More Books, More Thoughts

 A few weeks ago, I blogged about reading Truck by John Jerome, learning that I had read a later work of his, Stone Work, and then my connecting the dots across the years. As I commented, I like Jerome's style and his approaches to life and writing. I then checked out his On Turning Sixty-Five. Subtitled Notes From the Field, it contains Jerome's reflections on hitting that milestone, on looking ahead to the next decade or so, on aging, and on enjoying life. His older brother had died at age 64 several years earlier, and Jerome juxtaposed his brother's early death against his own hope of attaining 80 or older. 

Early in the work, he writes of making plans with his wife for canoe trips to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary and to explore northern Canada, noting that they "began thinking harder about how we were spending our days...The truth was, we could begin to see an end to larks like that, and figured we'd better stock up on them." 

Jerome was anticipating the physical hurdles in such trips as he and his wife aged. But I, the reader, knew what he did not know. He was not going to make it to 70, dying at age 69 of aggressive lung cancer. But he doesn't know that. In my commonplace book (saving the quote), I wrote "reading this book is heartbreaking at times because I know what is coming but he doesn't."

Picking up the pieces of my heart from Jerome, I reread Underland by the peerless Robert Macfarlane. I had first read it when it came out in 2019 and had captured several pieces of it for my commonplace book at the time. On rereading it, I went back and marked the pages in my commonplace book to compare what moved me then versus now. As I reread, when I found a passage that moved me, I would look back to 2019. And guess what? Yes, I had captured them then too. All of them. Many of those quotes had to do with how humans have used the ground under the surface of the earth: to bury treasure, to store relics, to bury one another. 

Yesterday was my treatment day with Tim, my oncologist of almost 18 years. My cancer stays stable, but persistent, meaning that the medical world cannot get it into remission. That means that the amyloidosis, my concurrent disease, continues to flourish. As we talked about how I feel physically and mentally and emotionally, Tim for the first time ever used his "truck rolling downhill" analogy with me. 

The analogy is simple enough. With a progressive, incurable cancer, the disease is comparable to a truck parked at the top of a slope, but in neutral and with no brake set. The truck rocks a little and then starts down the slope, gaining speed as it goes. From a doctor/patient standpoint, all we can do is slow but not stop it.

I knew the truck analogy well from friendships with two other patients of his, both now dead; each of them reached that point with their respective cancers that Tim talked about the truck. But for me this was a first. It was one of those moments where I realized that while I knew that the day would come when the truck would appear, I did not really know it until Tim said it out loud.

Which brought to mind quotes from two books, one that I shared, voice breaking, with Warren, and one that I used last fall in a talk about death and dying. The one I read out loud to Warren came from The End of Your Life Book Club, Will Schwalbe's memoir about the books he and his mother read and shared together in the last months of her life as she dealt with the cancer that was killing her. Schwabe writes of her oncologist, at the next to the last appointment, knowing the death was not far away, asking his mother if she could hug her. "It's not a very hopeful sign when your oncologist gives you a goodbye hug." He softens that with writing that the hug was "two people comforting each other...before one left on a long trip to a distant land."

I have not had a farewell hug from Tim yet, but that day is out there.

The other quote, which washed over me as I sit here typing this draft at way too early an hour of the day, was from When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalinithi's memoir about dying: "Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I knew that someday I would die, but I didn't know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I knew that someday I would die, but I didn't know when. But now I knew it acutely."

I have known since that long ago diagnosis that I am dying, not metaphorically, not philosophically, but actually and in real time. Tim saying out loud the truck analogy yesterday (and it does not escape my sense of humor at the universe that this post started with a book titled Truck) was just an acute reminder.

As I sift through these emotions, as I read these books, I am reminded of yet another quote (yes, also in one of my commonplace books): "Books can break your heart, but they will never leave you." (The Lost Chapters: Reclaiming My Life One Book at a Time" by Leslie Schwartz.)

Books, books, books. How grateful I am for them for never leaving me.

This Year's Gardens, Part 4

The globe thistle is sprouting! 

 

While the weather is still making up its mind as to whether it is really, truly Spring, we are certainly having more days pointing that way. Looking at my garden journal from last year, it was May 15 before I planted most of the garden, although I was already eating lettuce from some volunteers in the prior year's patch (none this year). Getting the beds ready and watching the seeds inside certainly make sense this time of year.

