her able hands

Phew, that was a long week.

I haven’t been getting up early to write, instead sleeping until just before I need to be up for work the past two days, thus no update. Chris’ brother and his family were here until yesterday, so the evenings were taken up with sitting on the deck drinking beer and eating whatever crazy concoction I threw together, while the kids played in the sand and on the swings. Having them here made the weekend bearable, and while I wouldn’t wish for them to move back here (would never happen) I do wish we could all spend more time together. They’re terrific.

My brain is fuzzy, my thoughts a confused tangle of threads, all vying for attention:

- We have two baby raccoons trying to get into the chicken tractor every day.
- The rabbit has now moved on to the Chard, one leaf per plant, so the decimation of that crop is only a matter of time.
- I haven’t planted enough beans or basil.
- I need to figure out a game plan for alternate work.
- Have to line up child care, September 7 will be here before I know it.
- There’s a mountain of laundry to put away.
- I say too much.
- I miss my family.
- I don’t know how to fit into Chris’ family.
- I love our little house and our land, but wish we could move it closer to my family.
- Every time someone in LA asks me for help now, I want to snidely say, oh sure, you wanted to get rid of our department, but you still want me to rescue you. But I don’t, because that person probably has no idea.
- The growing disconnect at work is making me want to go back to waiting tables.
- I need to refocus that thought on how to generate some freelance corporate writing.
- I’ve had a few ideas about a corporate writing identity/brand for myself, and want to take some time in the next couple of weeks to set up a website.
- Grieving for someone who was so difficult to live with is exhausting. I didn’t think it would be so exhausting. I thought it would be much easier. I was wrong.
- I wonder if he can hear my thoughts now, and find myself apologizing in my head all day, looking up at the sky and around at the trees and thinking, sorry man, but it’s the truth.
- I just realized last night that Father’s Day is Sunday and haven’t done anything for the Dads back home. Shoot.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll have more than one related thought in a row and will be able to string together something more coherent than a demented-sounding list.

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Some bits and pieces:

I just woke up from a dream in which we were looking at a penthouse apartment in Chicago. It was an artists cooperative, with a big community garden on the roof. A woman who had the topmost apartment (it was seven floors of so-called penthouses and she had the best one, though the rooms were open to the hallway)–anyway, she was ordering MacBook Pros for everyone in the building and ordered one for me without my okay. It was zero interest and no payments for one year (like Sears!) and then after one year you could pick how much you wanted to pay and stretch it out over as many years as you wanted to. No questions asked. I was kind of excited. Both about the MacBook and about the prospect of living in a big city again, especially under such bohemian, yet comfortable, circumstances. The apartments were beautiful, overlooking a funky downtown neighborhood with a farmer’s market on one side, and somehow looking out over a huge expanse of prairie on the other. I’ve only ever driven through Chicago once.

I ground the coffee extra thick this morning, and it tastes smoky.

Lila’s still asleep. I’ll bring her to daycare when she wakes up on her own, then come back here to do some cleaning, then head next door to help my MIL with getting the house ready for an influx of people over the next four days.

Calling hours on Sunday. Funeral (cremation, no ceremony at the cemetery) on Monday.

Mom looks good. Tired, but stronger than I’ve seen her in recent months. Said she intends to travel, and to spend part of every winter in the southwest.

I used the words “anal probe” in reference to my week in a staff meeting and everybody laughed heartily. Phew.

This was after I was called out of the meeting to the daycare. Lila was playing on the slide with a child again, playing the “pull me up” game. I was running back to the meeting to grab my things and let them know that I had to take her to the doctor to put her elbow back in place.

The doctor showed me how to do it myself, and suggested she wear a sling for outside play, at least for a few weeks.

Our neighbor felt so bad about what happened the night before, she brought over dinner and a gift for Lila. Her son even brought her a helium balloon on a string, which entertained her all night long. That was so incredibly thoughtful, and the dinner smelled so good. But still, I wish she didn’t torture herself the way it sounds like she did. The kids play that game every time they get together. It was an unfortunate accident.

When I got home, I thinned the salad beds and made a big, spicy salad to bring next door to go with the Italian they ordered (and put the neighbor’s delicious smelling dinner in the fridge for tonight).

A mosquito got me right at the edge of my ring on my finger, now the finger is swollen and the ring is cutting off the circulation. And itchy.

The sun is cutting an angle through the living room window, lighting up the blue glass vases on top of the black shelf. I’m too lazy to take a picture.

It’s tempting to not clean this morning, but instead to get out in the garden. Maybe I can do a little of both.

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Yesterday was one of those days where I had to put aside my own agenda repeatedly. I had big plans for the garden after work, as you might recall from yesterday’s post. No planting or thinning occurred, but comfort and safety and love, these things grew in abundance. Sometimes life derails all of our plans with more important things. It’s yet more opportunity to stay with the moment and let go of the struggle.

This idea has been in my mind so much lately as I’ve watched Chris’ father deal with terminal illness and his own demons. Perhaps it’s selfish of me to think of my own life so much in the face of his suffering, but I believe in the mirror of the world. Truly, that’s the altar at which I kneel. Or one of them. There’s also the garden, of course.

Dad was brought to a Hospice nursing home again yesterday, in a coma. Chris just called a few minutes ago, just as I finished typing the first two sentences of this post. His father died last night around midnight.

I’m a thousand times relieved for him, that the excruciating pain he has suffered has ended. I’m ten thousand times relieved for his mother, whose mental health has been taxed ’til nearly empty. We went over to see what we could help with last night (after our side-trip to the emergency room to fix Lila’s first case of nursemaid’s elbow, an accident that happened not ten minutes after we arrived home from a long day, when her friend pulled her by the arm to drag her up the slide).

