Letting Go

Greetings from Domelandia,

My grandson was at the doctor's office recently. When the doctor walked into the exam room, he yelled, "I DON"T WANT TO DIE!!!" (He's 4).

I can relate to that. And by the way, I don't want anyone or anything I love to die, either.
The past few years I've been faced with a series of losses. Some are big, some aren't, but they all point to one of the lessons I'm supposed to learn: Letting go.

About a month ago I noticed the apple tree we'd planted in 1991 looked ill. My friend Penny B looked in one of her books and described the symptoms of fire blight. She read the description and my heart sank. Turns out that this particularly nasty affliction is caused by hail, late frosts, and drought. So, I think, we're three for three. This tree holds a lot of good memories for us, and we even got several bushels of apples from it over the years. One remedy for fire blight is to spray the tree with copper sulfate while it's in bloom. This method kills bees; I won't do that. Another suggestion was to trim off all the blighted parts, which I attempted to do last week. There's just a skeleton left of our poor tree with a few leaves left to keep it alive. Maybe.

We lose our parents and our friends. Someone I knew died last spring and the shock and unfairness knocked the wind out of me. It's so painful for me to witness the grief of bereaved families that my stomach hurts for days after a funeral.

Pets get old and feeble, or go carousing and don't come home again. One of our old horses, the Palomino, broke her hip in a snowstorm a few years ago. The Viking had to put her down, and because the snow was so deep, we couldn't bury her. I vowed that our other horse, Glory, would not be food for carnivores--not that I don't appreciate circle of life stuff--but I couldn't handle it. Glory is the horse we bought at the sale barn for $35 and the horse that taught our daughters to ride. She has one messed up ear and has arthritis in her front legs. She was looking so poorly a couple of years ago, we thought she wouldn't make it through another winter, so our friend brought his backhoe and dug her grave. It's over in the meadow, a beautiful spot. She made it through that winter (and the next two), and more than one visitor finds the hole macabre. She's been with us 31 years and I'm resigned to losing her, but I know I'll cry when the time comes.

My friend lost her baby sister, then her Mom, and then her brother all within the space of a few years. She said, "Up to now, we've just whistled through life." She helped me recognize the signs when my Mom began her final journey. She provided resource books and endless support, which made the experience more bearable but not much easier. My siblings and I wondered why Mom's passing was such an awful ordeal. I keep telling myself that it was her death, not ours. That she had lots of things to work out before she could let go. That her passing was exactly as it was supposed to be.

I think people hang on beyond all reason because life is wonderful and they don't want to go.
Or they finally decide to go because too much sadness has accumulated and it's too much to bear.


My doctor convinced me that I should take statins to combat my high cholesterol. They made me feel tired and achy. I almost became reconciled to feeling tired and old all of the time, but one day I decided, "To hell with this." It took two months but now I feel like my old (ha, ha) self again. I'm certain that something will eventually kill me, but until then I refuse to feel like I'm dead before I really am.

In 2008 the Viking had triple bypass heart surgery, Mom got pneumonia, and I broke my ankle. (Bam! Bam! Bam!). Things were starting to settle down and then we heard that the loveliest of human beings, my sister-in-law, had breast cancer. BAM!!! She dealt with it head-on. Instead of asking "Why Me?" she asked, "Well, why NOT me?" She had the breast removed and scheduled a reconstruction. She got a tattoo where her nipple used to be, and moved on with her life.

I am grateful that I didn't lose the Viking. I'm SO not ready to let that part of my life go, but someday I'll have to. I'll keep doing the things I love to do while I still have time and energy. I'll get new pets to love, and keep good memories of the old ones. I'll remember the grace of my sister-in-law.

I'll get another apple tree, a blight-resistant one, and let go of it while I'm planting it.

Summer is My Favorite Season

Greetings From Domelandia,
This time of year, I practically live outside. Gardening (and all that that implies) is one of my passions. The Viking and I decided that one of this year's goals is to see if we can grow some food for real. So I have bitten off WAY more than I can chew and sometimes feel overwhelmed when I wake up.

Here's what I've been doing: I moved flagstones from an old patio area and used some of them to build a little sidewalk around our new dining room add-on. I had to use ropes, levers, and 2' lengths of fenceposts to move them. I dug out a bushel of old iris--now I need to decide where their new home will be. They are a deep purple color and smell like Grape Koolade. The yellow Dutch iris are in full bloom right now, are 2+ feet tall. They are velvet perfume.

The Viking (obviously, he GETS me) built me a state-of-the-art gopher-proof garden (cross your fingers!) Tilling as I go, I have thus far planted 3 kinds of onions, zuccini and yellow crookneck squash, pumpkin, Italian flat pole beans, baby limas, and Blue Lake green beans.
I planted 3 raspberry plants. For pretty, an assortment of sunflowers and hollyhocks, planted to face the morning sun. Columbines, lilies, delphiniums, and hosta in a shady spot. I've kept them all watered, and applied compost and mulch. I'm expecting to water them through June, our driest summer month. I feed the birds daily and remember to bring in the feeders at night so we won't have bear problems. I take the dogs for their daily walk and keep up with office duties for our business. I cook supper (not culinary triumphs--I just can't get into cooking right now), wash dishes, do laundry.

I make neverending lists for the next day: (Need to Plant: Cukes, carrots, corn, chard, cabbage (?), Anaheim pepper and tomato sets.)

This is the time of year we look forward to. The heat! The green! The wildflowers! The songs of birds from dawn 'til night. The beauty of our little valley.

Those little bags of seeds crammed full of possibility and hope.