Making a Garden

Making a garden when you cannot dig a hole is  a difficult feat.

Last weekend I got inspired by the Tax holiday and decided to buy some plant material  from garden outlets in nearby Massachusetts.
I drove over to the Home Depot with my neighbor--who also cannot dig much.  And we scouted the  garden shop.  My conclusion was that there were not enough trees and the prices were still too high.  Then I was inspired to cruise over to the garden  area of the nearby KMART,  and I could see that they were offering some real bargains.  So when it began to pour down rain,we headed home and resolved to return the next day.

And we did--I bought 10 plants--mostly trees and some shrubs.  My neighbor also  bought a few items.  We jammed them into the trunk of my old Volvo--it has a kind of hidden capacity to carry  large items --when I   push down the back seats and extend the trunk space to include the rear passenger seat.  So all the trees   were crowded into the trunk, and we were able to close the  trunk and carry our prizes safely home.

My next test was to determine how I would get the plants into the ground. My husband is older than I am and has no affinity for gardening.  But I  broke the job down into three events, and said surely we could dig  3 or  4  holes each day and get the  plants into the ground.
I cannot tell you what a battle raged and how often I  had to  implore him to try to make the hole just a little bigger.
Now they are all in their new spots.  It  looks like a garden from hell because they sit in the  midst of weeds and long grass.
My next move will be to buy many  bags of mulch and compost to encourage  growth and  protect them from the  changes of the winter season.
I wonder how many of these  cut-rate trees and shrubs will take  hold and thrive,  and how many will perish. But then again--I ask that question of just about everything these days.  It has all become so precarious and uncertain--and I know that we are  all perishing. But before we go, let's do what we can do.

I used to think that I could control and make things happen--now I see that was an illusion too,

Making those skeletons dance--Anna's Way

WHAT ANNA TAUGHT ME

Because my mother, Anna's older sister, Margaret was the constant reader, writer and thinker in our family I thought that she was my most active life teacher. After all in constant consultation with her brother Joe who was a Christian Brother and taught school all his life, she was always reading to me and taking me to libraries and encouraging me to prize my mind as she prized hers—they cannot take your education away, she often told me. My mother sort of knew that "they" would try to take anything else one had. gathered on life's precarious journey.

Anna, on the other hand, only read the newspaper and style and fashion magazines. Her favorite activities were Shopping, Bingo. Gambling and experimenting with make up and ironing new clothes. She was vain and gossipy and mocking and very funny. What did she have to teach me?

It turns out that she taught very valuable lessons in three areas—loyalty, vanity, and show business.

Let's face the music and dance.--That was her unspoken but constantly enacted performance.

Anna taught me the value of putting on a show. She taught me the heroism of cheerful, uncomplaining show boating.

Many days it would get very difficult to amuse my two sisters who had Down syndrome and were extremely active and restless. When my mother had exhausted all of her and my resources—play store with them, Norma, play hide and go seek. Read to them. She would pull out the last and unfailing stop--

Time to put on a show.

And depending on the time of year and what holiday season we were near we would begin practicing the Carols, or the love songs or the patriotic airs or Irish favorites. Then Margaret would take up her top hat and cane and I would act as Master of Ceremonies.

We would wait until Anna came home from her day job at the Corning Glass Works. And when she came through the door on the second floor on Englewood Avenue—she would see the costumes and the drum, and after a day inspecting glass from a hot furnace, she wold take her turn and do her set pieces—a sailor's hornpipe and a kind of modified can can. We would all join in the uproar and applause and bows--we had made it through another day.
 Years later when my mentor quoted Bernard Shaw's remark--”We all have skeletons in our closet, the trick is to make them dance,” I got it instantly-- wept and laughed copiously—that advice went straight to my heart—with Anna we certainly had made them dance.

Yes, Anna taught me the value of putting on a show. the heroism of cheerful, uncomplaining show boating.

Burnout and Care giving

Talk to me abut care giving and I will tell you that it eats you up from the inside out. Relentless, it never ends and it never lets you forget it. Like a kind of negative being in love—thinking about the person you are taking care of is the default position for your soul. You know how when the electricity goes off all the clocks go to 12 o’clock. Well all the clocks of me now reset at Anna and Yash. I wake up in the morning and I listen for them in the house. Then I go and check on them it’s 5am so I try to go back to bed. But I can’t sleep because I am running the things to do for each, doctor appointment, new prescription to drop off and later pick up.

How about talking to me about love

Cause I don‘t know how to talk about it anymore. This is where love has brought me, but I am not  feeling it as love. It doesn’t sound like love and it does not act like love,  it is indifferent and oblivious, and takes it all for granted.

Don’t talk to me about love because I know now where that leads. It feels like a way of getting to use people and say this is what you should do if you really love me. Take care of me from dawn to dawn and then get up and do it again.

Talk to me about burn out because I fear that is where I am going with this. Finally one tires of talking and  I just want to sleep and see what dreams produce or what comforts can be extracted from oblivion.