New Year's Path; Old Year's Victories

I think I have written before about what I try to do every New Year's Eve, but what the heck. I will write about it again...

Last Year Is Done: Let Go of Missteps, Keep the Grace
I take a serious, long look at the year that is ending, reading the goals to move toward a more desirable path, and trying to honestly see how far along I have moved in that path and whether or not it remains a valid guide for what comes next.  I also write down every single misstep I believe I have taken with somewhat brutal honesty at times.

Then I read those missteps aloud, pausing after each and I systematically tear up the list into as tiny pieces as I can and I throw them away. Sometimes I put the day's coffee grounds on top of them, just so that I feel I have thoroughly obliterated them.

Finally, I write what I feel I have accomplished on the left side of a piece of paper, as well as all the good things that I feel have happened TO me--the serendipitous gifts, or points of grace.  Some years I have had a terrible time finding either, but more often I find that it's easier to list points of grace than accomplishments.  I tend to minimize my role in anything good. I have noticed this in the last three years, most particularly; I had far less trouble finding my flawed acts than giving myself credit for anything.

Bit by bit, though, I got better at that.  In 2010 I managed not to blame the house not selling on me. I gave myself credit for readying the house for market, for making some progress in some self-destructive obsessive behaviors, and for forgiving myself. Never before had I listed that as a positive accomplishment, but I finally saw that I would have appreciated this in other people--why not myself? But enough about 2010. It was a terrifying and painful and difficult year.

2011 began differently. The list of graces was enormous, but I saw that I felt I had accomplished a lot as well. I had returned to my blog, exceeding my target of 26 entries for the year. I had finished two more paintings and have five in the works. I let go of worrying about how much money I would have after paying off all my debts if the house sold.  I changed the dynamic of a relationship that was truly codependent. I found the core and the structure for my book. I began to exercise again, if somewhat sporadically so far.  All of my baby steps had added up to something.

Baby Steps Matter! From Broad Strokes to Filling In the Details...
I have overlooked the baby steps so often in my life, not recognizing that they added up to moving along a path I valued. The path? To live more creatively and closer to the bone of Jeannette. Who I am, rather than someone I think other people will approve of or like. Living my life out of loving rather than being loved. (That's a kicker, and I cannot say that I come close to living that way, but it's a pretty worthy goal I think.) That little girl who kept company with the mice in the traps, who talked to them and loved them who somehow got it that loving things was an answer to something scary ... she was only three and understood how to do that.  In some ways, the path I wrote down to work toward in 2012 is hers.  The path is the elementary school girl who wrote her first poems in free verse.  The girl who saw a foster child with scanty clothing and asked her mother whether they could do something to help, and then helped her. My path is the same as the middle school girl who completed her first "real painting" of three faces of women, crying out for help in her art, crying out through the false smile, the anger, the scream--but no one heard. They saw the skill but ignored the voice. My path is to write and to paint my soul, to do my best to be felt and seen and heard--but to do it for the act of the doing.

Those were the broad strokes I wrote for moving forward.  I do tend to find writing some specific steps helps me to get started in every year, though I don't label them resolutions.  While I put the broad strokes as the start of the right side of my paper, I always follow it with specific actions. That's all I call them, rather than telling myself they are resolutions.

I recognize that taking care of my health issues must be included, or I won't be able to do a damned thing. I start with them because they are the least interesting to me--this year, just getting to the apartment gym once a week and to ride my own recumbent bike at least an hour a week are enough for someone who has been bedridden for so many hours a day.

I want to have at least 52 blog entries this year. I don't say once a week, since that would set me up for failure if there is a week I don't get to it.  But this year I DID get ambitious, for once. I simply put WRITE THE BOOK, yes, in BIG lettering. I did not put write the finished product, nor publish it. I just have to write it now. (Bruce, you are so right. Most of it is written in my head or in my blog, but I have to put it in a compelling, readable form. The whole thing. Period.)

