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.

I have work to do.  I stole an hour late this afternoon and cut the fountain grass with garden shears, one small fistful at a time.  The grass clippers were left out too long last fall and have rusted.  I pulled at tufts of crab grass that are growing underneath the edging and claiming the beds before I have a chance to mulch.

Every day, despite the rain, I take a walk around each garden, anticipating a new burst of flowers breaking through the clay.  Today it is the pink wand flower.

I’ve resisted making the first trip of the season to Country Colors, or stopping by Lowe’s to pick out this year’s gloves.  If I wait, maybe the sun will come out.  I am superstitious.

I slip the baby maple tree seedlings out of the foundation bed while the dirt is still wet, one at a time.  The Virginia bluebells will be gone soon.  I take pictures of them but the wind and my tremor create blue blurs instead.

The red bud tree is blooming early, I think.  It blossomed for the first time last year.  Now the branches are glowing magenta in the lowering sun.  It is too cold still.  I know what a frost can do.

I think of all this knowing that just a month from now I will be dripping sweat, swatting away flies, my fingernails caked in dirt and my hands stained with dandelion.  The vases in the house will be filled.  I will spend hours and too many dollars at Country Colors.  Old, fat hippies and survivalists will be tending their narrow plots of Early Girl and Golden Boy tomatoes and bib lettuce and zucchini in the community garden beyond our yard.  We call it the vegetable gulag.  None of the community gardeners laugh when I tell them this.  “It’s surrounded by a tall chainlink fence, you know? It’s like a prison for vegetables,” I say, trying to explain. I think they think it’s an insult.

Any groundhog we see is named either Butch or Mama.  We are indiscriminate. We are hoping for baby whistlepigs but the rain has been hard and unrelenting and I worry that they might drown under the shed across from the community garden.  I’ve seen Butch or Mama only a couple of times this year.  The field behind us floods more quickly with each new rain.

The forecast for tomorrow is more wind, more rain.  In fact, it should be here anytime now.  The weatherman is saying the chance of rain is 70% and winds will be ESE, 17 MPH.  It will be in the 50s again.

I won’t look at the forecast beyond that.  I just want to wake up soon again with the sun bordering the curtains in the window, tapping at my head, telling me it’s time. I’ve got work to do.

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.

I envied her courage while I dreaded her irrational anger.  She was singular.  She wore black slips over black tights, little black boots, and a black biker jacket.  When she was really poor, she made like Scarlett O’Hara, wrapped a curtain over her waist and down to her ankles like a sarong. Stylish, without a hint of irony.

Her expectations were too great for the world.  Although she fought against this quality in herself and was genuinely generous, she expected the world from those who loved her:  infinite patience, forbearance, forgiveness, money, authority, adherence, unobtrusive but unconditional love.  She was always let down.

She was my best friend.  I told her everything.  She got my jokes.  I got her jokes.  We made each other laugh with the simple raise of an eyebrow.  She could listen and hear and understand.  She gave good advice. She gave the best hugs.  She spoke with passion and urgency, like a powerful current in a deep river.

She had beautifully sculpted cheekbones and a rueful smile.  Gracefully athletic, sports came easy to her.  She was a coach to anyone who wanted to learn.

She loved her son most. When she learned she was pregnant, she came to my dorm room to tell me and then immediately told me she was gay.  We were  in college together then.  Her boy was born over summer break and she brought him back to school in the fall.  She toted him along with her everywhere. He was the part of herself she could love unconditionally.  She could never love her own mind, her own heart, her own gifted soul the way she loved him.

My sister was a painter.  Like everything else, her painting was unconventional, bordering on prose and poetry and primitive images and appropriated photographs punctuated with scientific symbols, math equations, marginalia.  Many of her paintings were wittily chagrined, some were dark and heavy. I envied her brilliance.

I found her on Facebook after losing her for three years when she was once again not speaking to me.  I found her before my heart attack, and she came to see me on my birthday a week after it.  Her last message to me said that we would see each other again, “when the snow melted and the mountain pass” between Cincinnati and Pigspittle “was clear.”

The grieving nearly took all of me.  I wondered why she died and I didn’t.  She had more talent, grace, wisdom than I.  She was more beautiful and intelligent.  She had a son.

I’ve had a hard time talking about it, let alone writing.  It is easy to recite what happened that day, less so how I feel about it all.

