A Writer’s Garden—Finding #Peace in Mother Nature during #COVID-19 by Carole Ann Moleti

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A Writer's Garden, Carole Ann Moleti, COVID-19 Garden, Fantasy, flowers, Garden blog, Nature, paranormal, Unfinished Business Series

Welcome to A Writer’s Garden where writers who are gardeners or just love gardens will be sharing their garden and flower stories, as well as a bit about their writing. Today’s writer/gardener guest is Carole Ann Moleti, who is talking about how her garden helped get her through her COVID-19 experiences this year.

Welcome, Carole, and thank you for your front-line service during this global pandemic.

This past winter was more like an endless spring of damp, dreary days with flooding rains. The camellia bloomed, blood red, during the final days of March.

Camelia

That was right about the time those of us in health care raced in blindfolded, with one hand tied behind our backs battle to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.

In those early days, adrenaline pumping, I’d return home from what was supposed to be an 8-hour shift that lasted 10-12 hours. I’d pull into my driveway, and Mother Nature would welcome me home to my garden.

The world was silent to human ears, with New York City on PAUSE and battling a killer virus. But, like before we dominated the Earth, the flora and fauna breathed deeply of the fresh air and thrived.

By March 27, the chirping robins had returned, and were building their nests in the trees. The camellia was fading but I cut a bumper crop of daffodils and made nosegays with the grape hyacinths, which brightened my mood.

Daffodils and forsythia (upper right)

 

 

grape hyacinths and heuecera

 

 

 

 

My tulips did not fare well, with only four pale purple blooms, but the forsythia was a wall of bright yellow. Squirrels darted about. And there was not a single human sound, other than my waterproof clogs tapping the slate before I left them at the back door.

The streets were deserted, but nature didn’t care. There was no traffic, less smog, more parking and the sunrises and sunsets over the South Brooklyn waterfront conveyed peace and serenity moments before I entered the chaos that loomed beyond the door I was about to scan myself through.

May was soon gone, lost amongst 60-hour workweeks, and I never realized that Memorial Day weekend had passed. By June, the azaleas and irises were spent, and the mountain laurel, rhododendrons, and peonies were finally blooming.

peonies

The hydrangeas are in leaf. Who knows when their blossoms will emerge in this crazy year? I finally planted my vegetable garden.

hydrangea

The most amazing gift was the frog. We have lived in this house for thirty years. My young son had once hoped for a frog or toad, just like the ones in the legendary books by Arnold Lobel. We even had a toad house in hopes of attracting one, or both, but had no success.

Frog

As if it was waiting for curfew and COVID 19 restrictions to be lifted on June 8, as I walked past the pond, a frog leaped across my path. I thought it might be my imagination, but later I spied it on a rock. The next day, its eyes peeped out of the murky water, then disappeared. Hopefully it is here to stay. We all need health and peace and happiness.

Mother Nature has issued a stern rebuke. Human habits are driving many species to extinction, and we might be next unless we pay attention to the environment and take meaningful action to avert climate change.

We learned a lot about COVID 19 this spring, and about the best and the worst of human spirit. We’ll be better prepared for the next round, but hopefully the Earth can recover and we can avert another viral pandemic and violence epidemic.

Mother Nature spoke to me loud and clear this year, without saying a word. I just had to PAUSE to open my eyes and my heart to hear the message through the silence.

 

About the Writer/Gardener

Carole Ann Moleti lives and works as a nurse-midwife in New York City, thus explaining her fascination with all things paranormal, urban fantasy, and space opera. Her nonfiction focuses on health care, politics, and women’s issues. But her first love is writing science fiction and fantasy because walking through walls is less painful than running into them.

Excerpts of Carole’s memoir, Someday I’m Going to Write a Book: Diary of an Urban Missionary range from the sweet and inspirational in A Quilt of Holidays to the edgy and irreverent in Not Your Mother’s Book: On Being a Woman. She has a essay in the acclaimed Shifts anthology, https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01CB4XEIM/

and one in the forthcoming Impact: Personal Portraits of Activism due out September 2020.

