Raingarden

I really dig it.

What is the best thing to do if it is 50 degrees outside and pouring down rain? Dig a new flowerbed, of course! Don’t bother with a bra. Don’t even put on clothes. Just stay in  your jammies, because you’re going to have to change afterward anyway. Get on your heavy green garden clogs because—duh!—mud. Then grab a shovel and start turning sod. Feel how soft the roots are under your shovel. Get it way under there, then hoist up a load of water-laden grass and muck. Grab it with your bare hands and shake off some of the dirt, then throw the sod-clump in a pile to deal with later.

Do this again and again and again, while the cold rain wets your hair, seeps through your clothes, and trickles between your breasts (if, you know, you’re a woman) and down your shoulder blades. Keep on doing this, turning the sod inch by weary inch, picking out the worms and grubs and roly-poly bugs and throwing them in another flower bed to keep doing their wonderful buggy business. Stop to take a breath and lick a drop of water off your nose. Notice how salty it tastes, and realize that the rain has mixed with your sweat. Feel exhilarated!

After about an hour, when the sod is all turned, wipe the muck off your shovel, which has become one brown muddy color with the wood indistinguishable from the blade. Grab the glops of mud that are hanging onto your clogs and throw them back in the newly-turned flowerbed. Then get down on your hands and knees and crumble up the clumps with your hands, smoothing it out a bit, and weeding out any straggling bits of grass. Get muddy up to your elbows. Feel so good you could cry.

Now, go get that hydrangea that you got for mother’s day (if you’re a mom, and if you got a hydrangea) and dig a big muddy hole for it. Drop the fledgeling hydrangea in it and gather the soggy soil around its roots. Do your silly little thing, where you pray for the plant to be happy and grow and make big beautiful flowers so that you will always remember the first mother’s day you spent without your mother, and how you survived it, and how she’s happy wherever she is now. Don’t cry—because you really don’t feel like crying. You feel good. You feel strong.

Then rinse of your shovel so it won’t rust, wash off your hands, go inside and peel off your chilly wet clothes and put on cozy dry warm ones. Go to the upstairs window and look down on your handiwork. See the beautiful brown soil, as clean as a newborn baby’s bottom (in a sense), and see the freshly-planted hydrangea drinking up the rain. Smile with satisfaction. Feel marvelous. Write about it. Press “Publish.” The end.

Linguistics

My college linguistics professor—well, maybe he wasn’t a professor, but he was a doctor, at least—often used the acronym “WIGO,” or “What Is Going On.” And if you have been reading my blog for a very long time, you’ll know that I already have a post entitled “WIGO,” back from 2010 in which I discuss tummyaches, pumpkins, ponies, and novelist Jodi Picoult. This time, WIGO is a very different mish-mash of happenings. They include, but are not limited to, the following:

1. My dad got engaged last Friday, on a boat—the Delta Queen, or something Mark Twainy like that—floating down the Sacramento River. Kaye said yes. The ring is now on the finger. The wedding date is set for Aug. 4, or maybe Aug. 11 if things go terribly awry.

2. My mother remains completely dead.

3. Due to the ongoing fact of No. 2, I had my first Mother’s Day without her. It wasn’t so bad. Simon and Annika took me to have a real English cream tea at Meadowlark Tea Room, which is owned by a charming woman with an even more charming East London accent. It’s amazing that one can find this in Vancouver, Washington, but one can. And boy howdy, does she make a mean cucumber sandwich.

4. Two days AFTER Mother’s Day, though, I was so sad I couldn’t get out of bed. Again.

5. I got fed up with being fat and feel something akin to determination with regard to losing weight.

6. I went to a cooking class and learned how to make paella, although I can guarantee you I will never, ever, ever make it at home, because it’s got mussels and shrimp and stuff and I just can’t get into the whole shellfish thing. They just taste mildly garbagey to me.

7. Kaye was showing her house to a real estate agent in preparation for selling it. (She’ll eventually move in with Dad, but Dad lives so far out in the country that it’s really not feasible for her to live there full-time. Dad may eventually sell his house, but in the meantime they’ll probably get a condo or townhouse somewhere in Vancouver or Northeast Portland, closer to all the kids.) Anyhow, during the house tour, as she was descending the ladder into her small basement, she slipped and fell, fracturing her spine and her hand. She’s been in the hospital for three days and is feeling better, but the fractures will take eight to twelve weeks to heal. She hopes she’ll be better by Aug. 4. Or Aug. 11, as the case may be. At any rate, it’s been kind of sucky for Dad to be in the hospital. Again. But probably not as sucky as actually having a spinal fracture.