It happened like this:  I got up, took a shower, felt fine and thought that the two weeks of back pain I had been experiencing was finally over.  As I got dressed to go to work—I was scheduled to lead a workshop in budgeting in 45 minutes—I suddenly felt the pain in my back return, then move to my chest and down the underside of my left arm.  I could breath but the pain was so intense I was doubled over and sweating.  I called my assistant and then my husband.  He rushed home from work and drove me to the emergency room.  Pronto, we got three clues as to how serious it was:  first, I was seen immediately; second, nitroglycerin; third, morphine IV.

One of the doctors sat down on the bed, and said very calmly and sweetly, really, if such a thing could be said sweetly, “You just had a heart attack.” More than 90 percent of my main artery was clogged.

Husband and I were in a kind of symbiotic denial, both believing that while it was serious, I would go home, rest, and then deal with it.  Or something like that.  Neither of us seemed to understand the word “now.”  As in, “You need to get a stent put in NOW.”

It wasn’t something to be negotiated.  Pigspittle General didn’t have the doctors on staff to put the stent in, so they had arranged for an ambulance to drive me to OSU.  Within a couple of hours, I was wrapped up in blankets, rolled into the ambulance, and attached to a machine that blared ominously every time we hit a bump in the road.  I had to wave goodbye to my husband from the back of the ambulance, an experience I never want to duplicate.  It was soul-wrenching.  I cried all the way to Columbus.

The new heart hospital at OSU is as futuristic as Midwest hospital architecture is likely to get.  The floorplan is circular with patient rooms encased in glass, like spaceship pods, one after the other comprising the outer ring of the floor.  I couldn’t have asked for a better place to be.  It was private, reasonably quiet, and zen-calm.

Within an hour, I was in the operating room— mission control with flat screens that dropped from the ceiling, titled at angles so that the doctors could see them.  I was in and out of a morphine haze, trying to focus on details, knowing I would want to remember them, but losing the battle.  The staff was stunningly young—not one over 30, I don’t think.  I could hear heavy metal but couldn’t make out the band.  The surgeon, who struck me as more hipster than surgeon, leaned over and told me he was going to put the stent in my femoral artery that would open up the flow to my heart.  I didn’t have my glasses on so I couldn’t really see anything except greenish flashes from the screens above and I kept dozing off.  And then there was a burst of pain as the angioplasty ballooned in my artery and I thought I was having a heart attack all over again (which, apparently, I was—the balloon stops the heart to open up the flow).

You can’t sit up for several hours after a stent is put in.  You lay as still as you can.  I remembered the mantra from that levitating game we played at slumber parties: she’s as light as a feather and stiff as a board.  I thanked anyone and everyone who entered the room that night—for saving my life, for making me comfortable, for being doctors and nurses, for feeding me, for holding my hand, for loving me, for saving my life.

· · ·

Last night, we watched the 1930s film classic Dinner at Eight.  At the end of the movie, Lionel Barrymore’s character learns that he has heart disease, a clogged artery, and likely only two months to live.  I thought to myself how, in another time—or even just another place, one a bit more remote, I would have died.  Nine short days before my 48th birthday.

There is more to tell.  For now, I can tell you this:  I’m a lucky, lucky girl.

From Zula’s family, I have names and dates and war service marginalia. The lines of these ancestors seem more like tentacles reaching out into space than earthy roots twining underground.  I’ve added to her research, taking the family back 500 years to William Boardman (Borman) of Claydon in the county of Oxford in England, who likely was born before the turn of the 16th century.  I’ve read about Claydon, which is grimly described as a tiny, impoverished parish.  I can’t find any mention of my relatives, except for a will left behind by Felix Carter.  Back on this side of the virtual Atlantic, I discovered a letter sent by Julian (Carter) Boreman (or Borman or Boardman—take your pick), daughter of Felix, to her son Samuel Boardman (or whatever) who had arrived in Ipswich, MA, in 1638.  The letter, dated Feb. 5, 1641, “written in a fine hand and in red ink,” is short and sweet:

Good sonne, I have receaved your letter: whereby I understand that you are in good health, for which I give God thanks, as we are all—Praised be God for the same. Whereas you desire to see your brother Christopher with you, he is not ready for so great a journey, nor do I think he dare take upon him so dangerous a voyage. Your five sisters are all alive and in good health and remember their love to you. Your father hath been dead almost this two years, and thus troubleing you no further at this time, I rest, praying to God to bless you and your wife, unto whome we all kindly remember our loves.
Your ever loving mother,
Julian Borman

Between the lines you can read how precarious life was at this time.  The fact that she notes that Samuel’s sisters are still alive, for example, reveals this uncertainty.  Julian uses the letter to break the news, at least two years old, of Samuel’s father’s death, but does so without much drama (had the pain of losing her husband waned?) and a pinch of obsequiousness (“troubleing you no further”).  It tells, too, of the risk involved in traveling across the Atlantic and Julian’s reluctance to give up her son Christopher to that journey.  That she could write a letter, directed as noted in the letter’s history, “to her very loveing sonne Samuel Boreman, Ipswich in New England give this with haste,” offers a glimpse of her education and standing in this small village.