Anyway, Mom seemed more present last night than she has in a while, she’s really had a very hard time dealing with the prospect of Dad dying in the house, even though that’s what he wanted. She tried, bless her heart, but boy, it took such a toll on her, and we’ve all been worried that she would need assisted living any minute now, too. We chatted with her and their dear friends who have been such a boon and a blessing in all of our lives these past two months. Chris and Bill sat at the dining room table and worked together to fix Mom’s glasses that had broken sometime during the day.

I pulled the bedding off the hospital bed in the living room and got the laundry switched and another load started, folded and put away. She made an out-loud tally of what items would need to go back to Hospice, then reminded herself that she shouldn’t make that call yet, just in case he made another miraculous semi-recovery and got sent home.

The man had quite a lot of fight in him, hung on months longer than any of his doctors ever expected, just by the sheer force of will. His will was so much stronger than his body. But yes, someone can make that call today.

From the hour you’re born you begin to die. But between birth and death there’s life.

- Simone de Beauvoir, All Men Art Mortal

Godspeed, Dad. We all send you hugs and wishes for all you’ve ever hoped. Forever.

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Though it’s supposed to clear out this afternoon. We’ve had clouds and rain since Saturday evening and yesterday dropped down into the 50s. I wish we had our rain barrel system in place, they’d all be full. When I made the rounds of the garden beds in the evening, I imagined that everything would be paused and waiting for the cold to pass, but no, everything had made a giant leap for the sky.

I have to sit and thin out the salad beds tonight, or the overcrowding is going to cause everything to bolt on the next hot day, they’re all growing tall and thin, not setting about their jobs of making nice, fat plants. My fault, of course. I also hope to replant beets, beans, zucchs and yellow crooknecks. The work days are getting tough again, and I feel deflated and spent when I get home, so haven’t gone out to do anything yet this week. That situation is only going to get worse this summer, so I have to find a balance for myself in order to keep that illness-inducing stress at bay. If I can’t make time to garden, the stress builds up. But if I overdo it, I’m useless at work. I need to remain very useful at work right now in order to keep my job, until it’s out of my hands (which it will be soon).

But in the meantime, my family and the garden, they remind me of what’s of most value. Scrabbling to hang onto something that makes me so unhappy? Not so important. Doing a good job, showing up for what I have agreed to do, and collecting the paycheck for right now? Yes. That’s important. Especially while we still have two house payments. It’s a question of attitude, of approach from within. To consider my inner life a garden that needs and deserves vigilant, gentle cultivation. Be there at work with eyes wide open, knowing that playing in this particular game means that other people call all the shots, and the shots they call have only to do with money. Period. Never to do with the people who help generate that money. Ever. No matter what bullshit rhetoric they spout at staff meetings. That’s all lies. Always. It’s quite metaphysical, this working for a big corporation. One has to face the fact that it could all be gone tomorrow, must keep that in the consciousness at all times in order to move forward without expectation and attachment.

I was looking through my iPhoto library for an appropriate image to illustrate my feelings this morning and found this, taken a few weeks ago, when the Dame’s Rocket was just starting to bloom. It’s hard to look at, the eye vibrates on those hard, white ropes. It reminds me of looking at Johnny Carson’s herringbone suits on the late-night black and white TV we had when I was little. But the more I looked at it, the more I saw the warm glow of the late afternoon sun just beyond the ropes. Imagined walking around them to the sunny place. And then I remembered what those ropes are; a giant hammock with a ticking stripe cushion to keep elbows and feet from falling through and getting tangled up. A place of repose. Why look at it as an intrusion? Why not accept the invitation to step right up, recline and enjoy the warmth? I think this weekend, I have a date with the hammock.

So my job is to remember to not take it personally. Spend a small part of every day making new connections for work (and daycare, we found out yesterday that they closed the daycare facility starting in September). Then go home and be myself with those I love and adore. Sweep the floor. Scrub the toilet. Build the bamboo tee-pee fence for the tomatoes. Plant the hot peppers. Start some basil. Thin the greens. Make a salad. Keep the laundry clean. Make dinner. Listen to the kids’ stories. Ask questions. Hold hands with Chris. Push my fingers into the cool dirt beneath the straw, tickle the tiny tubers at the base of the potato plants, let the pulse work its way up my arm and into my heart. Say thank you.

Technorati Tags: work, corporation, meditation, garden, family, hammock, attitude

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Oh, the cute little cottontail has found my garden.

*&#%$

@#$#%. $^*#@.

Was out showing a family friend the neatly mulched and weeded beds (and the ones that are a mess of violets and overcrowding) when I noticed that the beet bed was raided. Three quarters of the two-inch tall beets (just growing their second set of leaves) were gone. Just moments before, as we walked up from my in-laws house, I saw a big (read: stuffed on tender, young beets), brown bunny bounding away from the far end, into the so-called field behind the yard—a mess of overgrowth from bulldozing two years ago, and stalled construction.

Beets. GONE.

It’s such a challenge to not get discouraged in the garden. I threw some fencing over the bed to protect the few remaining sprouts, and will try to get out there to re-seed tonight.

Making a survey of the other beds in the drizzle, I see that almost all of the bean plants have a beetle problem, that still only 2 summer squash have germinated and one of them is turning yellow. Three of the six Raspberry canes appear to be dead as a doornail. But the peas are flowering.

I guess I need to ask my in-laws if they mind us putting up a fence around the garden. That will at least eliminate the battle with the four-footed creatures who have realized that the neighborhood buffet serves more than simple white lawn clover.

Technorati Tags: garden, pests, organic gardening

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