Carole’s work has appeared in a variety of literary and speculative fiction venues. Short stories set in the world of her novels are featured in several of the Ten Tales anthologies. The Unfinished Business Series, a three volume paranormal romance, was published by Soulmate.

 

 

Social Media Links

Amazon:  Twitter @petitemeetstree  Website: Facebook

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

#Nature #flowers  Unfinished Business Series #fantasy# paranormal

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A Writer’s Garden–In the Garden Retreat with Carole Ann Moleti

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A Writer's Garden, Carole Ann Moleti, Garden blog, Garden Retreat, Unfinished Business paranormal romance series

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Welcome to A Writer’s Garden where writers who are gardeners or just love gardens will be sharing their garden and flower stories, as well as a bit about their writing.

Today’s guest is writer/gardener Carole Ann Moleti. She’ll be talking about her writing retreat. Welcome, Carole!

 

When sitting on the beach, with the water lapping over the sand, kites drifting in the breeze, my inspiration and creative energies surge. Thirteen years ago, when I first got serious about creative writing, I’d hoped to make enough money to quit my job and buy a beachside retreat. I dreamed of being able to write uninterrupted by daily life, and to be able to invite other authors to join me. Of course, I planned to pay for all this by writing a bestselling series or two.

It had never been easy to break into writing, but the seismic changes in the publishing industry took authors from a point where agents, editors, and publishing houses would only accept perfectly formatted, typed manuscripts by mail, to an environment where paper is obsolete and writers are at the mercy of electronic publishers and monopolies that have rendered authorship for most to a hobby that barely covers expenses.

So, I continued to work the day job, which often includes nights and weekends, juggling home, and family responsibilities while trying to write. And I continued my second favorite past time: gardening. Every summer for as long as I can recall, I’ve spent a week or two on Cape Cod. Words flow as I wander the beach at dawn, dictating a scene with the call of the gulls as accompaniment. I linger after morning yoga, staring at a blue horizon that meets the bay. Waves lap onto the shore, and inspiration strikes. I rush home to get it all down.

One of the best parts about gardening, and writing, is when seeds germinate and spring to life. Drab winter deadheads are trimmed, branches pruned, soiled tilled and suddenly, everything turns green, blossoms and grows. I completed the Unfinished Business Series: A paranormal ghost story romance set in Brewster, Massachusetts.

This year, thanks to the day job, a stroke of luck, and karmic timing, my beachside cottage became a reality. Like a tangled first draft manuscript, the neglected lot sported dead and dying trees, choking the life out of each other, threatening to bring the house down. The perennial garden was a tangle, the rose garden was over run with thorny privet and a thicket of weeds.

Garden trees before

Garden before

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My husband and I flagged the trees that had a chance, and found a landscaper to remove the rest, along with privet that was strangling everything around it. And this spring, he, two of our friends and myself spent many days of raking, bagging, pruning, digging, weeding, tilling, ad infinitum. Like the pearls that emerge from an edited manuscript, there were many surprises: spring bulbs around the house and wildflowers poking through the grass thanks to newfound light and air. We unearthed a stone wall garden bed, birdhouses, and added a new garden bench.

We planted more roses, and a “blue garden” of hydrangeas, and day lilies that will bloom next spring and every year there after.

hydrangeas

 

 

 

 

 

 

roses

 

 

 

 

 

 

Best yet, the house emerged from behind a shroud of darkness and the perennials did not have to fight the weeds.

Cottage front yard after

It’s been fourteen years this May since I began creative writing, and my new “writer’s garden” has been planted, and my latest manuscript: a contemporary Western romance, is well on its way to completion.

 

About the Writer/Gardener:

Carole Ann Moleti has been gardening since she was old enough to remember. She loves being surrounded by the sounds of nature, any body of water, fountains, and waterfalls. You can learn more about her at http://caroleannmoleti.com/

Carole’s work has appeared in a variety of literary non fiction and speculative fiction venues. The Unfinished Business Series: A sensual Cape Cod Paranormal Romance is set near the beautiful beaches Brewster, Massachusetts.

http://www.caroleannmoleti.com/the-unfinished-business-series/  

Warning to readers of sweet romance: these book may contain sensual love scenes.