8. Did I mention it’s hard to get out of bed? I’m TIRED. Why I am so tired?

9. In spite of this niggling tiredness, my new friend Carrie and I have decided to participate in a local vintage/handmade goods flea market on July 14. Beyond that, we are tentatively planning to open a space in the local antique store, which is incredibly well-trafficked and full of wonderful finds. We’re calling our new business Gables, and here is the logo that I designed:

10. So far we have made wreaths covered with dictionary-page flowers, sailboats made out of ticking-stripe cloth and driftwood, glass magnets, and several soldered silver necklaces. It’s all, you know, stuff you’d find in shabby chic/upcycled/vintage-type stores. I’ll add a mix of some knick-knacks I’ve got hanging about in boxes, an excess of my grandmother’s linens, tiny terrariums in old vases, and lots of handmade stuff like framed silhouettes on burlap. The kind of stuff that would only interest you if you’ve got an interest in crafty things, which I do. And at this point, I’ve got nothing to lose, so I might as well have a bit of fun.

Do those two gables—which are not really gables but actually dormers—make you think of boobies? Because they make ME think of boobies. I don’t know why. They’re not round and squishy. But they do have pointy bits. Is it because there are two of them? At any rate, boobies can’t be bad for business.

Whatever! Or: An Ode to Not Caring Anymore

This is the Colorado Street Bridge, near where we used to live in Pasadena. Its nickname is “Suicide Bridge.” Read on for more fun facts!

It’s amazing how not giving a shit can cheer you up. After writing my last dreary, dismal, gray, melodramatic post, AND after spending 40 minutes unloading it all on Simon, I felt SO MUCH BETTER. They say that sorrow shared is sorrow halved, or something namby-pamby like that; I say, “If you can make other people even more miserable than you are, then by comparison YOU’LL FEEL AWESOME.”

No, I don’t really say that. I actually felt guilty about bumming Simon out, but he withstood the tempest and we had a good laugh about it later. I said, “If you ever said all that stuff to ME, I’d probably jump off a bridge!” which for some reason made us both crack up. Ooooh, boy, suicide jokes are always winners.

The rest of the week was simply grand. Soaked up lots of crazy-Northwest-springtime sun; did a little shopping for stuff I can’t really afford but hey, it’s birthday money; bought some goldfish for our pond (read: sink in the yard with water in it); thought seriously about starting a business—I have a new friend who suggested renting a space together at Camas Antiques, where we spend most of our spare time anyway, and now I am busy thinking up business names and mentally designing logos and writing imaginary copy for our theoretical WordPress site; made some amazing Southwest-style chicken soup that Annika and Simon won’t touch because it’s too spicy; and I made four necklaces out of glass and paper and soldered silver; I applied for two whole jobs and got TWO WHOLE RESPONSES! Yeah, I’ve been busy with ALL KINDS OF STUFF that you can do when you’re not chained to a computer earning a massive freaking paycheck.

But my point is, after being so depressed that I decided I didn’t care anymore, I started to care again. And now I care a lot about all the regular stuff I normally care about: writing, reading, cooking, gardening, decorating, eating, sex, and beating the pants off friends and random strangers at Words with Friends and Ruzzle.

So every successive day after my Not Caring 9/11 has just been better than the day before. Today was THE BEST: I watched Annika sing her first solo at a local performance by her school’s jazz choir. She ROCKED THE HOUSE. The girl may only be ten, but she can scat like a big momma. I did what I always do whenever I see Annika on stage—I cry a bit. I mean, not big fat sentimental ninny tears. I don’t cry so that anyone can see me. I just feel the tears of pride welling up, and I push them back down inside where they belong.

But the tears just proved that my grief and sadness and crap aren’t bottomless. They DO have an end, a deepest point, a bottom—a whacking great squishy bottom, just like mine. And when I hit it, I can bounce back up again, into the sunshine. Grief may turn out to be less like a pit and more like a trampoline, with lots of ups and downs.