And the seeds inside, at least most of them, have not disappointed. The globe thistle I gathered from the bed down the street? It came up in profusion in three of the four cartons. And the zucchini has gone wild in its little greenhouse; I am hoping I can keep it reined in there before getting it into the garden outside. Worst case scenario, I will up-pot them into empty yogurt containers to hold them for another week or so. (The western scrub sunflowers? Nothing. Nothing.)

And the zucchini! 

The tiller

I spent much of April 22 and some of April 23 doing a hard weeding by hand of the kitchen garden. It wasn't until April 23 that I finally got my electric tiller unboxed and put together.  That was easy enough. Using it, however, was (still is) a learning curve. I got better as I tilled longer, but clearly I am a novice. I did the kitchen garden, the smaller of the two, with Warren offering suggestions from time to time.  

Yesterday was warm and sunny and windy. Warren suggested that we both take a break from the household demands and till the Hej garden, the larger garden. It had been Concert Week and we were both on overload all week. I was exhausted and not feeling well, and the tears came rushing up. "I can't till today," I said. "There just isn't enough of me."

"No, I'll till," said Warren. "You can direct and help with the smaller things."

 The Hej garden was a mess; I had only cleaned it roughly last fall. The open compost bins built by the previous owners needed structural attention; Warren and Dave (who owns the property) spent some time discussing those issues. The open compost bin also contains a commercial plastic one, which Warren dug out and turned so it could be used. (Oooh, a compost bin! My own compost!) Then he turned to the tilling of the garden.

The Hej garden is larger. It is also a much wetter garden because of its location (on a downslope) and drainage issues that weren't there years ago. The soil was heavy and dark. After a few attempts with the tiller, its blades were caked with mud and weeds. 

The Hej Garden Before

Warren was undeterred. He got his mower out and mowed the weeds down, then brought out the yard de-thatcher/scarifier he bought late last year. It too soon had its share of mud and weeds clogging it, but he got it through the garden.

Warren bringing in the heavy equipment

As for me, I took up and cleaned off the bricks that delineate the two unfenced sides of the garden. And, no surprise, unclogged the blades of the tiller and the de-thatcher. I'll put the bricks back in place after we finish tilling. I'm glad Warren stuck with me and encouraged me to come out to the garden, stepping in where my physical capacity was lacking. I was tired when we came in, but delighted by the time in the sun and the dirt and the smell of green. 

Pulling up the bricks until all the tilling is done. That's my glove, not a detached hand.

By Saturday after next, my goal is to get a load of compost for both gardens and get it tilled in. That will be May 14, which puts me on track with last year. During that week, I will go to my local farm market and buy plants. And somewhere in there I will take the tiller out to my dad's house and help him till a small garden.

For now, though, the garden tilling is started. 

The Kitchen Garden

The Hej Garden After 

When I talked with my son Ben yesterday, we talked about their garden plans. He said they were planting "only one" zucchini plant this year, but lots of tomatoes. Like me, he and Alix discovered that the best tomatoes are the ones from the garden. He said they would not plant peppers this year; they had concluded that their homegrown ones were not superior to the store ones, and were a lot more work. He mentioned there would be herbs in the garden.

Unlike Ben, I will plants lots of zucchini. We are just finishing our 2021 stash in the freezer. We will have basil, but I don't grow other herbs. Pesto is one thing; dealing with the other herbs is another. And while I noted in my 2021 garden notes that I would plant "fewer" tomatoes this summer, my resolve is weakening as I think of the joy of a fresh tomato. 

Time will tell. 

This Year's Gardens, Part Three

Seeds from the trip last summer 

Here in central Ohio, the weather is messing around with us. A few weeks ago, we had temperatures in the 70s. Earlier this week was snow. Today is cloudy and mild; tomorrow it is supposed to be almost 80.

I have yet to start any outside gardening. Heck, I have yet to clean up the gardens, let alone till them! But all the same, I did get started today in this year's gardens. (I just realized I had been titling these posts "This Year's Garden," singular, when it clearly is "This Year's Gardens," plural.) 

Last year, I had to plant the zucchini three times, twice for the squirrels. They dug up every single seed and ate them all, sometimes leaving the empty shells to taunt me. We had zucchini finally only because Warren came up with a homemade seed starter and I got enough plants going to transplant them. This year, I am not even bothering to try the seeds outside. The peat pots starter from our neighbors was activated today and planted with zucchini and cantaloupe (which the squirrels also devoured in seed stage last year).

Loaded up and ready to go! 

