Facing the Enemy

 

It’s 9:30 on Sunday morning — already too late to beat the grocery store mobs. Instead, I step out into the garden to see what’s ready to harvest. There is already enough lettuce in the garden for my salads.

Gorgeous snow pea pods seem to have emerged overnight and I better get the rest of the leeks before they blossom. There is a rustle behind, I turn and see, my garden nemesis:

the groundhog.

We are merely feet away from each other. I am sure it is the same old guy who has been helping himself to what I plant, for years. I take a step towards him and he bares his big old teeth. I retreat out of the garden, closing the gate behind me. But fatso can’t get out. Tetley is inside and I think about running to the house to release him — but they are the same size and I would worry about woodchuck geezer hurting my little Cairn. And I imagine their battle would destroy the garden anyway.

Chuck tries a few lame leaps up the wall but can’t make it. Next he burrows into the opposite corner to try and exit through the fence into the peonies. I step back into the garden, my heart pounding, to try and get a better photo and he steps in my direction as if to charge. I retreat. I think about running into the house to get Rob but know he will escape while I am gone — besides, I am not sure of what I want to do with this guy. I have wanted him gone for years — now is my chance.  He is too smart for have-a-heart trap.  The sledgehammer we used to pound in tomato stakes is behind me. I could never do it — but maybe Rob could. But no – I don’t want the carnage. The picture of violence would always be here in this little corner. Instead, I watch him – we eye each other – my look saying, ‘I know it’s you, buddy, so don’t come around here anymore’. (Ha. see below)

He makes another leap for the wall and this time, manages to drag himself through the tangle of raspberries canes.  I open the gate and step inside to assess the damage — cilantro plant knocked over and a few beheaded sunflowers. How many years I have cursed this guy for decimating flowers, just-planted or just-ripe vegetables? And yet face-to-furry-face and I didn’t feel like bashing him. It’s just plants, after all — if he was eating my kid, (or my dog) I’d kill him. I know I could and would. In my mind, this is the same creature that has scampered away just in time for years. And today, older, slower, fatter, and trapped, how could I not feel sorry for him?

P.S. A few hours later, I return to do some weeding and he races past me again — and now the lettuce so nicely captured in the photos above, is gone, as is the marigold and more sunflowers have been stripped to stalks and I feel a fool — but mostly for not shutting the garden gate.

Morning Ritual

I love sleeping – the deliciousness of lingering in bed, rolling over for more dreams. But I have come to cherish the stillness and emerging light of early morning and now try to rise before the sun, unfolding out of slumber as the first birds begin to sing. I pad downstairs, make a cup of tea and sit in front of open computer and, now that it is warm enough, the open window. From here I can see the birds, or this morning an upside-down squirrel raiding the feeders.  Sometimes it is really the compulsion to write that has me leave my dreams and the heat of my man, but many mornings, it is just the dog barking. Like an alarm clock, he erupts at 5:30 AM — half an hour after my alarm of bird chirps as an early rising neighbor walks by with her dogs.  Tetley yells his greeting – or perhaps, his threat to stay off his turf. In any case, his barks bounce off the bedroom walls — impossible to sleep through — so up I get, shooing him out the door before me.  This is my window for writing, thinking or simply sitting. Time and space before the requirements of the day begin.

Garden Update

Yesterday, we filled and planted two raised beds — heirloom tomatoes and peppers, dill, parsley, marigold plants and chard, spinach, lettuce and arugula seeds and cucumber seeds tucked into a corner.  The main garden is already planted and even tasted: leeks, spring onions and lettuce. And in another week, our first share of CSA farm vegetables will arrive.

This year, I think I might have overdone it.

On a cold, dark night, one of the many of this long, bitter winter, I decided to pre-order plants for the garden. As the days warmed up and no box appeared, I began to think I might not have actually placed the order. It is like me to fill a cyber basket and then balk at the shipping charge, abandoning my spree. This notion solidified in my mind when a search through my emails failed to turn up a confirmation.  So a few weekends ago, I went shopping for plants — Paul Robeson tomatoes (will they sing?) Thai dragon chiles (will they burn?).  Last week, a box arrived — yes, with more plants.  So if you need tomatoes, peppers, (as long as the critters are not too greedy) I’ll have them.