At any rate, it’s better than jumping off a bridge.

‘Cuz OW.

Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow

I haven’t written in a while because I’ve been busy doing things, but the reason I’ve been busy doing things is to avoid writing. I work in the garden—I’ve made two new flowerbeds and replanted a bunch of stuff and made a pond and a fairy garden out of a double-basin sink—and I furiously run around and have coffee and lunch with friends, to keep sadness at bay. It’s mostly working, except when it’s not. And when I’m very, very, very sad, all I want to do is write; but then you, dear readers, just get a butt-load of sadness and surely one of you will say something meant to be helpful but really not helpful, like, “Just be more positive!” or something like that, which will depress me even further.

But here, in brief, are some of the things that have happened: I went to a Moroccan restaurant for my birthday and ate with my fingers; Annika caught two fat trout with her own fishing pole and we ate them for dinner that same night, roasted whole in the oven with salt and butter and herbs, and they were delicious; I finally told my father, after 42 years, all the ways his volcanic anger has wounded me, complete with a spate of full-on weeping, about which I now feel a little ashamed but it was probably good for my father to hear his daughter weep; Simon didn’t get the big job he applied for AND he lost a $40,000 contract for an internet TV show, and we’re both more discouraged than a huge vat full of discouraged things; we’ve continued to get together with Kaye and Dad and the girls every weekend for dinner, and discovered that although Kaye is generally sensitive and encouraging she manages to say precisely the wrong things to Simon with regards to his deflated career and unintentionally makes him feel about 100 times worse; and we spent a lovely Sunday in Hood River, Oregon, pleasantly squished into a maroon minivan with our wonderful friends, looking at the millions of pear and apple blossoms that are right now adorning the area’s picturesque orchards. There’s a good chance that one of the juicy ripe pears you eat this fall will have started out as one of those blossoms.

Mostly I feel a loss of hope, manifesting itself as an immense heaviness somewhere in the region of my thorax. (Isn’t that a bit of a paradox? That an absence of something should feel so heavy.) I feel that all the good things that are to happen in my life have already happened, and there is now nothing to look forward to. I don’t think we’ll ever make more money, or pay off our credit cards, or buy a house, or be able to pay for Annika’s college or even a pair of Nikes. I don’t think I’m actually employable anymore; nobody responds to my cover letters or job queries. I look at employed women going about their business as longingly as a childless woman observes mothers cooing to their babies. Funnily enough, we made so much money last year that we lost our state-subsidized health insurance this year, and now I’ve lost my awesome doctor and we have the crappiest healthcare plan that money can buy. This makes me anxious every day. Of course, I should already have been anxious about the five fillings that are slowly turning into root canals in my mouth because we have no dental insurance. Fortunately, the state still covers Annika, so she is able to keep the same marvelous doctor she’s had all along. Bright spot!

And let’s not discuss my newly blooming back fat.

In short, I’m in a pit so deep that I now wonder if I’m capable of getting out. It’s too bad, as well, because I actually thought for a while that I was scratching and clawing my way to the top. Now I’m just waiting for God to tip the entire planet on its head, for my sake, in order to spill me out of my hole and rescue me, like a child shakes a captive spider out of a cup by turning it upside down and allowing it to scurry on its way.

Because I feel compelled to end this post on an optimistic note: the sun is shining, my cats are soft, I’m meeting a friend at her house and she’s going to teach me to make jewelry with a soldering iron, and the goldfish we’ve put in our sink-pond haven’t died yet. I have a pleasantly shaped face and my breasts are nice, if only I could get them to stop popping out of the push-up bra I got a couple weeks ago in a fit of insanity. I have friends who love me and I husband I adore and who loves me back and a daughter whose exasperating qualities are more than balanced out by her quirky smarts, creativity, and luminous beauty. I have beers in the fridge and fuchsias ready to bloom in the garden. And someone told me last week that they loved my gray hair streaked with reddish blond bits. I said, “It’s my Real Woman hair,” and she laughed.

See? It’s not all bad. I can still make a perfect stranger laugh.

A Trip to the Food Bank

Any day is a good day that ends with quiche.

So last week we pretty much ran out of money. We were waiting on several checks from clients that were absurdly late. We had enough in our account for one not-so-full tank of gas, but our fridge was bare, aside from a month-old container of pancake batter and an assortment of condiments. I decided it was time to go to the food bank, which is located in a thrift store that I occasionally visit.