As I was finally getting my mind and hands into the gardens, I decided to go ahead and try to sprout seeds from last summer's trip and from a large globe thistle patch in the neighborhood. I'd been saving small yogurt cups and ice cream containers over the winter just for this purpose. For these, I am taking the "they're plants, they know what to do" approach. We'll see.

Globe thistle seeds

When I finished, I slid all of the containers under my plant rack. They'll get some sun there and I can keep an eye on them, especially the zucchini. If it does get as warm tomorrow and rain holds off, I may even make it into the kitchen garden to clear away some of last year's debris. 

And then there is the redbud. We have a redbud tree out front that we planted a few years ago. In pruning it earlier this year, I took one branch inside to see if I could get the buds to open up, setting it in a jelly jar on the table. Yes, the buds did open up. And then leaves starting sprouting on the end of the branches. 

One morning, Warren looked and said, "It's growing roots."

And it was. 

They are only ("only") very fine filaments floating in the water. But I am intrigued. Can I get the redbud to root? Will we have another redbud to plant at some point later this year? 

Only time will tell.

Of Time and Books

A month or so ago, I picked a slim paperback out of a Little Free Library on one of the routes I take to or from our local library. The book was Truck by John Jerome, a 1977 non-fiction work about the author's purchase and rebuilding of an old pickup truck to use at his New England home. Think Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which came out three years before Truck, with an attitude.

I started reading it last night. From hints in the text, I deduced that Jerome was older than I was by a decade or more. Curious, I Googled him. John Jerome, American non-fiction author, 1932-2002. Among his works were Truck, On Mountains, The Sweet Spot in Time, Stone Work...

Stone Work? 

Stone Work!

I pulled out my very first commonplace book, started sometime in the second half of the 1980s. About six pages in, there were several quotes from Stone Work by John Jerome. 

I read Stone Work when it first came out in 1989. Beautiful, lean writing about Jerome's tearing down, moving, and rebuilding a stone wall on his New England property: "two stones on one, one stone on two." 

I captured this sentence too: "October in the woods is a forced march into the sensory life..."

In 1989, I was living in Stockton, California, with my then husband and a very young Ben. I found Stone Work the way I found most of my books back then, by gleaning the new book titles at what was probably the central branch of the Stockton library. Stone Work came home with me and Jerome's words buried themselves in my head and in my commonplace book.

And here I am, over three decades later, reading him again. 

I open a book, I look up the author, and the past comes flooding over me. As Faulkner pointed out, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

John Jerome was 69 when he died. Many of his books are now out of print. But one of them, in a well-worn paperback. was here for anyone who wanted it. "Riches, riches, everywhere, just for the taking." (Yes, that too is from Stone Work.) 

I think Jerome would have enjoyed this roundabout path from 1989 to 2022. I know I have. 

Community

 Blogger Kim from Out My Window posted a short message today on my post of a few days ago: Tried to read your new post and it is gone. Are you okay?

What Kim saw was an operator error on my part. I am writing my exit piece for Medium and went back to an early (2009) post of mine about what I write about: small moments. In opening that post in draft form, I was able to copy the text I wanted cleanly, but when I went to close it, it posted as a brand new post today.

NOPE! I goofed. So I took it down. From that long ago, it was okay to let it go. But it left an electronic trace all the same and Kim reached out. 

Community comes in many shapes and sizes. It came locally today when our Legal Clinic partnered with the Ohio Justice Bus to offer a Domestic Relations Clinic at the courthouse parking lot. I was there for almost five hours, which was about hour and a half hours more than I should have been, but I was so impressed by our attorney volunteers and their dedication that I could not leave.

And community comes in our blogosphere, when those of us who may never meet in person nonetheless follow and care about others out there. Like Kim reaching out to make sure I was okay. 

More than okay with support like that, Kim. Thank you for leading with your heart.

Decluttering My Day

 I am on Joshua Becker's "Becoming Minimalist" email list. I have an on again/off again attitude towards those emails; typically I skim them then delete them. But today's article, 20 "First Step" Decluttering Ideas, caught my eye. True to his style, Becker advocated starting small: Declutter the inside of your car (#1), Clear off your nightstand (#5). Baby steps to encourage the reader to take more steps in simplifying their homes and, more to the point, their lives. 

I have felt worse—increasingly worse—physically lately than I have in a long time. Okay, than I have in years. Warren and I head back to Mayo in June, and of course for now I am continuing treatment, but I have questions and observations growing in my mind. And those questions and observations are touching off issues of decluttering—not of the top of the refrigerator (#10), but of my life.

