Ground Covered

I am not thriving - not lamenting, or asking for sympathy, just stating the facts. I am almost dreading going to bed because trying to sleep has been a torturous exercise. I'm in pain. I am not loving my weight and I have zero inclination to exercise. I'm too hot everywhere all the time, even with AC and multiple fans. I am in that meme where you're riding a bike and the bike is on fire and everything is on fire because you're in hell. I am in the centre of a fiery triangle of grief, perimenopause and pandemic - feel more like a pentagram. I'm not a lover of summer weather at the best of times - right now it's making me feel even more claustrophobic. I want out of the heat and out of my skin and out of my life for a few seconds.

Oh well.

So gardening. How do you feel about gardening? I have a similar love/hate relationship dynamic going on with gardening to the one I have with air conditioning. Basically when we started lockdown I threw open our bedroom windows and left them open for two months. Sometimes I woke up with snowflakes on my reading chair. Matt slept in a hoodie. It was amazing. I absolutely hate when I have to start closing the windows because of air conditioning, I resist it as long as possible because I hate feeling sealed inside and not being able to get any fresh air.

And then gardening. I always start with such optimism. I will shovel, and weed, and be one with the earthy earth, and plunge my hands into the living dirt, and lovingly tend the flowers and herbs and vegetables!

Well fuck, you guys, I don't know WHAT THE FUCK I'm doing! I could read some books or watch some Youtube stuff, but I never think of that in time, and then it's the goddamned May 2-4 weekend and my mother is frowning disapprovingly at my empty front flower bed and I'm panic-buying shit without reading the information tags again. Full sun? Part sun? Annual? Perennial? Even worse, this year I was ordering stuff online, like THAT was ever going to go well. I keep fucking buying stuff that I think is just a pretty flower and Matt says uh, that's a shrub. And reading is supposed to be my thing, you guys, this is not really defensible.

Get a load of this action before I kill them, or myself trying to keep them alive

I bring it all home and plant everything taking the blind faith approach - here I will thrust you and here you will thrive, or not, whatever, I'm not invested, you can be replaced. How do you know how deep a hole to dig? I start digging and then trying to stick the root ball in and it's not deep enough, and then suddenly it's too deep, like obviously the roots have to be buried but the stems aren't supposed to be buried and WHAT ARE THE RULES?

I have gardening gloves because we have those giant evil goddamned nettle things that grow six feet while your back is turned and look like they could eat you and have four-inch long sharp spikes, but I hate the feel of gardening gloves, so I put them on and then take them off and do stuff and then put my dirty hands back in the gloves and then everything is black. Same with my sandals - dirt flies into them, or I take them off and put them back on, or I wander out with no shoes to do one thing and stay out. Also, I say I'm going out for half an hour to pull a few weeds and water and then I get in the groove and Matt has to come out and push me, bug-bitten and wild-haired and covered in mud and blood back into the house.

But that thing, where flowers look totally dead and you water them and fifteen minutes later they are standing up and all dewy and perfect-looking? That will never not be magical to me. I am a sucker for the stupid zombie flowers.

Matt planted seeds before he left for Thunder Bay - SEEDS. Cucumbers and pepper and lettuce. That was foolishly optimistic enough, considering our growing season. Then I realized that he was gone and I really needed to get the garden in, and with one practically useless arm I was going to have to ask for help, which I don't do that often and am bad at. I explained the situation to Eve and what an idiot I was not to have asked before, because she is a mini-OCD-me and when she weeds, she WEEDS. She did the front bed, and I planted it. She did part of the back bed, and I finished it and then planted. I said I might ask for some help for the herb bed the next day. She did it before I got up and, um, didn't realize that there were seeds planted and a couple of the centimetre-high green things weren't, strictly speaking weeds. Oops.

Can you see the Gerbera Daisies? This is the first year they lasted for more than two days without something eating them AND a couple of NEW flowers grew - usually I buy them thinking of them as cut flowers, once they're gone they're not coming back. On the other hand, I think that thing in the front on the right might be a begonia that is frying to a crisp in the son. Oops again.