I drove myself there and walked in the door, trying to act nonchalant, like I visit the food bank all the time and it’s no big deal. I was sure someone would stop me and say, “Yes, but five months ago you spent nearly half your weekly grocery budget on artisanal cheese.” True dat. But those lovely people down at the food bank assured me that as long as we were currently under the Federally allowed maximum for what it considers “poverty,” we were eligible to receive food. Never mind that next month we might have plenty. The lady who helped me was calm and cheerful, and not at all condescending. I have never felt less judged.

“Don’t feel bad, really,” the nice lady said. “Lots of people have tough months, come in to get food, and then return to volunteer later when their financial situation has turned around.” Life is funny that way. Isn’t it just?

So I filled out the form and handed it in, and a few minutes later the nice lady emerged with a shopping cart full of all sort of unexpected items: farm-fresh eggs (it’s springtime and all the local hens are laying!) and coffee pods for a Keurig-type coffee machine (because LOTS of poor people have those!) and a whole blueberry layer cake and a bag of chocolate Easter eggs and an assortment of pastries from Starbucks. I was figuring on bags of rice and beans and maybe a big brick of orange cheese, but instead we got Doritos and two dozen oatmeal cookies and a kit for making chicken Parmesan (sans chicken). I did get some staples, such as a bag of lentils and peanut butter and beef broth and canned vegetables. The box included a frozen package of lunch meat, Stove Top stuffing, and Kraft Mac & Cheese, as well as fruit cups and fiber bars for  Annika’s lunch. I also got a bag of mandarin oranges, three tomatoes, and five tiny green apples.

On the way out, I was allowed to take a free loaf of bread, courtesy of the local Safeway, which donates its day old (and older) bakery items. I selected a whole-grain loaf which was hard and may have been sporting a ghost of white mold on its underside, but I wasn’t in a position to be choosy.

The only embarrassing part was pushing the shopping cart to my car. For some reason, I’d decided to park very far from the entrance. The cart clattered over the uneven pavement, as if yelling “FOOD BANK! FOOD BANK! FOOD BANK!” all the way to the car and all the way back. I felt a gut-twinge of shame as I wheeled the empty cart through the front of the thrift store and back to the lady waiting at the counter.

When I got home, I gratefully peeled and ate a mandarin. Then I took the eggs and some cheese from the Parmesan chicken packet and made a quiche, throwing in a leftover bit of onion and four stalks of asparagus that had been languishing in our vegetable drawer. I cut up the last of our potatoes and roasted them with olive oil, salt, and rosemary. I sliced the possibly moldy crusts off the bread and made buttery garlic toast. Then I took everything to Kaye’s house for dinner, along with the blueberry cake. She added a salad and a nice beefy Kielbasa sausage. Seven of us sat around the table talking and laughing, and we ate every last bit of that delicious quiche. I forgot about the mold while I was eating the garlic toast, and the cake was moist and fluffy.

I still felt a little ashamed, but mostly I felt pleasure: Here was my big new family, and I was feeding them, and they were happy.

Life is funny that way. Isn’t it just?

Unfurling

Sometimes I just need to look at something else for a while. Like the ocean, or a fern frond, or a friend’s face. I’m fond of my four walls, but nothing invigorates like a change of mise-en-scène, to get all Frenchy on you.

Knowing this, I sort-of-mostly-pretty-much-yes-completely invited myself to the beach for the day to visit an old college acquaintance. Or rather, she’s not old, but our acquaintance has been longish.

She has an unpretentiously West Coast Contemporary-Funky Beach Style house, all glowing wood and angles and windows, filled with plants and art and good vibes from her two cats, one of which I immediately adored. (Why are OTHER people’s cats always nicer?) Walking into her house was like being born aloft by a warm wind. Different art to look at! Different furniture, different pillows, different plants, different views out the window. Affectionate cat instead of cat who runs away and hides and then comes back later to meow at me when he wants to be fed.

