Almostgotit.com

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Related post:
Once Several Times Upon a Mattress

One of my dear friends directs an organization that works with inner city youth. 

These young people are often battered with repeated failures, but Chris believes in them, even when no one else does.  He encourages them to believe in themselves, too.

“Always Begin Again,” he tells them. Over and over.
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I’m helping a woman finish her latest book.  She’s old enough to be my grandmother, but whizzes around the internet like a pro and still hikes in the Andes.  She sent me an email yesterday, along with the latest installment of her manuscript. 

“This is so HARD,” she wrote.

‘But I have a sign up,” she continued, “that says ‘Failure can not tolerate persistence.”  Got it from a wonderful book called The War of Art.’

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Andy is home.  He called me today, and he sounded much better.  People have taken good care of him, so he was calling around to check in,  thank everyone.  His client had paid his hotel bill last night, even though he hadn’t managed to finish their show.  He added that Phillip has had some good days while he was gone, but that he himself hit another rough patch,  coming home this afternoon to the empty house.  

But he already has lots of things set up, lots of meetings with lots of people, for his business and to go over the estate, legal and financial things.   A  lot of mail had piled up while he was gone, too.  I could hear him shuffling through it.  He listed some of it for me:  Paperwork about benefits.  Insurance information for COBRA. 

And the death certificate finally came.  

“And, maybe,” he paused, “a grief counselor or something.  That might be good.”
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There’s a quote on scrap of paper on my desk that I’ve been trying to decide what to do with. It keeps getting shuffled to the top of my piles. I heard it last fall from an arborist who was speaking to our group about how badly our area’s trees had suffered from a year of severe drought, last spring’s late freeze, and a summer of record-setting heat.

Then he smiled. “But,  enough gloom and bad news.  I recommend, as all of us do who have the perpetual gardener’s heart: replant next spring!”

 ”Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
- Søren Kierkegaard

We shamelessly put the kids to work last weekend and “put up” more than half a winter’s worth of heating wood in one day   (3+ cords)  The log splitter doesn’t make wood nearly so pretty as an axe does, nor even as fast, but you can run it all day long – a thing you can’t do with a set of axe-wielding arms. 

Summer rhythm never seems to set in around here until summer is half-way through.  To tell you the truth, I still don’t know how to do it all very well, with kids and work — what there is of it — and Everything Else never quite fitting into whatever time we’ve allotted for it. 

Here, surely, is part of the solution, though.  Living, green things.  This is part of our whiskey barrel garden (hic) which we fenced off and built on what used to be the end of our driveway.  

It is wonderfully peaceful to get up in the morning when it is still cool and stand over the cucumbers or beans with a hose.  Everything smells good in the morning, too.

Later in the day, when Everything Else gets to be too much, I can slip out the back door without telling anyone to dump some stuff into the compost bin, lean into the barrels to pluck a few weeds, see how the volunteer tomatoes are doing, or rifle through the foliage to see if it’s time to pick the beans again. 

It’s not highly-productive time, it’s Being Time.  And I’ve (almost) learned that I can’t live without it.

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Related posts:
Chapter two-ing 
In defense of thoughts

Sunday, the youth group at church was selling “mums for mom,” so everyone was buying them and giving them to everyone else.  Sweetness. My own mother is 2000 miles away, so I gave a bouquet to the elegant Fasia instead, who has dubbed herself my “African Mother.”  She hugged me as usual, which I love because then I get to spend several hours afterwards smelling like her perfume.

Last year I gave a bouquet to my Neighbor Mother, Betsy.  I couldn’t this time around because she died in February.  She still gave me flowers, though: the pansies which she planted by her driveway last fall are still brightly in bloom.  Her irises were especially beautiful this year too, as were her daffodils and columbine.  Her Lenten roses began to bloom almost as soon as she left us, and one plant has blooms on it yet. 
 

I miss Betsy. 

She surprised us, at first, with her way of walking into our house without knocking.  Neighbors around here used to do that, I guess.  She taught us how to be neighbors, in a world that hardly has them anymore.  We mowed her lawn and she gave our daughter piano lessons in exchange.  Summers, we regularly trouped back and forth between her screened porch and our back patio, laden with potato salad and wine. 

During baseball season, she’d invite our son over to watch our team with her on cable (which we don’t have), and the two of them would share popcorn and shout themselves hoarse.

She didn’t want to live like a sick person.  She laughed raucously, kept up with a million friends, and continued to play with the symphony. 

She wanted to go to a place she remembered in the mountains one last time, so a group of us took her there.  She read us a letter from a friend who’d died of cancer, because the friend had the Words Betsy wanted.  She took off her wig and let us kiss her cute head, and we laughed. Raucously.  We didn’t know she’d only live a few weeks more. 

She died at home.  It worked out.  We took turns staying with her that whole last week, when the night nurse wasn’t there.  And I couldn’t have done that, made all those phone calls, spent all that time, if I’d had a job. 

All this past year, Betsy has been very worried that I didn’t have a job.  She even told me she’d find me one!  I was able hold her hand as she lay on her couch and finally tell her that seemed to be working out, too.

The million friends showed up at her funeral, where YES a few of us even danced.  All the viola players in town seemed to be booked with La bohème that day, but Rachel’s soaring violin was so beautiful it made us cry.  And at the first symphony concert, after Betsy had died, they honored her with an empty chair.

I know it’s a few days late (she’d tease me for that, too) but Happy Mother’s Day, Betsy!

While I regret not having had the pleasure of emptying them all of their original contents, (hic), the barrels are pretty fun to fill on a sunny March day, all in good anticipation of the flowers and vegetables we’ll plant in the next couple months.  Here’s how:   First, you cover the bottom with all your UNEMPLOYED plastic recyclables, plus the broken UNEMPLOYABLE Christmas-tree holder (also plastic) which was still in the garage for no good reason.  This fills space up faster, and also makes the barrels lighter.  Ta Da!!  Brilliant, or what?   *BONUS FEATURE*  They smell very interesting when it rains.  A little like  a PUB, Solent, but without all the cigarette smoke ;0)