Back in February, looking at what the spring held for me in Legal Clinic, I identified three major Clinic projects, separate and apart from the ongoing assignment of clients to attorneys, that I wanted to see accomplished. One is done. One is almost done (and will be done as of this Thursday afternoon). The third is on hold at the other end of the collaboration, so there is nothing to do right now. Clinic is, for all practical purposes, decluttered.

I'm deactivating my Medium account as an author, I hope by the end of this week. Will I continue to subscribe to and read Medium? Probably. There are some great voices on it. Will I continue to keep my account open to write? No. Not because I am lazy. Not because I feel inferior to some of those great voices (I mean, it is cool to read Barack Obama). But because there is too little of me and, frankly, this blog suits me and my observations best. (There is an E.B. White quote to that effect about his own essays; he felt he excelled best in that format when he wrote about his small observations about everyday life, but I am not going to search my commonplace books to find it right now. And White wrote beautifully and strongly in many formats despite his self-deprecation.) So this blog will continue; my life is full of small moments.

Deactivating my Medium account will declutter the writing corner of my life. 

Today earlier was brilliantly sunny. I thought about being outside, but kept doing inside things, trying to work through how lousy I felt. At about 1:20 today, I crawled into our bed, shaking and miserable. On waking up some 20 minutes later, I came downstairs and followed through on an email I had sent my friend Cindy in which I said first I "hoped" to get back outside in the sunshine, then added '"I know, I know—I need to get out!" 

And I did go out. Yes, I carried some gardening gloves and clippers with the thought that I would do some early garden work, but I quickly set those down. Our deck furniture is still in wraps, so I sat on the deck itself with my back against the tarped furniture. I added a Zildjian ball cap to shade my eyes. And I started writing (in longhand) this blog while feeling the sun, looking up at the blue sky with its scrim of clouds, listening to the birds.

The notebook in which I keep progress notes (how I feel physically) was the only one I had easily at hand, so I wrote in the back pages of it. The cover of that notebook is titled "Here's To Strong Women" with subtitles under it. One of them is "May We Be Them." As I diminish a bit each day, I wonder whether I am a strong woman by continuing on? Or just a stubborn, nay, foolish one?

Back to Joshua and decluttering. In today's trash were my worn out winter boots (which gave me a severe painful callous that may have to be removed by the podiatrist in all likelihood) and the most aged and worn of my three pairs of Skechers, about the only shoes I wear anymore. "Being frugal is not the same as being cheap," say my favorite frugal YouTubers, Larry and Hope Ware of Under the Median. I had been holding onto the boots, despite their being worn out AND painful to my callous, and the shoes thinking—what? That I'd get "one more winter" out of the boots? Another summer out of the worn out shoes? (To complete the picture, realize that the boots have resided behind a living room chair where I tossed them a few months ago to get rid of them, and the shoes had been stuffed into a too stuffed closet since, oh, maybe last summer?) (#9: Declutter old and unused coats and other items from your coat closet.) 

Putting them in the trash, finally, made me feel I was entitled to take care of my feet. Sometimes I forget that taking care of myself is okay. Sometimes I let my mind get cluttered up with thoughts of I might as well hold onto the bad ones "just in case." Just in case of what? That I need to injure my feet some more? 

Another thought decluttered, along with a bit of our living space.

As I wrote out there on our deck, I filled up on sunshine and bird song. My body relaxed and gained some ground. I had to get up to replace the pen as the first gave out. (This is a household of many pens from conferences and percussion trade shows,; we have pens everywhere. Okay, that is cheap and frugal. But this habit also adds to the stream of waste in the world, so that part is not cool.) My knees, feeling every dislocation from my younger years, every step ever climbed/walked/knelt, let their displeasure be known. When I sat back down, I changed my position and thought about my increasing balance and mobility issues. Some of that upcoming Mayo time is in the Neurology Department, a first. For now, I'm not going to let that clutter my mind.

All things come to an end and so did my time on the deck. As I have been typing this, the sky has gone gray and overcast. But oh, the sun! And the birds! And life. That time outside reset me. So maybe, just maybe, I decluttered some of my soul and my heart for now.

All Those Hams

 

All in! 

Yesterday I wrote about our purchasing six hams, given the pre-Easter loss leaders at two local grocery chains. I speculated perhaps some of them would have to reside in my dad's freezer.

Not.

Sometimes I even surprise myself!