We didn’t do anything all that spectacular: we talked, we walked on a the beach and around her neighborhood, we visited the store that she owns in town, her husband came and took us out to lunch, we browsed through an antique store, and then they saw me off with a box of tea and a sand dollar and I drove home. But it FELT spectacular to be someplace else, too peek into someone else’s life, to pet someone else’s cat. And the drive to and from the beach was exhilarating—two hours of listening or not listening to whatever station I wanted to, stopping when I wanted for a vanilla soft-serve cone or to pee, and that perceived freedom, when behind the wheel of a car, to make it turn in any direction and end up anywhere in the world, even though I’d always choose to come home.

So: a change of scenery, and the sympathetic ear of an easy-to-talk to friend. Throw in a background of beach and sky and wheeling seagulls, and it’s really more therapeutic, maybe, than a whole bunch of therapy sitting in a chair in a stuffy room and opening yourself up to a complete, if highly qualified, stranger.

Although I DO like to talk about myself, so I still enjoy therapy. And good therapy has its place, and is useful and appropriate when it’s warranted. And perhaps it is warranted in my case.

But jeez, I felt like a million bucks driving home yesterday. My mind felt open to possibility, new avenues of thought stretched away into the distance, and I followed them instead of staying put. I felt, all of a sudden, like I could DO things again, that not every effort is pointless. I thought: I can go back to school and become a marine biologist! Or I’ll open my own home décor store, and I started thinking of logo ideas. Or I’ll take a community ed class and learn how to reupholster furniture and finally transform that old orange chair in the garage. Maybe I’ll ask that lady who run the cooking school if she needs an assistant. Maybe I’ll start a landscaping business with my new stepsister. Maybe, maybe, maybe—and it’s not all idle speculation. One day one of my “maybes” is going to turn into a “probably” and then a “for sure.” And then it will be my new reality.

Isn’t that how life mysteriously but dependably unfurls? Everything begins as an idea, a thought, a what-if, and then we act on it and it becomes solid. A tightly curled fern becomes a great big leafy frond, and sends its spores out into the world, making more ferns. Fern-o-rama! Fern-a-palooza! Fernation! Fermentation and imagination! Everything is connected! Only connect!

In the meantime—well, I don’t know what in the meantime. In the meantime, I need to change out of this sweaty shirt and brush my teeth and drive to Battle Ground so I can take my grandmother to a hair appointment. In the meantime, I’m thirsty and we need more cat food and Annika’s out of Underjams.

But that doesn’t mean the fern isn’t ready to unfurl.

She Got Better

Three or four months ago, I seriously thought my daughter had some deep, dark behavioral problems. I thought she had Oppositional Defiant Disorder. I really did! We met with her school counselor and we got about six weeks of family counseling, which resulted in a new index-card-based positive-reinforcement-type system of discipline—or motivation, depending on how sensitively New Agey you want to be about it. I thought it was working at first, and then it really really really WASN’T working, and I sort of gave up. Simon and I had major disagreements over this and he thought I was a wimpy marshmallow parent and we absolutely had to stick to the program OR ELSE ANNIKA WOULD TURN INTO RAGING PSYCHO TEEN. I thought he was right, I just couldn’t find the physical or psychological wherewithal to keep it up. I used the excuse that my mom had died and it was making me too sad to enforce any systems on anybody. Ha! I wonder how long it’s appropriate to use that excuse? Probably I should stop saying and thinking it. But at the time it felt true.

So we were about to re-institute The Cards when all of a sudden, she got better. Her behavior changed enough that I felt comfortable enough to comment on it in this blog, even if I was still skeptical. Well, it’s been a couple months, and we’re still sailing along like a perfectly functional happy family. I mean, except for our crushing financial problems. But as far as our emotional life, we’re pretty cohesive again. It feels like a tiny little miracle. Or maybe not so tiny.

I wonder why Annika’s behavior all of a sudden changed. I want to understand what made her start acting normal and loving and calm and less apt to scream and throw fits. Did something change in her mind? Did good behavior start to make sense to her, whereas before she couldn’t understand the benefits of not screaming and stomping and slamming doors? Did her bad behavior stop paying off for her somehow? Or maybe it was a chemical thing, and Annika was simply experiencing a pre-adolescent surge of hormones that made her be absolutely horrid for several months. Maybe during those months she was processing Mom’s loss, in her inarticulate child-way. Or maybe she was grieving along with me, reflecting my hopelessness and loss in her screams and stomps. Or maybe it’s all of those things!