A Writer’s Garden–Memories Are Part of A Garden’s Treasures by Carol Ann Moleti

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A Writer's Garden, Carole Ann Moleti, Catherine Castle's garden blog, garden memories, Garden Treasures

Welcome to A Writer’s Garden where writers who are gardeners or just love gardens will be sharing their garden and flower stories, as well as a bit about their writing gardens—aka their books.

 Today’s guest writer/gardener is Carole Ann Moleti. Carole will be talking about Gardens and Memories. Welcome, Carole!

 

Memories are Part of a Gardens Treasure

 

Gardens never forget their gardeners past. Secrets are buried, and sometimes never unearthed, or trampled by someone who doesn’t understand or care about their significance. But the garden will speak its truths and tributes to those willing to listen.

The seventh anniversary of my father’s death was June 11, and I spent the entire month before tending his garden. For as long as I can remember, I’d followed Daddy around as he planted flowers and vegetables, fertilized rosebushes with dead fish he hadn’t used for bait, pruned trees and, trained vines. He dug a pond, and sculpted a waterfall out of stones he’d gathered. Over the years we had fish, turtles, and frogs in that pond. And when my parents moved to a house with a bigger yard years later, he dug Three Bridges Pond by hand. Unfortunately it was filled in after his death, partially because I think my mother couldn’t cope with seeing it there without him puttering around. During his final years, without maintenance, the garden was neglected as we all attended to him–and to my mother.

The empty pigeon coop now stores garden tools instead of his beloved birds. I love the feeling of touching the latches, as his hands once did.

And the handcrafted door with the half moon cut that fell off the hinges of his storage bin, along with a rickety Adirondack style garden planter, are now features in my garden, so I can feel close to him every day.

My Father’s Day gift to him every year is to make sure his garden is as beautiful as he would have made it. I took every stone from the waterfall he’d build for Three Bridges Pond and created borders for all the flower gardens. (image at top of post) I’ve weeded, pruned back, and planted new perennials. I’ve fertilized and mulched, and planted new borders along the driveway, daylilies, Hosta, and grasses along the roadway fence. I could hear him complaining about littering while I cleaned up debris tossed from passing cars. And he very clearly told me to “let it go, give your mother a break, and take care of her,” when, overcome with emotion, I sat down where the pond used to be and sobbed, telling him how sorry I was that it was gone–and that he was too.

 

About the Writer/Gardener

Carole Ann Moleti has been gardening since she was old enough to remember. She loves being surrounded by the sounds of nature, any body of water, fountains, and waterfalls. You can learn more about her at http://caroleannmoleti.com/

Carole Ann Moleti lives and works as a nurse-midwife in New York City, thus explaining her fascination with all things paranormal, urban fantasy, and space opera. Her nonfiction focuses on health care, politics, and women’s issues. But her first love is writing science fiction and fantasy because walking through walls is less painful than running into them.

Carole’s work has appeared in a variety of literary and speculative fiction venues Short stories set in the world of her novels are featured in several of the Ten Tales anthologies. The Unfinished Business Series: A Cape Cod Paranormal Romance is set near the beautiful beaches Brewster, Massachusetts.

Excerpts of Carole’s memoir, Someday I’m Going to Write a Book: Diary of an Urban Missionary range from the sweet and inspirational in A Quilt of Holidays to the edgy and irreverent in Not Your Mother’s Book: On Being a Woman.

 

 

 

 

 

A Writer’s Garden with Author Carole Ann Moleti

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A Writer's Garden, Carole Ann Moleti, Catherine Castle’s gardening blog, Garden blog, hostas, paranormal romance, pictures of hostas, pruning, Storm Watch, trimming, Unfinished Business paranormal romance series

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Today, we have gardener/author Carole Ann Moleti on A Writer’s Gardening with some beautiful pictures oh her hostas, and talking about garden clutter and getting rid of it. Welcome, Carole Ann

Thanks, Catherine,.

In gardening, as in writing, I find it difficult to get rid of things. The clutter sneaks up and gets out of control. I just can’t discard “my darlings” be they plants taking over a plot, escaping a border, or clever phrases and lush description concealing a storyline. So I reduce, reuse, and recycle everything.

