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My Year Of Creativity (August 2025)

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When summer begins (with almost 15 hours of daylight) I always think there is so much time to enjoy the days that lie ahead of me: to see people I haven’t seen since the summer before, or spend time with my loved ones at the cottage. I always expect there will be room in the months I am in Muskoka for endless kayak paddles or swims in the lake, but the moments seem to go by so fast!

In the past, the 8th month marked the beginning of the end of summer. This year however, at the start of August, the time left in this warmest season felt infinite. The month began with warm days and cool nights. With the perfect days, I expected to practice soldering my jewelry work after lunch. Unfortunately, an idea for my creative project was no where in my mind….

One morning as I was walking down the outside stairs from the bunkie, with my AirPods in, there was an on odd noise. Was it the creaking of the stairs? When I reached the bottom stair, the noise intensified. My morning news was muted so that the sound could be determined. The realization hit me: I was hearing a duck! I looked around the corner, and sure enough, there was a lone female mallard quacking in the direction of a loon on the lake. As I positioned my phone to take a picture, she flew off.

The thought of the duck flying away lingered in my mind. An idea formulated: I would use this picture for the back of a bezeled stone; it would add interest to the wearer, but wouldn’t be seen by others. My stone was picked out and a design was made by transforming the mallard picture to something I could use as a template.

While my work was being done, I listened to the news; it was never good. Unfortunately, horrible things were happening in the United States in August and it appeared our democracy had crumbled. Somehow, I felt fairly calm. Was I becoming somewhat numb to the news? Or were the sources where my news was obtained giving me hope and little laughter in the face of darkness? Probably all three of those things were somewhat true and possibly, the summer had worked its magic on me.

Just as it was reported that Trump was going to meet with Putin in Alaska, and Federal troops were going to be activated in D.C., my design started to take shape. The pendant back was cut out and the bezel wire was ready to be soldered on: it was time to use the butane torch.

I had planned to solder the pieces of the bezel cup together, at a table, outside on the deck. Unluckily, the weather changed to reflect some of the hottest temperatures I have ever experienced in our non air conditioned cottage. The temperatures had reached the low 90’s; there was no way I was going to add more heat to my surroundings!

Time, however was spent in and on the lake… away from the news. Just before leaving Muskoka, my sister mentioned that she had paddled into the nearby marsh. I thought it was too overgrown, so my kayak had not taken me that far. On one of those sultry August days, I ventured to the swampy area. As I entered the bay, the Water Lilly’s met me. Paddling on, a beautiful fairyland of Forget Me Not flowers, Lythrum, Pickerelweed, Duckweed and grasses lay ahead of me; it was well worth going out in the heat to explore! Sadly my phone was left at the cottage, so pictures would have to be taken at a later date…

Mid August came all too soon. I had soldered nothing by the time six days were spent away from the cottage! Traveling to upstate New York, my husband and I spent some extra time with our daughters, before moving our youngest to college for her freshman year.

When my husband and I arrived back to Muskoka on August 20th, there was only a week and a half left of my summer at the lake; there was so much I still wanted to do those last days! Yet, the promise (to myself) of one creative project a month had not yet happened.

For two days I tried my best to make a bezel cup, using the cut out pendant back and fine silver bezel wire. The project failed. The fine silver seemed to bend too much and I couldn’t get the wire to sit flat on the backing. My plans had to pivot, but I didn’t want to waste the metal…

A break was taken away from “jeweler’s bench” while the next step was contemplated. During this time, I went paddling to the pretty marsh. Pictures were taken. In the week and a half since I had last been the swampy area, some of the wildflowers had died back, but it was still pretty.

That afternoon, I decided to use the bezel wire (already soldered closed) to encase the stone. My project was no where near finished. Progress was interrupted the next day, as I attended a class to learn how to use resin. The four hour workshop, which was located an hour away from my cottage, was great! We made pendants (or earrings) start to finish: from making and soldering the wire frame, securing the jump ring on the the top and then layering resin and flowers together. I still had the recent kayak trip in my mind, so I chose flowers that reminded me of the marsh.

Driving back to my summer home, after my class, the realization hit me that in one week’s time I would no longer be in Muskoka.

As the sun rose the next day, it danced behind the clouds like fire in the tree tops. There was less than a week left, but the appearance of the “flames” in the sky, ignited my creativity for the following days and I got to work.

Cold weather seeped into Muskoka. I went in the lake once, during that period, for 40 minutes; the water temperature was about 68 degrees. Even for me (a life long swimmer) that was a little cold. Most days it was windy. Due to the wind there were no more moments spent kayaking, but there was time to for artistic pursuits.

