Three Gardens, One Soil

There are three gardens in my life.

They live in different corners of the internet, but they grew from the same ground. I did not fully understand that until now.

The first was Like Showers On New Grass (October 2009 – October 2012).

Letters to God.

It was a season of hopeful reaching -- words lifted upward, mostly filled with light, good news, and grace as I understood it then. I was not yet ready to name drought. When I stopped writing there, it was not because faith disappeared, but because exhaustion did. It is difficult to keep writing about showers when you begin to feel cracks beneath the soil.

The second was Stories From My Garden (October 2010 – December 2018, revived August 2025).

Bloom where you are planted…
A blog in pictures and seasons about the people and fur people I love most.

This one was different. This was the real soil -- the people and fur people I loved most, the birthdays, the memories, and eventually, the fractures. It was not curated. It was not filtered. It was life as it unfolded. When it fell silent in 2018, it was not because there were no stories left to tell. It was because the stories had grown heavy. Sometimes the gardener steps back when the ground beneath her feet feels unstable.

Then came Rose Blossoms In The Wind (July 2013 – present).

Stop, and Smell the Roses…

This became the rhythm. For years, I posted every single day -- roses gathered carefully, beauty arranged faithfully. When life felt uncontrollable, this garden remained steady.

Eventually, that daily rhythm softened into weekly bloom. Three hundred sixty-five became fifty-two. And something surprising happened. I realized I could still breathe. The oxygen was not gone; it had simply adjusted.

Rose Blossoms had been oxygen for me. It was the garden that never withered when the others did. But I see now that the strength was never in the roses. It was in the gardener. I was the one who kept showing up. I was the one who refused to let at least one space go dark.

I used to think Rose Blossoms was easy. The poetry and images were gathered from books and the web. I have black thumbs. I can kill a cactus. So I planted flowers in cyberspace instead. But tending a virtual garden consistently for more than a decade is not ease; it is resilience. When real soil felt heavy, I gathered beauty where I could find it. That was not pretending. That was surviving.

If I look at the three now, I see the pattern clearly.

Like Showers was my hopeful spirituality.
Rose Blossoms was my curated beauty.
Stories From My Garden is my unfiltered truth.

Prayer. Beauty. Soil.

They are separate spaces. Sacred in their own way. But they are not separate selves. They are seasons of one woman learning how to live through different weather.

Like Showers remains paused. Not abandoned. Just resting. Some gardens lie dormant until the right rain returns. Rose Blossoms continues its weekly bloom. Stories From My Garden stands here now, revived, less afraid of naming erosion.

All three remain mine.

They share the same roots.

If you are curious, you may wander into the other gardens here:

Like Showers On New Grass -- https://likeshowersonnewgrass.blogspot.com/

Rose Blossoms In The Wind -- https://roseblossomsinthewind.blogspot.com/

And if you stay here --

this is the soil I stand on now.

Still rooted.
Still learning.
Still blooming where I am planted.