I feel like I should have some inspirational message to end on - the earth putting forth new growth, nurturing new life, rebirth, blah blah. I got nothing. I wish I had some weed.

For the sword outwears its sheath, and the soul wears out the breast

My mother-in-law died, early in the morning on Saturday. Warmest spring on record in Thunder Bay. Her husband had sat through the night with her because he felt that the time was coming. My husband was nearby.

This is what I wrote on Facebook:

Matt's mom - my kids' Nana Barb - left us this morning and we are bereft. She didn't have a good mother-in-law, so she was determined to be a good mother-in-law and honestly, she probably overshot a little, because I would have settled for one that didn't take her son's side in everything (she didn't, she busted his balls even more than I did). She came and helped me look after the kids while Matt was away - we'd get up early and sit around in our pajamas and messy hair, we'd stay up late and watch weird movies and generally have a splendid time. She bought me my first immersion blender (life-changing) when she couldn't bear to see me pouring soup from pot to blender and back again. She bought me a leopard-print winter hat that I hated, but Eve wore it naked all winter around the house and it gave us great joy. She once mixed me a gin and tonic that made me drunk for three days.

My children are so lucky that they have had full, lifelong relationships with four grandparents and two grandparents. I am so happy that Barb had the adventures she did, that she went places and saw things and had a giant family that she adored. That should be what we all strive for, right? A life that you love so much you can't bear to leave it. A person that we love so much we can't bear to lose them. It's not enough, because it's never enough when we love someone. So I guess I have to be grateful for that, even. Fuck.

This is the obituary, written by my brother-in-law Eric, her middle son of three. 

I've typed a lot of things and erased them, here and on social media, out of some misplaced desire not to sound like a cliché. I have not realized that this is asinine - like people who decide that they're going to be "cool" parents, and their kids will wear tiny motorcycle jackets and only listen to Bob Dylan and Velvet Underground, and the whole family ends up embarrassing and douchey. 

We found out about a year ago that Barb had lung cancer and that it was probably terminal. This gave us some time to plan visits and tell her we loved her. Matt took Eve up for her birthday in November. I texted her pictures of the kids and the dog almost daily. The disease and treatment turned her into a night owl, so she would be awake on her ipad and we would have conversations at one a.m. We made bad cancer jokes. When Angus shaved his beard into mutton-chop whiskers and I sent her the picture and said he looked like he was about to foreclose on the family farm she said "I know! I thought he was going to make me change the will!" She was brave and magnificent. 

So in a way, we're grateful that we had this year to treasure our time with her. But if she had dropped dead of a heart attack on Saturday instead of drifting away on palliative sedation, she would have been able to be at our family Thanksgiving last October with all her sons and their wives and children. She wouldn't have been in terrible pain for the last week or in the hospital without her husband because of Covid last month.

We buried her mother two fucking years ago, at 95. Do you see what I'm doing here? Remember when I talked about doing Covid Math? Now I'm doing Death Math, and it's not helpful in the least, but it's almost impossible to stop doing it entirely.

Matt and I went for a week-end at the end of January. She was doing quite well at that point - she was up out of bed, we had dinners at the table, we had a glass of wine at night, we had great conversations. When I was leaving she said "If I don't see you again..." and I said "You'll see me again". I wish I hadn't. I try really hard not to deal in platitudes. The last time we saw Nana she said "no one lives forever, and I don't feel sorry for myself". Matt said "oh, don't talk like that" and I was like "shut up, dude, the woman is ninety-five". This time I really was confident we would see Barb again because we planned to go up once a month until the end. The only reason we couldn't is fucking Covid, so technically it's not my fault that I was wrong, but I still feel like an asshole. 

She was fairly circumspect about who she wanted to have knowledge of her situation, which is why I haven't talked about it here before now. But when we were leaving she also said "take care of Matt. Don't let him cry", and, well, fuck that, Barb, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. I might even rend a garment or two. 

So there it is. Someone we loved died, and we are sad. If you are so inclined, go for a walk and pet all the dogs you can (sometime in the future after Covid, I guess). Raise a gin and tonic - just a tonic if you don't drink, just a gin if that's what floats your boat. Love your people hard. That's all I've got.