One evening, just before it rained, my husband and I went on a boat ride. The clouds were majestic, the kind that always remind me of the summer’s end: fluffy and piled high; some looked like mountains rising above the islands, while others seemed to have heavens light shining from behind.

The final week was busy, but not fraught: my husband and I spent two mornings at nearby farmer’s markets; there were last visits with family and friends; and the promise made to myself, at the New Year, was fulfilled. By the 30th of August, the northern days were noticeably shorter…almost two hours less than when I had arrived. Perhaps I didn’t get to do everything I had wanted to do over the summer, but I was happy to just be there.

8th Month Complete

My Year Of Creativity

January https://tell-me-your-story.org/2025/02/01/my-year-of-creativity/

February https://tell-me-your-story.org/2025/03/07/my-year-of-creativity-2/

March https://tell-me-your-story.org/2025/03/30/my-year-of-creativity-march-2025/

April https://tell-me-your-story.org/2025/05/18/my-year-of-creativity-april-2025/

May https://tell-me-your-story.org/2025/06/06/my-year-of-creativity-may-2025/

June https://tell-me-your-story.org/2025/07/11/my-year-of-creativity-june-2025/

July https://tell-me-your-story.org/2025/08/08/my-year-of-creativity-july-2025/

A Love Affair with Roses

By Marcia

I don’t remember when I planted my first rose bush. In 1976, I started a garden at our first home in Pennsylvania. My husband and I planted rhododendrons, a weeping cherry tree and a magnolia tree, and I attempted to create a “rock garden”. The garden was a disaster. I was new to gardening and had more enthusiasm than knowledge. I re-purposed the large rocks from the rock garden into a border for my next gardening attempt: a strawberry patch. I don’t remember growing roses at that house.

We built our second home in 1986 on a 20-acre rural property outside of Indiana, Pennsylvania. As my interest in gardening grew and I dug more holes in the yard and planted more beds, my husband delighted me by adding a six-foot chain link fence, around a quarter acre of our yard’ because the deer liked my gardening efforts, too.

Baba, my Ukrainian-born grandmother, had a bubble-gum pink rose growing in her garden. Both my mother and my aunt had Baba’s roses growing in their yards and my mother gave me a start of that rose. If it wasn’t the first rose I planted in my garden, it was among my favorites for its beautiful, full blooms and its heady rose fragrance. That unnamed rose set me on a path that gave me years of joy and pleasure.

By 2001, my husband and I had been married for 30 years. He pursued his hobbies on weekends and free time. Our sons were adults and away from home. I guess the time and my emotions were ripe for me to embrace a new pastime, a new ‘lover.’

I love roses—their large, colorful flowers and sweet scents. I adore the history of the old garden roses. Some have been grown for hundreds of years. While less lovable, I accepted their thorny canes as one might overlook the less-than-ideal mannerisms in a new love interest.

In my fence-protected garden, I planted dozens of rose shrubs—one of my lists included the names of 80 roses I bought and planted over the years! I enjoyed walking in the garden and smelling the roses. I didn’t bring too many bouquets into our house—I almost couldn’t bear cutting the blooms from the plants. Reading postings on Internet garden forums, many with photos of beautiful roses grown in others’ gardens, became addictive and fueled my desire to buy more roses. Not only could I read about the plant, eventually they could be ordered via the Internet! How easy was that?! I was obsessed!

It is likely that Baba’s rose was an old garden rose. Most Heirloom roses bloom once a year, usually in late spring and early summer. What is lost by growing a once-a-year blooming rose plant is made up many times by the abundance of the flowers covering the plants and usually a very strong rose fragrance. The scent is what I loved the most about them, however the flowers were very photogenic as well, doubling my pleasure in growing them.

I grew the “Apothecary’s Rose,” a rose that had been grown in medieval gardens and used by herbalists for various remedies and perfumes. I added a deep pink rose, “La Belle Sultane,” who enchanted me with her frilly yellow stamens against the dark petals. She was named for a French woman Aimée Dubucq de Rivery who was captured by pirates in 1776 at the age of 13 and became a cherished concubine and mother of “Sultan Abdul Hamid the First of the mighty Turkish Empire.” Another rose, “Maiden’s Blush,” was originally named “Cuisse de Nymphe” (translation: “Passionate Nymph’s Thigh”) by the French. Perhaps the English found the original name too vulgar. There are similar stories about the names of some of the other roses I grew. And, of course, I grew Baba’s Rose.

