It’s spring. So there’s a lot of leaves around from last fall. Sort of like a letter from your old pal Autumn. Hi! Remember me? Thought I was gone, didn’t ya?  He takes after his brother, Winter.  Even when he’s gone, he’s not entirely gone.

So I bought a leaf mulcher. It’s basically a string trimmer turned on its back with a funnel to guide the leaves into the strings where they are chopped into, as the commercial says, “That’s some good mulch!” But honestly I don’t need the mulch. Neither one of us could be fairly called gardeners. We just like the leaves tended to rather than blowing around willy-nilly. At least mulch is good for the yard.

Rather like bits and pieces of old stories. I sometimes still refer to false starts, stories that went bad, snippets of notions and such “mulch.” Nothing’s really wasted. Maybe that false start was the right start, just the wrong story. Sometimes a bad story will finally tell you what it needs to make it good, or that snippet has a notion buried in it you weren’t ready to recognize at the time. Since half of writing is recognizing a good story when it shows itself, that’s a win. They’re all win.

Waste nothing.