Filed under: Gardening
I am impatient for sunshine and a warm front. Three reliably sunny days, sequential, preferably during a weekend. I tap my foot, cross my arms. I am testy. I’ve got work to do.
Last fall’s dead things need to be peeled from the garden bed, leaves raked, ornamental grasses–fountain, feather reed, maiden, purple fountain–plucked and trimmed. The wheel barrow has a flat tire; it’s filled with water and two bags of last year’s mulch. The compost needs tossing. October was spent with my neck in a brace, recovering from a discectomy. The garden beds are as I left them on September 30, only now with wet leaves and brittle appendages of chrysanthemums, black-eyed Susan, coreopsis, pink wand flower, aster, and others I no longer recognize in their hollowy decay. (more…)
Filed under: Life, in general
It’s been over two years since I last posted and that was the first post since my heart attack. That’s a long time to go without reflection through the written word, without silence, without exploring the hairline cracks, the fissures between lines. I have spent much of that time worrying that I would have another heart attack. I am like a Geiger counter, registering and measuring all of the tiny quakes in my body, analyzing the data that comes in through nerve endings and palpitations.
But worse than this was losing my sister three months after my heart attack. She died in the middle of the night, in the bathroom, from blood clots in three thin arteries. She was my best friend, even when she wasn’t speaking to me. She cut me out of her life and let me back in so many times I couldn’t begin to count. Each time she cut me out, I felt I had lost a limb. As I got older, I began to see my hands as hers, my feet as her feet–we shared these small features, short, chubby digits, wide, duck-like feet. Sometimes I will glance at my hands and think she is here, holding my hairbrush or putting on my shoes. (more…)
