Trimming Viburnum

With the help of a long-handled trimmer, my dad and I snip the topmost strands of viburnum, the shiny-leaved shrub outside his door. Its name is Latin for "wayfaring plant," though I feel more like the wandering one, having returned to my hometown after twenty-some years away.

There's so much of this viburnum outside the door, it looks like a table of green, one I'm used to walking by without considering the way Dad keeps it vibrant with careful editing a few times a year. Left to its own devices, this enthusiastic shrub will overtake the sidewalk and grow taller than the nearby window. Dad, meanwhile, keeps the best of the plant, its deep green core, and trims growth that doesn't shape the plant as well.

I offer to help and the tool Dad hands me, a long-handled combination of clippers and pincers, is what fascinates me most. While the blade slices the leaves, the pincers hang onto them, not letting go just yet. Like a good editing tool, the blade snips while the pincers simultaneously hang onto the trimmings, filing them away for another narrative or even a different role in the existing story.

We'll recycle the cut leaves, making them part of the landscape as mulch or fertilizer, a good reminder from Dad that what we trim, whether leaves or words, can find a home somewhere else. The established viburnum outside the door, meanwhile, will grow red-tinted in fall, evolving and taking on a new form even while we try to contain it. We'll edit it again in a few months, allowing for growth yet keeping what's best about the wandering plant, for now, in place.

Layered words

Now that wintry weather is here, I watch the snow piling up around our yard gnome and what were once puddles on a sandy road now creaking with ice. Last winter, so much snow fell it started forming striations of different storms, layering winter.


Writing revisions form in the same way, with a fresh draft of snow to make footprints in (or maybe even a snow angel) followed by time and waiting for what the weather brings next. I may play with the words (whether there's a thaw or not), I may let them be for awhile. Returning to the piece of prompts me to add another layer, like a second snowfall, giving depth to what's already in place.


This revision doesn't mean the original layer has gone away -- far from it. Even if the revision is substantive, what remains of that first draft, or layer, is a starting point, the first iteration of ideas and invention. Time helps the piece form, whether over the course of a long winter, a short winter, or something in-between. Some revisions take more quickly whether by necessity, such as a fast approaching deadline; other versions take time to break through the ice and learn what this piece of writing is, at the end of a short winter's day, about.


Past the sunshine and distractions of summer, there's an introspection offered in these gray hours of ice and snow offer, meanings half-frozen and just waiting to be discovered.