Finally, I wrote "start and complete at least three new paintings."  That may not seem like many, but since I also put "Finish partly done paintings," that means I would wind up with ten completed paintings, at least. I keep finding partly done paintings that I had forgotten about entirely, from 2009 and early 2010. I had had to dismantle my studio early in 2010 because I was readying the place to sell. They remained packed up and hidden until I moved. When I put up my Christmas tree, I found another nest of them!

Age, Schmage (or Old, Schmold, if You Like)
I had begun this year's list with the intention of giving myself a schedule, but I cut to the chase instead. I may have the same list next year, or I may not. But in reading the list of accomplishments and graces of last year aloud, I realized that I felt like having myself shoot for the stars. Why dream little?

I will be sixty this year.  I did not think of my parents as old at sixty.  My mom hit that age when I was twenty-five, so it was not unreasonable for my friends to think it was old.  What I saw in my parents, though, was that they both had minds like steel traps and, when she was sober, my mom had an insatiable curiosity about just about everything--except things that had to do with popular culture. Dad became Registrar of a university when he was sixty, after changing careers five years before. They were not over. When my health took such a terrifying turn in January of 2009, and so many dreams blew up in my face, I had started to let those thoughts of "getting old" and being "washed up" creep in through the cracks where my soul had been bleeding.

I allowed myself to start to believe that the best years of my life were behind me. Why? Because I was in acute pain? Because an old love had been used my heart then thrown it and me away, like garbage? Because I was poor? Because I had lost my career or any hope of regaining that particular career I'd built over ten years? Because I had to go through the humiliating process of applying for Disability? Because I knew I had to lose my home? Because my son had become increasingly withdrawn and depressed, and there was not a thing I could do? Well, yeah! Because of all those things.

Fine. I had reasons to be depressed, to be fearful, to be stuck. So what? I realized at the end of 2010 that none of those things had anything to do with being old, or being done.  I have no idea what snapped me to attention, but I do know that something practical and tangible--winning my disability hearing and having the judge lambast the board that denied me turned me around. How crass, one might say. Well, when you are penniless and have to rely on a credit card and the kindness of your friends to put food on the table, having an independent income, no matter how meager, changes your life.

I got unstuck in 2011. I made reachable, small goals for myself last year. I met every single one of them, and have you any idea how good that made me feel last night?

Why Dream Little? My Mantra, Perhaps...
So I am dreaming BIG this year. And I actually yelled at a friend who talked about our being old and how we had to accept that from here on opportunity is for the young. It made me angry because I feel as if, once again, I am just getting started. I had to start from scratch when my husband took off when I was forty. I was on disability and had been for almost a decade. I had to start to build a career from almost NOTHING. I did it. And here I am, twenty years later, having to start from scratch in a different way, so I will do it.

It isn't about the poverty; it's about having a sense of purpose. I have that now, and I have some financial security for a couple of years, at least. Who could ask for more than that? I am a lucky woman; I keep writing that, I know. But I feel it all the way through, and I think it is a healthy way to feel. It's up to me not to squander this opportunity I have.

An old friend, told me that all he wanted for me was to be able to get up each day and choose whether I wanted to write or to paint, or whether I needed to simply rest because of my back. He said he wanted me to be able to choose how I lived my days without having to be so worried all the time. Well, his wish for me has come true, and I did not think it would.

I have an exciting year ahead to look forward to. I find the thought of being sixty kind of freeing. I am not sure why yet, but undoubtedly I'll babble about it at some point. My "other big sister," Nancy will be seventy. She's not old, either. She volunteers in two organizations, works part-time because she wants to, travels to marvelous places--in another year, she's going to go to the Polar Bear town in Alaska... My Aunt in Alaska's 97. Yes, she IS old, but I love listening to the wanderings of her mind when we talk.

