A BUDDING PASSION

The best use of a garden gnome I've ever seen!

I used to think people were born with certain talents, and if that talent was art or music or whatever, it would be manifested early on, in the form of a child prodigy. That's why I was so shocked when I took that battery of aptitude tests as a young adult, and was told I would be good at something artistic. "Are you nuts?", I asked the counselor. "I can't even draw stick figures!" "Ah, but those are acquired skills, aren't they?"

I began to understand what she meant when my mother-in-law Theda, a talented painter all her life, suddenly decided to take up woodcarving in her 60s. Around that same time I had a next door neighbor who had started out as an architect, then switched to interior design and landscaping, and oh, by the way, did fabulous paintings in her spare time, though, in her own words, "painting was never anything I aspired to, it was just something I happened to be good at."

What I came to realize is that most people are born with a certain amount of creativity in them. A very few are prodigies, while the rest of us will be shaped by our environments, education, and familial influence. I also believe that we ourselves have the ability to tap into that dormant creativity, nurture it, increase it, and take it in many different directions -- acquiring any necessary skills along the way, through hard work and diligence.

That's why it doesn't surprise me at all to see my husband taking an interest in landscaping, now that he's retired. After all, didn't he tell me long ago that one of the most important attributes of a good engineer is imagination? His imagination has come to my rescue more than once. When I first enrolled in the horticulture program at Richland College, and started doing garden designs, I had all kinds of plant knowledge and an eye for color and design that helped me pull together great plant combinations. I sometimes, however, had difficulty seeing "the big picture." I'd sit at my drawing board with a fresh sheet of vellum before me, get the house, existing hardscaping and boundaries sketched in to scale, and then I'd get stuck trying to figure out how to divide up all that empty space that was left. John, on the other hand, could walk up behind me and just, well, see it. "Have you thought about doing this?", he'd say, and it would be the perfect solution!

Gardening and design were my all-consuming passions for many years, but writing gradually edged its way in then eventually took over, and I've felt awfully guilty for abandoning them this way. What a relief it is now, to have someone I can pass the torch to -- someone with a "budding" passion! (tee-hee)