Still, I want to know more.  I always want to know more.  My obsession with ancestors is not something I can explain easily.  Am I looking for some link beyond our common DNA?  Was some life-changing experience for Julian encoded on the genes that have passed down through generations to me?  Is this fascination all really about me and my place in the world, my foot on the map?   Am I navel gazing through history?  Despite my wishing it were not so, that I am not so narcissistic, I can’t find a more plausible explanation, except maybe that I love studying American history.   And while mathematically it may be true that going  back 20 generations will produce a million ancestors, it is that finely tangled thread from the present to the past that I find magical.

In the past three weeks I’ve cleaned the kitchen stove and cupboards, the washer and dryer, the floors, the bathroom.  Helped rake semi-frozen, wet leaves. Counted the dead deer on my way to work each morning (four, and one appears to be headless). Celebrated Obama’s election a couple of times, most recently with beer.  Removed the dry leaves, one at a time, off the bittersweet branches that are in two vases.  Planted some mums.  Felt slightly crafty but not enough to launch into a full-fledged project, such as sewing curtains.

I’ve not paid as much attention to the news.  I’m fairly certain I don’t need to, that the same storylines will be there tomorrow:  Will Congress bail out the auto industry?  Is Obama’s transition team getting all sloppy with leaks?  Is Bush the lamiest of lame ducks?

I am untethered, no longer bound to any campaign except my own.  (Which I keep forgetting about.  I’m supposed to run for office in the Pigspittle Dems party and because someone else is also vying for the position, I have to actually campaign. I think I have a mental block.)

I never ever in a million years would have thought that I would say this but I’m going to:  I miss canvassing.  Yes, I miss walking up to strangers’ doors and intruding on their Saturday afternoons with pesky questions about their voting preference.  I miss it.  I do.  I miss the incomprehensible Google maps.  I miss discovering new roads and getting just a little lost.  I miss the unpredictable public and their quirky welcome mats and cobweb-masked houses.

So I get an email from David Plouffe today asking me if I’d host a “Change is Coming” house party.  Do I dive in again?  What kind of change could we bring to Pigspittle?  It’s tempting.  Very tempting.  Seriously.  Especially if it involves canvassing.

(Stolen from my friend Bob…)

(In passing, has anyone observed that hunting animals with high-powered guns could only be defined as sport if both sides were equally armed?)

And this typically deadpan observation:

It’s admittedly a rare gift to produce a paragraph in which whole clumps of words could be removed without noticeably affecting the sense, if any.

Contented sigh.  My blogosphere is complete.

People can hold racist views and still vote against them, because they hold other views, too—they contain multitudes. And people can change. No one should imagine that the country has suddenly lurched in the direction of the Upper West Side. Residents of my neighborhood of Brooklyn have certain beliefs that are incompatible with those of residents of Glouster, Ohio. Obama will be wise to govern in ways that leave those unbridgeable differences alone, and instead direct the power of government to improving people’s lives in both places.

The identity of Pigspittle is similar to that of Meigs County.  While some families have long roots in the ground, others were among the thousands of Appalachians who migrated North after the coal mines closed.  They carried with them the same accents and idioms and holy-roller religion (though, to my knowledge, none of the famed Meigs County weed). They also carried a resentment on their backs that is still evident, though not nearly as violent as it was fifty years ago.  (A black woman who grew up in Pigspittle told me stories of how she was treated in high school, how she endured razors thrown at her during drill team practice.) I confess that I find it nearly impossible to understand racism in Pigspittle.  African Americans and Hispanics make up a minuscule proportion of the population here—no more than two percent.  Yet, listening to some, you get the impression that the county is overrun with minorities who want to take their Pigspittlian jobs and run their Pigspittlian schools.

My theory—and it’s just that, a theory (and probably too generous a theory, as it presumes that there is some logic to racism)—is that a few generations back these families vied against minorities for work in Kentucky and West Virginia, and later on the way up north, in cities like Columbus and Dayton, in small towns like Pigspittle, the anger was pressed down from generation to generation like a branding stamp.

“I ain’t votin’ for no nigger!”  Loud click. It was one of the first numbers a new phone bank volunteer dialed one night in September.  Apparently, the voter had caller ID, knew that the call came from the Pigspittle Dems HQ, and wasted no time voicing his disdain.  The volunteer never came back.  While I knew that campaigning for Obama would weed the thin-skinned from the calloused, I felt sheepish, that I deceived this volunteer and let her down. After all, I had spent weeks telling volunteers that phone banking and canvassing would be a transformational experience, that through volunteering they would hear moving stories about people in pain and in need of change.