At any rate, I feel as though Annika’s shift in behavior has allowed me to come out of the darkest part of grief by giving me peace in my family life. Home is a safe place again, whereas I stopped feeling happy at home for a while. And I just spent a whole week of spring break with her without a single Incident-with-a-Capital-I. Granted, she watched about 300 hours of mind-numbing television during the break, so maybe her brain just turned to goosh and she couldn’t think well enough to argue or care. But really, it was just nice. She read and watched TV in the mornings, and then played with the neighbor kids in the afternoon, and then a few times we went out together to do something fun, like grocery shopping or coffee or to exchange a pair of shoes for a dress she wanted. Low-key stuff. But it was all EASY and PLEASANT. She was loving and kind and I was happy to be with her. I felt a success in motherhood—a glowy sort of pride that yes, this is my girl, and she’s beautiful and smart and so much fun to be with that I am sharing a cup of coffee and we’re talking about deep things (or farts, whatever) and we clearly have a close bond. Plus, if you ask, I will tell you that she got straight As on her last report card, and that she’s off the charts on her reading skills!

This is good. This is all good. I know that the teenage years are just around the corner, and that those miserable months of screaming and fit-throwing might come again, but at least I know—well, I don’t know WHAT I know. I don’t know why she got better. I only know that she did, and that even though I wanted to give up, I didn’t, and we got through it, and that I loved her even when it was hard to love her. And maybe that’s all I need to know.

Tunnel of I-Don’t-Know-What

I went out to lunch the other day with a new-ish friend of mine; that is, we’ve known each other for a few years, but this is the first time we’ve gone out to lunch and talked about more personal things. Anyhow as I was telling her about all the baffling, goofy, strange, sad, happy and frustrating things about my life at the moment, she said she got a mental picture of me in a tube. I sort of laughed and wondered if the tube was protecting me from what was outside, or restricting me so that I couldn’t touch whatever was outside. She sort of laughed, too, and then looked bashful; she says these odd little snapshots often pop into her mind. She said she thought maybe the tube was protecting me, that I was traveling through this dark tunnel thing until I got out the other end and everything would be OK, or else at least I’d be OK enough to handle whatever was outside the tube.

I was intrigued, but I didn’t want to press her further. I didn’t want to ascribe special significance to the image, which was probably entirely random and simply the product of her very creative brain. Nevertheless, it’s stayed with me: Monika-in-the-tube, like one of those vacuum things that are used to carry correspondence through office buildings, or between the bank teller and the customer in a bank drive-thru. I got shoved in the tube when my mom died, and now I’m traveling—whoosh!—towards some unknown destination. I don’t know where it will be, but I know that it will be less constraining than this tube.

In the meantime, I’m discovering that one of the most difficult things about grief—or maybe it’s not grief, maybe it’s just this particular period of my life—is that I’ve lost a certain confidence in myself and my abilities. When I was young, I thought—as do many annoying young people—that anything was possible if I just tried hard enough. If I WANTED to do something, I ought to just DO it. I should MAKE IT HAPPEN. But now, as I am about a week away from turning 42, I’m feeling the weight of circumstances and the simple lack of energy to go out and MAKE IT HAPPEN. (…whatever “IT” is: writing a book? Losing 40 pounds? Learning to cook Moroccan food? God, I’m hungry right now.) Things are HARD. And I’m TIRED.

Maybe if I just TRIED HARDER I could PUSH THROUGH THE TIREDNESS: TA-DA! I’m a new person with a small butt and perky boobies and a rocking recipe for Chicken Tagine! But usually the tiredness wins out. The couch is soft, it’s fun to play games on my cellphone, and reading is easier than writing. So my approach for getting through grief has been essentially this: MFWSA, a meaningless acronym for Move Forward with Small Accomplishments. (Of course, it could also mean Mutton Friccaseed with Sauce Anglaise. You decide.) Small Accomplishments could be Hang a Picture, Write a Letter, Meet a Friend for Lunch, Make Dinner, Fold a Load of Laundry, Do Twenty Minutes of Yoga, Have an Apple Instead of a Grilled Cheese Sandwich, Search Jobs on Craigslist and Send a What-the-Hell Résumé, Go for a Walk. It could really be anything. The important thing is that it’s small, and I can do it successfully without having to take myself away from the couch for extended periods of time. I’m not radically changing my life, but little things are getting done every day, so that I feel good about at least a few things when I lay me down to sleep every night. It’s like Accomplishment Appetizers: whetting my appetite for some larger accomplishment that may come later.