A couple of years ago, my Black-Eyed Susans took over the front yard, and I culled several of them to fill in my mother’s flowerbeds. I edited more than 20,000 words out of my upcoming novel: flowery sections of prose that smothered the storyline. They’re being used as teasers bonus content for my newsletter subscribers.

This year, the Hostas are choking out the groundcover and daylilies. They’re dangling over the border onto the patio and into the driveway. My colorful accents have become a monotonous behemoth. So I grabbed a shovel and filled about fifteen pots with the lush foliage, giving most of them away to friends, saving some for our upstate cottage that needs things the deer do not favor (I let them sample the corn and crab apples).

Now the sculptures can be seen, the dead leaves hiding under the leaves are composted, and the Cana lilies are poking through the canopy. Next week, I’ll take a spade to the massive pinwheels of color spinning out of control in the front yard before they roll over the lilies of the valley and the remaining Black Eyed Susans.

My new novel, Storm Watch, the third book in the Unfinished Business Series of paranormal romances, is being released on June 28. Back to work.

 

About the Author:

 Gardener/writer Carole Ann Moleti has been gardening since she was old enough to remember. Her favorite things about gardening are the sense of peace and oneness with nature, bees buzzing, butterflies alighting, the fragrance of flowers, the field mice, frogs, and toads. When she’s not gardening, Carole is writing in a variety of genres including spicy paranormal romance, gritty urban fantasy, memoir, and nonfiction that range from the sweet and sentimental to the snarky and irreverent. You can see her portfolio at http://amzn.to/23KBru8 and find out more about her at http://caroleannmoleti.com/

 

 

 

 

 

Through A Writer’s Garden with Carole Ann Moleti

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Author Catherine Castle's garden blog, Carole Ann Moleti, fishpond, garden memories, Pond Memories, romance author Carole Ann Moleti

Pond Memories

Daddy’s Pond

My earliest memories are of gardening with my father. Our home was on the Bronx waterfront, with the beach as a backyard, so there wasn’t much space.

Daddy in the backyard

Daddy carved out a corner for a pear tree and another for a fishpond, complete with lilies, a turtle, and croaking frogs that found it on their own. We had a small vegetable garden and he planted roses for my mother. I once watched him dig trenches around the rose bushes and bury fish he’d caught off our dock as “fertilizer.” Thinking about it now grosses me out, but at the time I was transfixed.

Our Pond with some of Daddy’s statuary

I grew up helping him tend the outdoor spaces, as well as the indoor garden, with a miniature railway he created in a greenhouse that looked out over Long Island Sound. Storms took a heavy toll and there was always a lot of clean up and repair needed every spring.

When he fell ill, my husband and children teamed up to help my mother take care of the garden for him. He’d watch from his wheelchair, not saying much–as was always his way. I wondered what he was thinking–and worried it was too painful for him.

But the last day he and I spent outside together was an Easter Sunday, sitting by the fishpond at the Long Island Veterans Home, watching the birds and bees in the flower garden. I cherish that memory–and remember the look of contentment on his face just days before he lapsed into a coma.

These days, Daddy guides my hands as I tend my roses, plant flowers and vegetables, and cultivate the water garden my husband lovingly built along with fairy houses, gnomes, frogs, and fairies to make it our own.

My childhood home is now in another’s hands. Daddy’s fishpond was filled in to make a nice, flat lawn–on Earth Day no less. I wonder what happened to the turtles and the frogs. It is a melancholy synchrony that this post comes just days before the fifth anniversary of his death–on Father’s Day 2011. I hear Daddy telling me it’s all right–that life goes on.

I let the sweet smell of honeysuckle and the weedy tinge of clover bring me back. I savor the sound of my feet crunching on the few well-trodden footpaths carved into grassy sidewalks that have escaped the mason’s trowel. The sound of a tinkling waterfall transports me to a time and place when the little piece of heaven we called home was untainted by the ravages of weather, time, illness, loss, and sad goodbyes.

