Smokey Mountain Breakdown

I've gotten a bit lazy with my writing, I think. I've been working on edits and collections, but no new material. I think it's time I remedy this, but I started a story yesterday and found myself struggling. It's a new feeling. I've never been one of those people who believed in "writer's block". Have always maintained it's just laziness and can be remedied by discipline. But I've never felt at a loss for tales before and now I'm wondering... So. My plan is to come back here. Here where it all started with an exercise in discipline using this blog. I'm going back to daily blogging to fight off this ennui. And I'm going to try to pick up reviewing again on Zoetrope. So there.

***********************

Yesterday and the day before were the sort of glorious spring days in the mountains that make one glad one lives here. Visually, it's an orgy of brightness, color and contrast. Out in the deep woods, you can see the white blossoms of the serviceberry trees dotting the mountains. Rarely do you see them on the verges of the roads as they used to grow here. But if you mark the location of those white blossoms and return in mid to late summer, you'll find the dark, sweet fruit. If the birds don't get them first, that is.

The other tree that is so lovely to look right now are the Bradford pear trees. They've planted those fruitless pears as landscaping--managing to breed out the quality of the tree that makes them yellow-jacket traps later in the season. No fallen fruit to clean up. It seems counter-intuitive to me--to make a fruit tree that has no fruit. That is only good for it's visual appeal. But we do that with people all the time, don't we? Ignore the hidden, intrinsic values in favor for that which is pleasing to the eye. We are odd creatures.

But they haven't been able to rid those pears of their stench. In fact, I think these pretty pear trees are even stinkier than their fruited cousins. There's this dramatic stand of pear trees just on the other side of the dump past the bridge where they dump the stocker trout. Cor! What a pong! Absolutely stunning, but stinks of rotting meat. It would be too much to ask for them to smell of hyacinths or peonies.

At least the pears are partly honest. Not their fault for being barren. Peonies are the true liars. Lovely and sweet smelling, but harboring the troubled darkness of nightshades.