Looks like there is other bounty in store as well — tiny bunches of grapes already blanket our arbor and the strawberries are beginning to ripen. Still early, but it sure feels like summer has arrived.

Faking It

Even after 10 years of gardening on my not-quite quarter of an acre, I sometimes have no idea what I’m doing. Case in point: only two of the Dahlias I planted in pots a few weeks ago are emerging. I pushed aside soil in the other planters until I found the root still a woody end, dry and ragged as a calcified cigar. When I potted these tubers a few weeks ago I turned them over and over, poking the ends, unsure which end was where the plant would grow out of when I buried them. For all I know, the poor things could be smothering under there. (Rob suggested I should have planted them sideways.) Times like these, I feel like an incompetent gardener.

This feeling of being a dilettante extends to other things I love – like cooking. I believe that if you can read, you can cook — it’s just directions, right? I credit great cookbooks and food blogs for deliciousness conjured up in the kitchen.  While I know I make kick-ass sandwiches – (stuffed with roasted peppers, jalapenos, herby-greens) without recipes but otherwise, rarely create something new from scratch. So really, any scrumptious meal I may make is only Tricia’s as designed by (insert recipe author here).

Although in my single years when it was easier to live on a dime, I fancied myself an artist and worked a paying job as little as possible in order to ‘do my art’, I always felt a bit of a fraud, even when galleries showed my work and people bought it. Now, I feel the same way about writing, wondering if I have the right tools or talent.

I marvel at the confidence I see in others. Where did they get theirs, why didn’t I get a dose of it when it was being doled out? But then I think about the Dahlias and the possibility that the invisible ones may just not be ready to bloom yet – and might end up the most spectacular of all.

 

Smelling Spring

I have been inhaling my way through spring, almost drunk on the fragrant shrubs in my garden. Last year’s extreme pruning left me with fewer Lilacs this year but I am reassured by wiser gardeners than me that next year will be better. Tiny Carol Mackie Daphne, on the other hand, is exploding in exotically scented little blooms. The Daphne’s fragrance is more delicate than the larger, almost vulgar smelling Virburnum shrub with it’s heavy white heads of flowers.  I made the mistake of planting these beauties all in the same corner at back of the house where we like to sit in the summer, imagining a scented garden. But it’s still too cool back there at this time of year and we rarely sit, as I’d imagined, inhaling the perfumes while soaking in the sun.  Instead, I regularly venture out to this spot to get my scent-fix and lob off branches of blooms to fill the house. But  after only a day or so, both blossoms and perfume fade. It’s not the same.

What is it about scent that is so evocative? I think it’s the ephemeral, passing quality – like time. We cannot keep it – not for long. There, the poignancy of spring.

 

Mother’s Day Without Mothers

My mother became a mother way too young to know what she was getting into. Irish-Catholic and in the 1950s – getting married and having kids (4 in 5 years) was just what you did when you wanted to get away from home. She told my siblings and I (young adults at the time) that if she had it to do over again she would have done grander things than just had children. This was not said in anger but rather announced as a confident declaration of her brilliance (she was) but our existence had thwarted her success. Certainly a strange thing to tell your children. Still, she believed she was a better mother than her own.

I too think my mothering skills surpass my mother’s. For a start, I wanted my daughter more than anything else in the world. Being a mother will alway be the most remarkable thing in my life and I can’t imagine how she would not have felt the same.  Like her, I also wanted to get away from home and did at 17 after my father moved out and my mother’s depression and neediness threatened to smother me. For the rest of her life she ignored suggestions to seek help, instead stoking her bitter anger and sadness with alcohol.  I stayed far away, living in the midwest and overseas where our contact was limited to often maudlin phone calls.

When M was a year old, I moved back with my new family, into an apartment within minutes of my mother.  She doted on her granddaughter, found her brilliant and beautiful, read to her, praised her, delighted in her.  She embraced being a grandmother and with this glimpse of her unconditional love for my daughter, our own relationship began to blossom. Six months later, she was diagnosed with lung cancer and six months after that, she died. It is as a grandmother I miss her today.