She begins on one topic about a friend, then skips all over the place, but if I wait long enough, she always returns to the place she started... and it's always a marvelous ride along the way. Hmmm... I think that's the whole point to living creatively, perhaps. The ride's as important as the destination, maybe more so.

END of this ramble. Happy New Year! (I may revise this three or four times after I publish, but I just want to put it out there and start on my goals NOW.)

The Studio is Set Up

Last night I dreamed another painting and I can't wait to start it this weekend. I have some things to tend to first, drat it all.  It had to do with the South of France and a dream I have had for about five years.  When I am panicking about the future, when I feel alone, I dream this dream of a big yellow house.  It is probably best described as a Victorian farmhouse, with a deep wrap around porch. The trim is white.  I am almost always in the kitchen, the sunroom hallway leading to the old barn, which is now a four car garage with a studio above it, or in the sun room.  There is a country kitchen with two ovens and a huge table that seats eight without the leaf.

The house always smells like oatmeal bread fresh out of the oven; that's my specialty. One winter when I was shut in almost all the time, I learned to bake bread the old-fashioned way. I would make the sponge, and then add my salt, oatmeal, remaining flower, and sometimes finely ground walnuts and pecans. I loved kneading the dough because it gave me an upper body workout. I always made enough for three large loaves. I especially loved punching down the dough.

People say it's a good way to let out aggression, but something in me always thought that putting negative energy in my bread was not a good thing. I try to name people and things I love when I knead and punch the dough. Silly? Probably, but who cares.

Anyway, in my dream, I live with at least three people. Rarely are those people actually in the room with me. Sometimes I hear a guitar in the background. Other times I see a familiar body bent over the flower garden that fills the U made by the corridor, garage/studio, and a wing of the house. Sometimes someone has just come up the gravel driveway and there is the sound of bags of groceries being put on the floor by the front door.

Always, always I am content. I am getting ready for company. I am singing. I am wiping my hands to go out to the garden. I am calling to someone that dinner is ready. Always the dream is in the middle of some activity that represents a full life, one of absolute contentment. I am never aware of whether or not I am romantically involved with anyone--it is irrelevant.

The other night I dreamed my house on a hillside in France, when the sunflowers are in bloom. I looked out at distant rolling hills striped in yellow and azure, and the walls of the room I was in were French blue. There is no other blue like it.

I had not dreamed my yellow house dream in months, so I saw it as a sign that I truly know my next phase of life has begun, and that I see it as good. And that is ironic, because I am coming out of three days of being quite literally bedridden for all but about three hours of the day--broken up hours. Even that didn't matter, once I paid attention to what my body was telling me.

This will come as a surprise, I am sure, but I had pressed myself a tad too much, trying to get everything done, wondering why I could not do what I did at forty-two years old. I'm only fifty-nine and have four more destroyed disks than I had then. What's the problem?

The non-word "duh" keeps springing to mind.

In my dream, however, I looked through a window that had hanging plants at the edges, to these beautiful hills, and one, lone tree that came across the scene from the right. One branch of some delicate small leafed variety,  dancing at the edge.  And for the life of me, that picture screamed joy to me and I have to find a way to translate it to my paper, don't you think?

Whether the dream is France or Pennsylvania or central Massachussetts, whether it is near a river, a lake, or the midst of the mountains, the house holds a family of women, with an occasional man floating through. The house holds light, and safety, and laughter. And this time the outdoors was the same, and as far as my eyes could see, I saw nothing but harmony, color, and light.

It isn't often we get to feel that way, I don't think. Or perhaps we can, and we forget to hold onto the center of our souls. We drift too far into the static of life, maybe. Or perhaps it's just me.

Regardless, this weekend the paints come out and I will paint my way home inside.

Again.

Spring and the Celebration of the Mother of Mother

I keep thinking that I have written about this subject before, but perhaps it was not here. I think it was probably to someone in an email, or for another project. If I have, I'm sorry, but the story as written here, probably has a different rhythm, and the details will have shifted in emphasis. The truth of my grandma remains the same. I miss her sometimes still, as her joy for simple pleasure reaches through the decades and grabs me by the heart.