I downplayed the whole “and there are some racist assholes out there too” part.

I rarely mentioned it, in fact, even though I had personally heard epithets, sometimes shouted and other times muttered under breath. During the primaries, when it was us against Hillary, I discovered racism was in the shadows of our own party.

When meeting with one of the first Obama staffers to arrive in Ohio after the primaries, I asked how we were supposed to deal with racism.  He shrugged his shoulders and smirked. I thought about his response for days. Did he think there wasn’t racism in Pigspittle?  Did he not care?  Only later did I understand that no one in the campaign would talk about race.  And later than that did I understand why:  we had to trust that most people in most states would vote to move the country forward, not set it back.  (Mind you, not most people in all counties. It’s an important distinction that relieved us of having to actually win Pigspittle County.) We had to take a leap of faith—one of many, I learned along the way, but more on that another time.

Not a single Democrat was elected in Pigspittle, except for a judge who was running unopposed.  But we moved the margin, gaining seven points on the Republicans compared to 2004.  It was more than we needed to accomplish.  It was breathtaking.

And in the end, I hadn’t lied. The experience was, indeed, transformational.  I did have long, meaningful conversations with undecided voters who were concerned (some outright terrified) about the future—a young mother who wasn’t sure what world she had just brought her daughter into, a grandfather ailing from inoperable cancer who worried about daycare for his grandkids, a truck driver who couldn’t afford gas.  They were thoughtful, compassionate, and respectful.  They were doing their own research, reading about the candidates, watching the debates.  They were Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. One woman told me that she kept a running list of the candidates’ attributes—pro’s and con’s of each— and that come election day, she would pick the one who had the longer pro column.  It seemed like they, collectively, took an eternity to make a decision—we called and canvassed from August through November—but I was comforted by the earnest effort they were making in their decision.  No matter how they cast their vote, I knew that they thought long and hard about it.

More than one thanked me for calling, for listening, for giving them the opportunity to rant (perhaps because we always asked what issues were important to them and genuinely cared about the answer).

Just as George Packer was grateful to be among a dying breed of journalists still able to be reminded of human complexity, I am grateful to have been among the campaign volunteers who were reminded as well.

* Brilliant author of the 2005 must-read tome on the Iraq War, The Assassins’ Gate

And second, to Bloomberg News for filing suit under the Freedom of Information Act against the Federal Reserve to force it to “disclose securities the central bank is accepting on behalf of American taxpayers as collateral for $1.5 trillion of loans to banks.”  One and a half trillion, you ask?  Yes, and this figure doesn’t even include the $700 billion bailout approved by Congress.  According to Bloomberg’s Mark Pittman, the Fed lent $1.5 trillion to banks, including Citigroup Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.; in late May 2008, Bloomberg News requested data on collateral posted between April 4 and May 20. Although the Fed stated that it would look into whether or not it could make the records public, it never formally responded to Bloomberg’s request.  Hence, the law suit.  I’ll admit that I have a limited grasp on the failture of all these financial institutions but I do have a something of a grasp on common sense.  If I were to lend my best friend $100,000, I would want to know what collateral is going to back up that chunk of money in case my friend goes belly up.  Given that at least some portion of that $1.5 trillion is yours and mine, I think we have a right to know whether or not Citigroup’s collateral is a thousand acres of swamp land.

Maybe my science dreams are telling me I’m feeling guilty about not re-starting my Science Saturday blog posts?  I had every intention of posting a link to a Columbia Journalism Review essay that chided (rightly so, the BSJ grad in me says) science writers and bloggers for lifting quotes from press releases, particularly those from university science departments, without attribution.  I was going to write an apology for my own bad habit of not attributing quotes appropriately and beg forgiveness as an amateur blogger who just happens to like science but doesn’t know a damn thing about any of it.  Instead I tried to clean up the yard (amid wind and spritzing rain) and put away the planters before snow fell; I cleaned the washer and dryer, and watched an old movie (The Enchanted Cottage), and took a nap.

I did think about fractals all weekend, after watching Nova’s “Hunting the Hidden Dimension,” which I had stored on the DVR.  All weekend, I looked at our trees and traced the fractal patterns in the branches.  They were there, in plain sight, except for those birch limbs I had pruned in spring, the ones a buck in rut had violently rubbed his antlers against.

Last night, we had our first snowfall of the season.  Fractals everywhere.