SunWinks! Sunday Gather Writing Essential Dec. 2, 2012: Lean and Mean (SunWE)

WHAT I WROTE, FINALLY

WHAT I MIGHT HAVE BUT DIDN’T SETTLE FOR

Behind our house there's an English Garden about the size of a squash court.

There’s a garden area behind our house that’s about 15 feet by 30 feet.

It features a concrete table with concrete benches and a concrete birdbath.  It's walled on two sides by colonnades of arborvitae twelve feet tall.

Technically, “Colonnades of twelve-foot-tall arborvitae wall the garden on two sides” would have been even better, eliminating the “to be” verb and passive construction “It is walled…by”.  I made a choice to lead with the wall idea.  However…

A rule we haven’t talked about is: avoid writing a string of sentences of similar length and construction. It sounds ham-handed and sing-song, unless you’re Papa Hemingway.  These two sentences would be even better written as one, thus: “Walled on two sides by colonnades of arborvitae… , it features a concrete table…”

Voila!  All three problems solved!  I’ve gotten rid of the “to be” verb and the parallel construction and led with the wall image.

There are rows of tall trees running along two sides.

A majestic rotunda of a maple tree dominates the near end of the garden.

A big maple tree stands at one end of the garden.

Rows of garden lights once marked out the paths and the birdbath had had a fountain in the center; both ceased working almost as soon as we moved in. We rent the house, and though we both work, we couldn't justify maintaining that sort of luxury on property we didn't own.  The same went for the in-ground sprinkler system.

There used to be lights in the ground alongside the paths.

Once or twice we paid someone to weed the plot, but had been letting it go to seed for many years. The blackberry vines overwhelming the area stood as high as, well, an elephant's eye.

There were blackberry vines as high as I am.

(“elephant’s eye” is an allusion to the song “Oklahoma”)

Underneath that, a thick carpet of ivy overran the ornamental flowers and everything else that once grew there.

Ivy covered the ground where ornamental flowers and other plants used to grow.

It had even overgrown the smallish alder tree to a height of ten feet, obscuring it as completely and opaquely as a leafy, emerald nun's habit.

Completely hiding the trunk.

I was just a wee bit chagrined upon seeing Donna, our boarder, picking the blackberries off the brambles and

I was really embarrassed…

An example of litotes (understatement)

decided to reclaim the garden for a writing grotto.

decided I wanted to clean the garden up and use it as a place for doing my writing.

First I pulled out the blackberry vines. Some of the stalks coming out of the ground were woody and thick as bamboo.

surprisingly thick and hard.

I hacked down the maple and alder saplings and raked the sun-yellow maple leaves out of the ivy. The wind came up and buttered the garden again, twice, and twice more I raked the ivy.

Scattered leaves all over the garden

“buttered the garden” is a metaphor

After the third time, Sir Leafs-a-lot has pretty much exhausted his ammunition.

The maple tree has lost most of its leaves.

Personification, pun, and metaphor

Now I come to the overrun alder.

At this point, I’ve come around to the task of pulling all that ivy down off the alder tree.

Thinking I was just going to pull the vines off the tree trunk, I quickly got a reality check.  The ivy vines were as thick as my thumb and as woody as the tree underneath, and wrapped around the trunk and limbs in the strangleholds of an old witch’s arthritic claws.

Wrapped tightly around the trunk and going around the limbs in all directions

a simile

I cut through the thick ivy roots up and down the tree in a hundred places with a pair of long-handled pruning shears, and pulled off the ivy clump by tenacious clump.

(Cleaner yet: “I cut through the thick roots in a hundred places with long-handled pruning shears…”)

With difficulty one clump at a time.