The Seasonal Dance ©2009
Here it comes again,
When spring smells stronger than fear,
And familiar dampness spreads like wine through veins.
Here it comes.
Again.

The season of loving
kills sobbing, and shoving
the pains of loss into a drawer,
I taste the juice of spring, 
blasting death—through the greening of grass,
and the yellow of branches ready to burst
with a sun-filled cacophony of over-bright flowers
that will fall to substantial new growth.

Here it comes again,
When spring Heaven beats loneliness,
for the company of colors too noisy to tolerate gray.
Here it comes.
Again.

The dancing in gardens
of steaming up-turned earth,
with worms wriggling back to the dark,
I dance my own ritual to birth—
Through the smoothing of edges, and clearing of space 
around shoots fairly aching to breathe;
through the weeds that have crowded their colors too long;
I discard what we no longer need.

Here it comes again,
When spring trumpets louder than pain,
for this birth that defeats any winter’s worst freeze.
Here it comes.
Again.


I associate Spring with my mom and with her mom... And I know it's Fall, but there is something about feeling one is coming to life again. And perhaps I am.

Seems appropriate somehow to write about Grandam M., Mom's mom.  When I was little, Grandma did the coolest thing for Jack, me and our friends. I was probably about Eight. When she would come, she would take out her teeth AND her glass eye to show us, and tell us all about them. AFTER she put them back. Then she taught us "After the ball was over..."

She also took me on my first wildflower walk and for some reason, all I remember is that the field was full of vetch, which  I thought was a completely gross name for such a gorgeous violet flower. Vetch. She also used to buy Jackie and me toys at Wallach's grocer, the corner equivalent of Seven Eleven® back in the late fifties. Mr. Wallach, like our neighbors two doors over, had come to our country during WWII, and, while he was a little scary, he still knew all our names and what we liked best for candy, and when we'd come to the store looking for milk and bread. But Grandma would buy us stuff. My favorite was the plywood plane with the elastic-driven prop, and my very first kaleidoscope ever.

We cut home through the field and I kept falling into holes because I was busy  looking at the vetch through my toy. Grandma kept talking about daisies, Queen Anne's Lace, and "verdure." God forbid she said something like "all the green" or even "greenery." No. Verdure.

I once told her, "Grandma, you speak in crossword puzzle words."

"Yes, darling girl, I do. But isn't it more fun than just using the same old words all the time?"

I shrugged, but I kind of thought she was right. She and my  mom fought constantly. Dad said, "Jean, the truth is  Helen just isn't all that bright."

Mom would  hold her palms out and just go, "AAAAAAHHHHHRRRRRR."

My favorite fight was this one.  I have no idea what the fight was about, but my mom was in the kitchen and Grandma was at the table, eating her obligatory soda crackers in milk... this means it was around 3:00. I walked in from school, and I was around 12.  I had recently realized I'd outgrown Grandma, because she had been on and on about trains the last time I'd seen her. Mom had taken me with her to Grandma's little efficiency flat and she'd dragged me into her bedroom, shouting, "Darling GIRL! Look at this!"

I waited and waited. Suddenly, there was a train. Yes. A train went by. Her hands went up in our familiar gresture of delight, "Dighdy dighdy DOH!" She would sing her arms abover her head, twisting her hands and arms from the elbows. I could not figure out why she loved the trains, but I managed to go, "Yeah, Grandma, that's great!" while humming the Twilight Zone music in my head.

She did that, though, over her soda crackers and whenever we had string beans. I just didn't get the thrill, but that was Grandma.

I walked into this fight, however. And Mom went, "MOTHER! You KNOW I am right, why MUST you persist in arguing with me."

"JEAN. I am your MOTHER. I don't care whether or not I'm wrong. Even when I'm wrong, I'm RIGHT."

