recognition based on factors that are in that person’s control. Use language that focuses on actions and verbs — “You worked hard” — rather than on traits or states of being — “You are smart.”
The praise that focuses on action tells the person: you controlled that, you made good choices, you kicked ass. The praise that focuses on a trait tells the person: you lucked out with your genes, you had no control over that, your choices make no difference.
As Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business says in the podcast:
DUHIGG:What we’ve found is that self-motivation and motivation in general seems to rely on believing like we’re in control.
DUBNIR: OK, so the implication is that there’s a certain kind of compliment or praise that is more powerful or that leads to higher productivity, yes?
DUHIGG: That’s exactly right. What we know is that you can train people to believe that they’re in control of their own life, and more importantly, to get them addicted to that kind of pleasant sensation that kind of comes from being in control.
I am eager to start thinking this way when I praise our children, and also as we think about rocognizing high performers at work. It’s a subtle difference in phrasing, but I can see how it makes a huge difference in the way we see ourselves, and our role in our own lives.
This was a really juicy podcast. I highly recommend it if you are interested in productivity in your own life.
For the month of April, I will publish a 10-minute free write each day. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. This one is from the Daily Post one-word prompt, Disappointment. Trying to get back into the writing habit.
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I drove to Durham, North Carolina yesterday to meet up with co-workers who are here for their team meetup. As soon as I arrived, I picked up a text message that the group was leaving in 15 minutes to go to the Duke gardens — did I want to join?
I dropped my bag in my room, grabbed my camera, and met them in the lobby to ride over together.
The gardens were stunning.
Narcissus flower (daffodil) 
Azaleas 
Garden path 
Hydrangeas 
Phlox 
In the quiet shade 
Hidden ginger flowers I didn’t get much work done yesterday, but I sure enjoyed these flowers, and the time I got to spend with my colleagues.
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As a family, we’ve gotten into several series that the kids really loved. We like to get pizza on Friday nights and watch something together. First was the BBC’s Merlin (which the kids adored), then Robin Hood (also BBC), then the BBC’s Sherlock.
The kids had loved Merlin, but once we watched Sherlock — everything else was forgotten. At least for our son.
After we watched all the Sherlock episodes, our son was lost. He loves Sherlock, and is even reading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. He didn’t know what to do with himself when the show was over. I’m pretty sure he knows the release date of the next episode.
We tried other shows — Arrow, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D — but they didn’t really stick. Finally, our son came home from school one Friday asking about Dr. Who. We ordered a pizza that night and queued up episode one.
As the show began, our 12 year old son said, “Oooh! BBC! It’s going to be good.”
Our kids are now Dr. Who fans. Somehow we allowed them to convince us last night — on a school night — to watch it. We had gotten takeout for dinner and our son said, “If I take a shower early, and we don’t have to cook or clean, we would have time…”
So last night, after soccer, swimming, and Five Guys burgers and grilled cheese, we curled up on the couch together, each under half a blanket, yanking and tucking until it was equally shared, and watched Dr. Who.
For the month of April, I will publish a 10-minute free write each day using a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Trying to get back into the writing habit. Thank you to Little Miss Fabulousness for the prompt “1/2 a blanket.”