I think it might be working. I have had about three weeks now without the bitter despair or overwhelming blackness that was my regular companion over the winter. And in spite of a the fact that I’m still a smidge jealous of my father’s new happiness with Kaye, I also feel an undeniable excitement at the prospect of a new and lovely person in our lives. Their joy is already spilling over and brightening our lives. Annika will have two beautiful and smart and fun and creative cousins, I will have a new sister, and our family gatherings will have laughter and chaos and loud conversation and screaming girls running up and down the halls. I know this will happen because it’s already happened: We had our first combined family dinner at Kaye’s house last Friday, and it was everything I just described. I’m EXCITED about this, about being a part of a family where people enjoy each other’s company and it’s big (or at least bigger than I’m used to) and stuff is happening. I understand it can also be a pain in the patootie, but I’m going to look at it as, for lack of a schmaltzier term, a blessing. Mom’s death was bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, but expanding our family is going to be good. I’m already thinking about things I can do to celebrate Mother’s Day on May 12: an English tea at my house where I use at least five of my 17 teapots and there’s cucumber sandwiches and radish-and-butter sandwiches and buttermilk scones with my homemade jam and big helpings of brandy-soaked trifle. Instead of a sad day, it will now be a happy day. Or at least a sad-and-happy day. See? Blessing.

My point is: I think I can see light at the end of the tube. And I think it might not be an oncoming train.

But just in case, I’m going to stay off the tracks.

Spring Break

Change is in the air. Or not.

I’m just so restless that it’s torture to write. It’s hard to sit still and concentrate, and my thought are like a rain of arrows, piercing me in diverse places. I wouldn’t be writing now except that it’s raining and I can’t be out in the garden. I feel as though SOMETHING IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN, even though maybe it’s not. In fact, my feeling of impending change is probably a sure sign that everything will remain the same.

It’s spring break and Annika is home from school and we can’t afford to go anywhere. Nevertheless, I’ve taken her to Starbucks and out to ice cream. She’s spent most of her break watching TV: endless annoying Disney teeny-bopper sitcoms. I mostly hate them. But they keep her occupied so that I can mope and feel restless and turn huge wheelbarrows of sod in our yard. I’m making a new flowerbed in our tiny back yard, which is way down below our house in a Grand-Canyon-like crevasse of shade. One one side is the sheer cliff face of our house, and on the other three sides is a six-foot-high fence, separating us from our extremely close neighbors’ back yards. We have to traverse two tiers of deck to get to the grassy part of the yard, which at the moment is overgrown and weedy and has a giant pile of rotting leaves and branches left by our landlord when he took down a diseased tree on our lot last fall.

In my mind, the lower deck is a pleasant place with rattan armchairs and a table and some potted plants, and the surrounding yard is landscaped with bright flowers. In reality, there’s some broken and faded plastic Adirondack chairs down there, and the ivy and moss I planted a couple years ago has gone wild and made the yard look even messier.

But that’s what I’m thinking about all the time to keep myself from going crazy. I plan the yard, exactly what I will plant and exactly where, what type of edging I will use and whether I will use gravel or barkdust, cement pavers or not. Will I dig out the ivy? Will I transplant the fuchsias? In the front yard, I have already spread compost and planted tomatoes. The rhubarb is coming up, the strawberries are greening. The hydrangeas I planted last year are fluffing themselves out in new-leaf finery. When the sun is out, it’s lovely to sit on the front porch and see the pretty results of all my hard work.

BUT I’M STILL SO FREAKING RESTLESS.

Will Simon get this job he interviewed for on Tuesday? The commute is a bear—no, two bears—but the salary is marvelous and it’s the first job he’s interviewed for since he started his business. More accurately, it’s the first job he’s WANTED to interview for: marketing director for a rather prestigious Portland video production firm, with high-profile clients like Hewlett-Packard and Disney and Nike. Simon sent off a cover letter last Friday, and heard back from the CEO within hours. That felt good. So he’s had his interview a couple days ago and this morning he had a message from the CEO saying they’ll be in touch next week.