And she got up in all the mighty dignity her 4'10" allowed and stomped out of the room.

I stood there just looking at my mom, who stared, mouth agape, back at me, until we both started laughing so hard we had to cover our mouths.

But this was Grandma.

***
I grew back into her, though. When I was about 31, I went to see her in the nursing home, one town away from us. She was in a full-care facility by then, and was 92. Her one eye had little vision, she'd had a hip replacement, but was pretty well lame. I know she was in pain, but something had happened when she hit 85.

We'd thrown her a big party, and she turned to my mom at the banquet and said, "Dahling girl, everything else is just gravy. I think I better make up to you now, while I can."

I was sitting across from them, and I felt I was watching part of movie, shot through one of those hazy filters--the kind that used around movie stars before you could simply touch up their faces in editing... Everyone else seemed preoccupied with their own conversations. Mom was looking at Grandma with an expression close to shock.

"Mother, it's all right.  I know you--"
"No, Jean. It isn't all right. I've mistreated you your whole life, making you  not go to college, but sending your brother. Always fighting. Always angry with you. I love you. You're my Jeanie. My girl. Right now, today, I'm changing. Dahling girl, it's never too late as long as I'm breathing and I'm not going to do that to you any more."

My mother cried and grabbed her mom. And Grandma never fought with her again.  They had another nine years of something very special.

But I knew she was fragile seven years later, and I had an impulse to visit her one May, because it was lush everywhere, and because the lilacs were in bloom. I grabbed and armful from a neighbor's yard, because she called me her "lilac girl."

I found her in the rec room, bowling. Yes. Table bowling. I stood at a distance, while four people cheered her on, shouting, "Come on Helen. Just one pin. Come on, you can do it."

She missed the table, forget the pins, which sent her into "Dighdy, dighdy, DOH." And delighted laughter.

"Grandma," I said, thinking dementia was now hardcore. "What are you DOING? I thought you didn't like bowling anyway... and--"

"I HATE, bowling, Dahling girl, oh, LILACS! My lilac girl, oh, pretty."  And she handed them round and looked at my confused face, squinting her eye, trying to focus. "What's that you are wearing? Purple and blue. What a pretty blouse. Oh, dear, you just make my heart dance."

Now, really. Who gets to hear that from anyone? But I was on my one track. "So if you don't like bowling, why do you?"

She simply shook her head at me and said, "Because that's what they HAVE. They have bowling, so I bowl. I sure as hell am not going to sit in my room and die. They have bowling, I bowl. they have rhythm band, I clop.  They have ring toss, I toss."

She saw I was not smiling. She did not see the tears filling my eyes.

Suddenly, she whipped something out from underneath her lap robe. A large trophy. "Besides, where else could I get this!"

Engraved on a brass plaque,  no less, were the words, "World's worst bowler in the history of time"

And we laughed. She wanted to walk to the courtyard that day. This meant it was a very good day for her. Mostly she leaned on my arm, but since she was, by now about 4'8" and weighed only 85 pounds, it was no trouble. I don't think it would have been any trouble to me if she were twice her size.  She used her cane mostly to point out the flowers, daffodils, scilla, and a few peonies were coming out early. It was one of those springs that had come in a jumble, when suddenly the temperature jumped to 80 degrees for five days in a row, so the plants were confused. No gradual spring, this one. It was more like a Beethoven symphony--all the stops were pulled out. Or perhaps Vivaldi.

When I took her to her room, I helped her onto the bed and she asked that I open the drapes. Her roommate liked the dark, but she was home for an overnight. Grandma drank in the light, turning her hands in the warmth of the day. I sat beside her and something made me start to cry and I rested my head beside her there. I felt her hand stroking my hair, like a breeze, she was so gentle.

"My lilac girl, my little girl. Your mother ... she's  not lilacs. She's peonies. She is all bright colors and so ripe she cannot bear up under the weight of her beauty." I started at such a description. I didn't know Grandma knew my mother so well.