Preferential Treatment – the Garden

Just shy of a quarter of an acre, our yard bustles with wildlife. Yesterday morning, turning the corner of the driveway with Tetley, I spotted a Bluebird.  No, not a Bluejay – a real Bluebird perched on a recently pruned oak branch. It was perfectly and entirely, an extraordinary royal blue. I hoped this fantastic bird might be considering taking over one of the birdhouses, although I think the sparrows might have claimed them all.

Later, I brought my cup of tea outside and settled into a wicker chair on the un-mowed lawn when a rabbit emerged from the hedge.  With slinky-body moves, he moved out of the shadows into a patch of sun where he proceeded to preen and clean himself not ten feet from where I sat. I made no effort to stay still, shifting in my chair, crossing my legs, yet instead of diving back into the bushes, he came closer. Soon he was six feet away, close enough for me to observe his eating technique.  His mouth moving like a non-stop motor, he leant over and plucked stems of dandelions (ours is an organic, thus interesting patchy lawn) from the bottom, then munched the stem down to the blossom end, he paused before swallowing this last (favorite?) bit.  He seemed to prefer spent blossoms, no longer an explosion of yellow, but not yet turned to seed. Sucking in half-a-dozen dandelions stems like so much spaghetti, I couldn’t help but think of the devastation he and his family (you know there are more) will cause in the vegetable garden. I’ll dust off my camera on the chance I’ll see him today and you can see how cute he is.

Even as I imagine rabbit just as quickly devouring tender lettuce, peas and other produce planted by me, I am charmed by him. Yet I do not delight in watching the big-old groundhog that has sniffed at our traps, (of course humane) circumvented our fences, and ignored our dog for many years. I feel mean and yell at him when I see him loping across the yard. Nor do I watch the surplus of squirrels with much pleasure although their gymnastic technique to reach the dangling bird feeders is nothing short of remarkable. So what kind of double standard is this?

 

Seasonal Reminders

The spectacularly short lives of spring flowers makes me melancholy. Hyacinths, as if overwhelmed by their own perfume, topple over into the dirt. The frill of petals around the face of the Daffodil crinkle like old skin.  The Tulips are next on the scene but it’s a race with the squirrels to score some for a vase or two. The Lilac bush I whittled away at last season has come back with the promise of many blooms in each tightly packed cob, but a tree at the end of the driveway that was a blizzard of delicate blossoms last spring, this year sprouts only leaves.

Maybe it is this fleeting-ness of the season causing my anxiety. I blamed work, but after a week off I still wake with a clenched jaw and thundering heart. I force myself to take deep breaths, stretch out into a yoga move or two, but psychically, I am still wound up. I flail around for another reason, any at all – but I know why I cannot shake this feeling. The scents, light and essence of this season are visceral reminders of the anniversary of N’s suicide. Even though these days are endlessly rainy and that week was incongruously sunny, memories of terrible days are still conjured up by spring.  I can’t shake, ignore or forget — 7 years later at this time of year, a state of strung-out, high-alert is still my lot – as is an eternal unanswerable question of whether there was anything else I could have done.

Sister Love

Writing about books is not really my forte and writing about books by people I know is particularly daunting — but here goes.  Two memoirs I finished in as many weeks, still linger with me like the feeling after time spent with dear friends.  No – like time spent with my sister – the richness of connection born of time, love – birth. That’s what remains with me after reading these brilliantly written titles by two women I admire and really like. Coincidentally, both were sadly, inspired by the death of their sisters. Just writing that, a sob sticks in my throat.

You’ll have to wait to read Nina Sankovitch’s Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading because the pub date is early June, but it’s a book that will fly and you heard it here first. Nina lives nearby and has a fantastic reading blog. Meeting Nina for the first time two weeks ago, we gabbed about books and life and books again, and then finally, set up her launch event at the store in June. She gave lucky-me, an advance copy and I spent the following weekend reading this stunning journey through grief.  (I first wrote ‘through and beyond’ but one never gets beyond profound loss, do they? Through, with time but a void remains – there is no going ‘beyond’ that empty space.) After the devastating death of her sister, Nina spends time frantically determined to live her own life twice as hard – but she hits a wall. Grief is to be sat with – and this she did, setting herself a goal and discipline of reading and then writing about, a book a day. She reads classics, mysteries, biographies, novels – new and old. Through her insightful readings and moving recollections we journey through the books she reads, into a rich exploration of sadness, loss, love – life. Hers is a beautiful, universal book.  And she’s just so damn like-able, you’ll want to be her friend, too.