I don’t know. It would be—well, not a long shot, necessarily, but certainly a lucky break. I could finally relax a little, and not wear myself out with our financial ups and downs. We’re so tired of trudging up that hill, only to slide back down again before we reach the top. Or maybe we reach the top and then go rolling down into the valley. Stability seems as delicious and tantalizing to me now as marriage once did. And I will admit I’m desperate for it.

In the meantime, I’ll have to stick to working though my anxiety with a shovel and a trowel and my dirt-caked hands. Change is easily wrought in a springtime garden.

Icing Without Dog Hair

So I haven’t written in a few days because I’ve been, you know, processing. I still feel weird writing about this subject: my dad married to someone who is not my mom. Or maybe that could just be the moldy toast I had for breakfast. I took the mold off, but it still tasted musty, even with jam and butter. Then I went online and obsessively trolled through all the sites that answered the query, “Can you get sick from eating bread mold?” The answers ranged from “Yes, you will certainly die a violent and horrible death,” to “Nah.” But so far all I have is a fluttery tummy, which could also be due to the fact that my Dad has asked me to help him pick out an engagement ring and the fact that Simon is on the way home from a job interview for a job that would completely change our circumstances if he were to get it.

On Saturday, we met Dad and Kaye and Kaye’s granddaughter, who is eight, for drinks at Gustav’s. Gustav’s is where we went for Thanksgiving that miserable winter when Mom was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. We didn’t know she had cancer yet, just that she felt terrible. Gustav’s is also where we met for my Mom’s last birthday dinner, and where we had dinner on the night of my 40th birthday. She was alive for my 41st birthday, but not doing well. Two months later she was gone.

Anyway. It was good to see Kaye, and actually good to see Dad and Kaye together, as strange as it is to write that. They fit together naturally. The communicate extremely well. They laugh at each other’s jokes, finish each other’s sentences, all the usual couple stuff. And they’re both so . . . HAPPY. They were oozing happy all over the place. I can’t help but be made happy, too, even while—I admit it—I am a smidge jealous of it. Not of their happiness as a couple, but of the fact that Dad gets to be happy now while I am still thick in the mire of grief much of the time.

Kaye brought along her granddaughter, who is eight. She carried a pink leopard-print backpack with her, and when she sat down at the table and removed a rubbery pink-and-green lizard that looks like the evil twin to Annika’s own rubbery lizard, they immediately became fast friends.

We all talked very comfortably and it was—well, it was not at all like eight months ago we were sitting in the hospice room waiting for Mom to die. But Kaye did not avoid the subject. She talked about Mom easily, as though they were friends—which they absolutely were. And Kaye acknowledges the weirdness of the whole situation in a most disarming way.

I asked Dad if he and Kaye had noticed any romantic sparks 20 years ago. Dad said no, they were in love with—or in Kaye’s case, at least loyal to—their spouses at that time. There was no mutual “WOW!” until recently. And then, all of a sudden, BIG TIME WOW.

Kaye seems to bring out elements of Dad that had been hidden from sight for most of his life. Or at least his life as I’ve known him. He’s never been especially considerate or compassionate, and now he’s all of a sudden thinking about things from other people’s points of view, figuring out what he can do to help. This is especially evident with Kaye’s granddaughters, whom she is raising together with her daughter and her ex-husband.

You might think that this is difficult for me, since Dad has been sort of a not-overinvolved grandparent with Annika. On the contrary, though, what I see is that Dad’s partnership with Kaye would bring out Dad’s Inner Grandpa in a more evident way. I see lively holidays with Annika’s new “cousins” and happy sleepovers at the big house in the woods, which is now empty except for Dad and his dogs and his dog’s farts.

Which brings us to the dogs. At dinner on Saturday night, while Dad slipped outside to attend to the dogs which were waiting patiently in the car, we mentioned to Kaye about Dad’s dog obsession. She said that she understand that it’s something Dad and Mom shared—a love of the dogs—and that he is doing a kind thing to take such good care of them after her death. “No. No, that’s not it at all. Dad loves the dogs. Dad LOVES the dogs. He LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVES the dogs.” She took this in, and then volunteered that she actually doesn’t care to have animals living in the house with her. Dealbreaker? We’ll have to see.

If Dad chooses Kaye anyway, that would just be the icing on the cake. And for once it wouldn’t have any dog hair in it.