Then she sighed, and I looked up at her. She was crying herself. "Grandma? Are you all right?"

"Of course, dear. Of course. I'm old. You know I'll have to leave soon.  But the hardest thing of all? To leave all these colors. How can I leave all these bright shining colors behind?"

And this was Grandma.

***
If I am to be poor, if I am to live at the mercy of others' care, if I am to find that my world grows smaller before my time? I will do it like Grandma— with unbridled joy, and clinging to all the colors she saw through her one half-functioning eye. Her eye was the truest of any I have ever known.

Painting for My Life

I never thought that painting could take the place of singing in my life — at least in part. Before the shingles aftermath, I sang in choirs and choruses. It was the way I got my jolt of art beyond myself and connected with people in the strictly social way. By that I mean having casual relationships with people built around a mutual interest, where we laugh together and produce together, but were not necessarily wrapped around one another's lives. That door is closed to me now, as is even the enjoyment of listening. That was a tortuous adjustment for me.

I forget how much I miss those sorts of relationships in my life, but I do. I work at home. I pursue largely solitary joys, and since my neighborhood successfully blocked my attempt to create this sort of community in my home, I find my sense of isolation has grown. The degeneration of my spine precludes the trips to the gym now as well. So I search for the thing that will bring me casual company.

I have found, however, something beyond writing, to give me the jolt of creation.

Yet I feel something else happening as I get back into some routines of painting. The act of teaching a friend is waking me up. We hand a painting back and forth, each adding a piece of herself to the work started by the other. It is an electric process because whatever we envision in each step must necessarily change the next time the painting returns. She and I wrote together as adolescents, building on one another's riffs. Now Paige and I do the same with our art. She has not let herself paint or draw. And I have not let myself fly. Her imagination frees my own. We paint, draw, tear, paste. We laugh.

And it spills over into my solitary art.

I love the rhythm of collage and painting. I built a peony from scratch. One layer of tissue at a time, I built my flower, lightly tinting each petal. Fifteen minutes here and there, and from a blank paper rose something I've never done, captured my impression of the blossom from a tree peony. It excited me and made me cry. I thought of my mother and her joy at the slow art of flower gardening, how it made her seem to be more alive. I have felt barren for so long, and there it was before me--this birthing of something from my own mind. Once more I felt the thrill of the process and result, both. I had not felt that for three years, when I began the huge painting I just finished two weeks ago--my vision of a treasured memory with my dad.

The best of my life seems to be surfacing when I pick up my pencil, my brush, my papers. I have begun a diptych of New England, with the unifying thread being a stone wall--my impression of a wall. Winter will melt into spring, burst to the right into summer and drop down into the second part, summer still. Then blazen into fall and fade into winter again. I do not know whether there will be anything beyond texture and color that will be those seasons, but the wall? The wall will be absolutely recognizable as that. To me it is the quintessential New England item, wherever you go. Into the middle of a forest and there it will be, the reminder that so much of our land was once tilled, then allowed to grow wild again. I loved Central Pennsylvania, but I missed my walls. Walls that did nothing so much as invite you to cross them. they marked properties, but did not keep neighbors out. Just cows...

I will find other ways to connect in a group; I feel more confident again. The painting has opened doors I had not recognized were closed. I have walked into a different stage of biological life, but realize that I do not have to allow barrenness to be anything more than that. I am alive again, if not blooming. But, then, Fall foliage is not about flowering, so much as the last dance before sleep. And it can be a long, brilliant, lush season indeed.

The miraculous thing about facing our demons that they do not describe, is how it feels to be free of them at last. If I cannot dance with my legs or sing with my voice, then I will dance with paint, with paper, and with pens. I may just hit sixty in a few years, more alive than I have ever been. We'll see. For now? For now I will simply walk outside and weed the garden and take it from there.