 

About the Author:

Gardener/writer Carole Ann Moleti has been gardening since she was old enough to remember. Her favorite things about gardening is the sense of peace and oneness with nature, bees buzzing, butterflies alighting, the fragrance of flowers, the field mice, frogs, and toads. When she’s not gardening Carole is writing in a variety of genres including spicy paranormal romance, gritty urban fantasy, memoir, and nonfiction that range from the sweet and sentimental to the snarky and irreverent. You can see her portfolio at http://amzn.to/23KBru8 and find out more about her at http://caroleannmoleti.com

 

 

A Writer’s Garden–Through the Garden Gates with Carole Ann Moleti

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A Writer's Garden through the garden gates with Carole Ann Moleti, Carole Ann Moleti, garden memories, paranorma and urban fantasy romance, the Bronx waterfront gardens, Tomi DePaola

The sticky latch on an old iron gate clicks open, and a flood of memories rush through my head. It’s been twenty-four years since I closed one just like it behind me. I was nine months pregnant with my firstborn, and the moving men bet it was a boy based upon the shape of my belly. I’d never again pass through that gate and walk under the towering pines toward the rhubarb patch, the vegetable garden, and find a spot in front of the fish pond to watch the frogs come out to play on an early summer evenings. Everything was blanketed under snow that night, masking the pain of leaving my beloved garden behind—even though the one I would be tilling later that coming spring was larger and just as verdant.

Feeling the soil between my fingers and rejoicing in the catharsis of pulling stubborn weeds, conjures my earliest memories of my father, who taught me everything I know about gardens and gardening: tending to his roses, pruning the fruit trees, and planting vegetables every summer for glorious fall harvest of tomatoes for canning, eggplants and peppers for frying, and cucumbers and lettuce for fresh salads. I recall the green and white striped caterpillars munching away, but somehow leaving enough behind for use to enjoy. He built his own pond and waterfall where I learned to care for the fish and a turtle named Napoleon while our bunnies hopped and ducks waddled around.

No one would ever believe that the waterfront of The Bronx, New York City, could be such a bucolic paradise, and many of those spaces have been paved over long ago. Most of the old boatyards along the East River and Westchester Creek are gone. The fig tree, the one by Clauson Point that produced bucket loads of sweet brown figs I picked (and ate) while the men readied their crafts for the long winter ahead, is a distant memory, and I am likely the sole survivor able to immortalize it with my words.

Me and Tomie

My father again had inspired me, always talking about Nana DePaola’s garden in Fall River, Massachusetts, from which he and his cousin Tomie (yes, The Tomie DePaola) would gather fruits and vegetables to wash under a spigot and eat in the shade of graceful trees. When I toured that garden with him Nana was long gone, but I could read the memories in my father’s eyes as he wandered, lost in thought.

 

The new garden I created 24 years ago boasts a towering pin oak tree shading a mammoth azalea bush that blazes with pink velvet every spring. It yields its glory to the peonies and roses, and finally the vegetable garden, and fig tree that delivers at least a few pints of sweet brown treats every fall. There is, of course, a fish pond devoid of frogs due to climate and environmental change and of fish, courtesy of raccoons and opossums that survive in the urban jungle of Queens, thanks to our waterfront areas and adjacent parks and wetlands.

I wrote in my diary siting in that childhood garden, and lost myself in books like Black Beauty, and The Black Stallion, and Little Women, and Nancy Drew as the salt air tousled my hair. I pulled crabgrass in my first garden, tears streaming down my face thinking about a friend, taken too soon—and ran in to scrawl my first piece of poetry about needing to accept the fact that there is always bad mixed in with the good no matter how hard you try to keep it away.

 

I now escape into my adult garden to prune and weed when I have writer’s block, and to rake leaves as I gather my thoughts into neat piles to be turned into rich brown compost to nourish future projects.  And I sit quietly, ever hopeful, on spring evenings hoping that the frogs will come to sing and play in my pond, next to the fairy houses my husband so lovingly created, the faded memories of loved ones and gardens that are long gone joyfully dancing in my mind.

 

 

Gardener/writer Carol Ann Moleti has been gardening since she was old enough to remember. Her favorite thing about gardening is being surrounded by the sounds of nature, particularly waterfalls. When she’s not gardening, Carole writes paranormal romance and urban fantasy for adults. You can learn more about her at http://caroleannmoleti.com