The tricky thing after reading such a superb book, is what to pick up next. Waiting in my ‘to-read’ wings, was Jill Bialosky’s History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life.  Jill a poet, novelist and editor, read at the store more than once and each time, we chatted warmly, comparing our children’s ages (about the same) and interests, but I did not know we shared unfortunate membership of being in the suicide survivor club. Her sister ended her life so young – in her early twenties just as Jill is beginning her an unbelievably heartbreaking, but ultimately, joyful quest towards motherhood, all the while writing and publishing beautiful books.  I marvel at how she did it – the amount of time she spent curled up in a ball seems slight for the cruel losses she endured.  The original title for my still evolving, memoir on addiction and suicide was Light Between Shadows. The shadow of being a suicide survivor threads through Jill’s book, but ultimately she leads us with the stunning poetry of her writing and insight, into the light.

I felt such recognition while reading Jill’s book – and while I am an amateur compared to her, feel inspired to delve deeper in writing my story of life with addiction and suicide in The Things We Cannot Change. Both Nina and Jill’s books are so courageous – and this is my challenge. Years of ‘Making Nice‘ and spent in Al-Anon learning detachment skills, do not make for good memoir writing. Tolstoy and the Purple Chair and History of a Suicide show me how raw truth can and should be told, with power and grace. Back to work for me.

And an overdue visit with my sister.

The Power of Herbs

Yesterday we finally enjoyed a Spring Saturday of sunny warmth. I gardened all day, transplanting, mulching, raking. My body now buzzes with the delicious, all-over, day-after ache of a good workout. I think that’s from wrestling with Mint. For years now, every spring I must rip out the thickly woven roots of this magnificently fragrant, insidious plant that threatens to take over my vegetable garden. And every year I think I have completed the job yet, between tomatoes, basil and beans, stalks of Mint emerge.

Standing, I loosen the roots with a pitchfork, a ripping sound my cue that I can pull them out without injury to my back. Then, sitting down in the dirt, I grab the roots with gloved hands and yank. As I do this, strings of tentacles pop out beneath the soil, leading me to another tangle of growth.  I planted this mint as a fledgling gardener, not knowing I would forever battle this harmless looking plant – so delicious for tea and in salads. Now I cautiously plant perennial herbs only in pots or where I want wild, fragrant coverage. Never in the vegetable garden.

Yesterday, I also pulled out a Purple Sage that for over a decade, has grown beside the vegetable garden’s gate. In spite of ruthlessly cutting it back every spring, by July I must squeeze between the fence and furry leaves on woody limbs, to get to the rest of the garden. With my pitchfork, I easily lifted out the Purple Sage and moved it to a flower garden where I am attempting to orchestrate a constant show of color of perennials and shrubs. Hopefully, it will thrive between the Irises and Azaleas.

Every time I bruised by the Purple Sage, or plucked some leaves for roasting a chicken or to be sauteed in butter for a simple pasta sauce, I think of the friend who brought it to me during my first spring in this house. She was visiting from NYC and arrived with a flat of herbs.  This plant survived those 15 years although our friendship did not. I have never known why she no longer wanted me in her life. She disappeared into silence during the height of addiction drama in my marriage, when she had just launched into her own, happier marriage. I imagine, we were too much for her — and don’t blame her: I would have felt the same aversion to us, her messed up friends. But she had been there at our beginning: she and I were off for a weekend break and were passengers on the same military transport plane out of Sarajevo when N and I connected for the first time. She predicted our future then – with a happier ending. Over those years in the madness that was former Yugoslavia at war, she was my dearest friend – family to N and I. Then, we all ended up here — her in the city, us in Connecticut. We saw each other less, especially as N descended into his hell of addiction and I scrambled to keep the pieces of our lives together. I left her a message or two and sent an email wondering what I had done, but I never heard from her. I still wonder what happened and miss her brilliance and hilarity. I moved this shrubby herb to gain more space to plant vegetables, but also, unconsciously, perhaps to end these flashes of mourning evoked by the scent of Sage.

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