Tree peonies & Irises

A friend of mine came into the house for her art play session and said, "Your flowers-forgive me--they are girlie flowers in the best sense. They scream 'Look at me, I am a flower and I've visible from outer space!"

To which, in all my erudition, I replied, "Well, DUH! Ya think?"

You can tell I am a writer, I know. But, hey, this is why I specifically planted those two plants. When I remember to expose the iris korms nice and early, I am rewarded with spectacular results — the kind really needed by any instant gratification junkie who is trying to learn the rewards of patience. I've dead-headed thirty blossoms and there remain twelve fresh blooms today — the last, but that's okay. The tree peonies, a new addition of just three years, are beginning to hit their stride. BOTH had five blossoms the size of breakfast plates. (I'm old. This is a plate between dessert plates and dinner plates.) At this stage of growth, the effect is sort of silly--all blossom, no foliage. Afterward, now that the petals lie in profusion on the mulch, the sight of the foliage of deeply cut leaves branching from one "trunk" is beautiful.

The point is that I have always overbought annuals in May. Now? I am so fully satiated by the spectacle of delicacy and boldness, that I hold off. These two plants just saved me about $75.

I expected a report from the space shuttles, but no. I cannot believe that those circling toward Bradley field don't tip down to have a look at the intensity of red and blue. Nope. Oh, well. The nightly news' loss is of no consequence. When the iris pass, the regular peonies--a ten foot, low hedge of them--will be off and running.

I can look down from my office, or out from my studio and drink them in. The gratitude for lessons taught by grandmother, my mother, and my oldest friend make me tear up. I did not know I was a gardener, until we moved into this home nineteen years ago, to a place of lawn and one forsythia hedge and not one single other shrub or flower anywhere. Now an island of viburnum, red maple, rhodies, mountain laurel, andromeda, azalea, run the sweep of the fifty foot ranch wing of the house, sheltering the windows from a neighborhood of eyes that DO intrude. There is an alcove of shade, where one can sit unseen from the street, and look back toward the house, to the flowers and other ornamentals. It is a spot of quiet and coolness. I dug every bed, planted every tree and bush and flower myself, largely unassisted.

I have a robin the size of Pittsburgh, who lands not ten feet from me when I mulch or weed. He squawks at me after ten minutes, eager for me to leave the upturned worms for his lunch. He is insistent. I ignore him for a bit because I LIKE my worms. Eventually, I decide he deserves a meal, and I let him at it--for a bit.

I have had two weeks to drive into my driveway and laugh at my ostentatious, unruly, marvelous mass of blossoms. Soon I'll have another.

And now that I have work and it looks as if I may just be able to count on being here for TWO more years, not one? Well, I may plan another bed of future instant gratification. That phrase may seem like an oxymoron, but so is an impatient gardener. I think the NEED for annuals is for the learning process. Oh. Mind you, I'll get some for the little fill in places, but I will be more reasoned in the quantity.

Not in the brightness, however. I will need them for August, before sedum and chrysanthemum have their sway. After the ludicrous lilies have passed and their jester-ruffs have wilted, leaving pathetic stalk behind. I'll need my begonias and alyssum, petunias and coleus, lobelia and snapdragons. The punctuation marks of profusion filling in the blanks, letting me know that my legs still work well enough. My life is rich enough.

It is hard to remember how I hated to help my mother dig holes and plant. How silly I said it all was, all the while I marveled at the ten foot bank of rock garden that sloped up to our home. I remember the iris among the rocks. The daisies and pinks. Pockets of petunias tumbling into masses of something with foliage as dark as New Hampshire pine forest green. I would stand transfixed, yet insist I did not care for gardens... until I had no gardens to see. Until my mother was gone, the cottage was gone, and I grew tired of the sameness of apartment life.

I am a gardener and I never knew it. I am an artist and denied it for years. What a gift to discover such things as I moved through middle age. What will I discover by 65? I don't know, but suddenly, pain notwithstanding, this aging stuff seems a bit less scary than I thought.