Some fellow rose enthusiasts widely promoted alfalfa tea as a fertilizer for roses. A gardener could make this magic concoction herself. Using a 55-gallon plastic garbage can filled with water, marinate alfalfa cubes in the can over a period of days or weeks. The resulting elixir was extremely pungent (I would say it smelled worse than a neglected livestock barn). Wearing rubber gloves, unless I wanted my hands to smell for days, I used water from the soaked and rotting alfalfa to water my rose plants. I don’t know whether or not it helped the roses. As one might do unpleasant tasks for a lover, it was one ritual practiced during my rose love affair.

While the roses themselves brought me joy, my garden also provided the perfect place to practice a new hobby: photography. With a digital camera, I was able to take photos of my beautiful blooms and the fauna (insects) that enjoyed my roses. That was so much fun and added another dimension to my gardening pastime .

Then in 2003, a deadly scourge entered my little piece of paradise: rose rosette disease (RRD). It didn’t affect people or animals, just my beloved roses. I learned about the disease on gardening forums and the Internet. Sadly, there was no cure for the disease. RRD is caused by a tiny mite that infects the rose with a virus. Symptoms of the disease include deformed stems and flowers, an excessive number of thorns on the canes, and an abnormal number of stems growing from the rose stems. The mite can spread the disease to other roses and eventually kill them. Looking at a rose bush with RRD, it is clear there is something wrong with the plant. The advice was, and still is, to dig out and destroy any rose bush showing signs of the disease.

Each time I found a rose bush showing the infection, the grief I felt was similar to what someone might feel when discovering a loved pet was ill and nothing could be done to heal it; this may sound stupid…after all, it is just a plant! But at that time it was so much more to me. I spent hours in the garden and there was little I could do to help and protect my ‘loves’ from this disease. I was sad and angry when removing those diseased roses. After discovering the disease in my garden, I bought fewer new roses bushes and started adding companion plants to my garden beds. My love affair with roses was on shaky ground.

There were other dalliances with plants that weren’t roses: fragrant peonies (that flopped when it rained which ruined the huge blooms); iris (the iris borer decimated many of my plants); colorful daylilies (vigorous plants that needed divided often—like wrestling with an octopus and requiring the strength of Hercules); clematis with huge flowers but no fragrance (the rabbits liked them almost as much as I did); and flowering perennials, shrubs, and trees. I also had a flirtation with growing plants from seed and participated in a pagan rite by sowing them on the winter solstice (which made the sowing seem a little magical—like a celebration of the “birth of the sun”). The romance was never as strong or as long as my love affair with roses.

Over time, my garden became too large for me to care for. I began referring to it as my chaotic garden because it was so sprawling, untidy, and unkempt. I continued to find joy in the explosion of flowers during the spring and summer months.

It has been over twenty years since I began my love affair with roses. We moved from Pennsylvania to a much smaller property in the sunny south. I said good-bye to my loves and look back with fond memories. My days of having a huge rose garden are over. My hope is to always grow a few fragrant rose bushes to love and enjoy wherever I call home.

The Garden of Strong Mothers

Last week, in the 32 degree weather, I headed to swim in the pool outside. I was intent on just reusing words I had written in the spring of 2020, for my next story. As I started to move through the warm water, thoughts and words swam around me. At the foundation of these thoughts, were the original words:

Growing up, I always considered my paternal grandmother (who I was very close to) the be strongest woman I knew. She had gone through tragedy and continued to carry herself with strength and dignity. I wanted to emulate my grandmother; I still hold her as a role model to live up to. She was like an Oak tree, tall and strong.

My mother, on the other hand, is more like a flower in the desert. Something that has to have incredible strength to endure the hardships of where it has to grow. Like a flower, my mother doesn’t appear as if she would have the need of strength. She has had to go through more than one person should have to. Over the past few years, I have come to recognize that my strength comes somewhat from my grandmother, but mostly from my mom. Not only was my mother strong in the hand that she was dealt in life, but has helped me to be strong when I needed it most. She would have come to London, after the Lockerbie tragedy, had I wanted her to. When I was going through a dark period, she came to Boston . She helped lift me up when when I was separated from my first husband and pregnant with my firstborn; then through my eldest daughters first year of life. As life goes on, my mom continues to be here for me and I try to be there for her. I hope her strength will pass on to my daughters.

With each stroke I realized that I have surrounded myself with strong women, all mothers . I envisioned a garden where the flora represented my friends. A kind of poem started to form….

Each time I swam this past week, I thought about this poem (I am not poet). In the end, I couldn’t think of one of my friends who has not had to carry something heavy in their soul. Does everyone have to go through hard times? I look at my grandmother, my mother… perhaps this is human nature. I don’t know the answer. What I do know is that my family and my friends are resilient, each with a special strength to be revered.