Yesterday on our walk, my husband pointed out a large bush with shiny green leaves, growing by the side of the road.

“This plant used to grow out in the swamp near the lake,” he said. He meant his family vacation cottage on Webster Lake in Massachusetts. “I saw it a few days ago, and when I looked for it yesterday, I couldn’t find it. But here it is today. I looked it up online. It’s a buttonbush.”

It was a chest-high leafy thing, with a spiky orb of a flower growing at the end of each branch. Like me, my husband likes to share things he’s recently learned. He’d been struck by the appearance of the flowers and the childhood memories they brought back.

When we got home, I looked up buttonbush, too. It grows best in very wet soil, which explains why it grew near the lake and why it grows next to the stream which exits under the road through a culvert. After a heavy rain, we slow down at that spot to listen. When the water is high, the stream gurgles.

Writing a Lyric Essay

The buttonbush became the first of my shimmers and shards. That’s what Jeannine Ouellette calls the small, concrete things that attract our attention, things that might become metaphors in our writing. I started following her Substack after I read her memoir, The Part That Burns.

This week, she is beginning a 12-week series toward writing a lyric essay. The first step is to find shimmers and shards, that is, to pay attention, to be astonished, as Mary Oliver says. Some lessons need to be learned over and over. The specific instructions are to find 5-10 shimmers and shards every day for the first week, then to write them down in a notebook with brief descriptions.

The buttonbush flowers, the gurgling of the stream through the culvert. That’s two. Now my eyes are open. Step one of being a writer is to uncover your eyes and unstop your ears.