The Long Road Back

2023 began with an ending, and we found ourselves heading back east for my father’s funeral in January. After almost four years, my first trip since the pandemic was a sad one. Coming out of such a long confinement, the journey we have made countless times seemed longer and my relatives looked older, the kids bigger. We all had to get to know each other again, and I for one, am not the same person I was in 2019. The family dynamics had shifted of course, and we struggled to gain some kind of footing while wading through the mementos of a long life.

Tables were piled high with photo albums full of forgotten family, dusty yearbooks of a life before mine, and innumerable slides that couldn’t be viewed unless you held those tiny squares up to the light. Fresh young faces lit by flash bulbs smiled at me with such bright hopes for the future, yet to be dulled by disappointments and setbacks, mind-numbing responsibilities and grinding routines.

As expected there were no end-of-life plans to fall back on so we the living fumbled through the arrangements as best we could, trying to honor and remember while finding a final resting place. The quest took me back to the cemetery where the families of both my parents are gathered, grandparents and great-grandparents, great-aunts and uncles. It’s also close to the little apartment over my grandfather’s garage where my parents began their life together and where I started mine. As strange as the recent past seemed to me now after the pandemic, the distant past still felt the same as I listened to my uncle recount stories of the places he’d lived and mischief he’d caused while we drove the narrow roads of my early childhood, through horse country that had magically transformed into suburban estates somewhere along the way.

The tribute to a life fully lived ended with the sudden crack of a gun salute on a bitter-cold winter afternoon and then we found ourselves gathered around the familiar table, telling the old stories and recalling special moments both present and past. As much as I had dreaded a reunion, the vital connections made to the living on this visit resulted in great healing, which ironically (or not) is the word I’ve chosen for this year. May this kind of heart healing continue as we all navigate a changed new world.

Peace in Pieces

I must say my word for 2022 took interesting twists and turns. “Peace” did not come easily this year while war, social turmoil, health issues and brutal weather events attempted to disrupt any gains I made in my inner and outer work. In overcoming the challenges and setbacks during these past months, I found occasional moments of serenity more precious than gold. Life’s chaos taught me that achieving peace is a state of mind first, and then the rest will follow.

Looking back, I feel like the first half of the year was spent under pressure, hurrying from project to project as we began to venture out of our quarantines. After two years of staying put with good excuses not to make any real plans, the starting gate was flung open and suddenly there were deadlines and invitations and expectations. Although I told myself that life had changed, I fell back into the old patterns and mindset all too quickly, thinking that we were guaranteed good health after taking all the prescribed steps. But vaccinations and wishful thinking don’t prevent infection, and the wily virus knocked my legs out from under me and sent me to bed, for months.

During the long, sleepless nights, I had plenty of time for review. It seems like the Universe is determined to give me a chance to see the error of my ways, namely that I am always ignoring chronic health issues that won’t just go away on their own. I had to make some conscious decisions to find healthcare that worked for me instead of settling for systems chosen by my insurance company. Going off of the conventional path to discover lifestyle alternatives seemed scary at first, but I followed my intuition and knew in my heart that my healing couldn’t just come from a pill. I had to educate myself first and then pay attention to how my body reacts to remedies.

Ultimately the greatest healer was time. And in a period of gestation that couldn’t be rushed, I found peace. Regardless of what was going on around me, when I needed to rest I would rest. When I needed to eat then a snack was in order no matter the hour. I began to chart my body’s functions like a mother does with a newborn, and I needed to establish a routine that would accommodate my medicine, supplements, exercise, nutrition and sleep patterns. I discovered that audio books were a marvelous way to fall asleep and that certain voices lulled me off to dreamland like a little child.

In childlike surrender I found the peace of taking one day at a time. Each day would be unique, with different symptoms and patterns. It was a bit like a big puzzle, and I found that when I stopped thinking about the causes so much, the simple solutions would come to me. I had to let go of the anger and blame I held toward the conventional healthcare system and providers who didn’t care or were too rushed to listen. And finally, when I stopped depending on others to fix me and took the reigns for my own life decisions, I found peace of mind. Like Dorothy in Oz I’d had the ability to reach this place all along; I just needed to try.

So I say goodbye to 2022 a little older, wiser, stronger and at peace. And I wish you peace as well as we enter a New Year.

To Begin at the Ending

The last two months have been all about reemergence. Because of the unusually mild fall weather (even after a killer frost) I was able to enjoy a few extra weeks of gardening after months of indoor confinement. As my energy and strength returned I could venture out for longer sessions of weeding, planting bulbs and harvesting the survivors of summer’s heat and drought. The decent sweet potato yield was surprising because you never know what is going on underneath those leafy canopies until the vines die back.

Like the shaggy squirrels frantically scurrying about with their nuts, we tucked away the garlic, carrots and potatoes in cool storage, covered cool season greens with cold frames and even brought in the houseplants expelled this summer when my immune system couldn’t tolerate soil molds and fungus indoors. I’m very happy to be surrounded by my green friends again, although not as many as last year. I said goodbye until next year to the annuals that would have a hard time in our dark bungalow now equipped with a little wood stove that will provide additional warmth but very dry air this winter.

The lesson I learned from my return to the garden was that life goes on despite an absence. Perhaps my importance and sense of control have been illusions after all. The flowers and vegetables that were healthy and established carried on and those that were weak and needed to be babied probably weren’t going to survive anyway. Nature has a way of doing just fine without my help with the design, it seems. As I sat in recuperation through the summer, I experienced a hit to the ego knowing how little my presence made a real difference to the world I had created.

What I found instead, as I surfaced from dark interiors into golden autumn rays was the welcome physical sensation of interacting with the retiring landscape again, to ground in spent garden beds while admiring seed heads ready to fly away toward their next reincarnations. I realized that what’s important is not tidy vegetable beds, plentiful harvests or pristine flower borders, but the immersion back into nature even when you are a little late to the party. And nature welcomes you back just the same.

Like the bounty of sweet orange tubers revealed after loss of the vine, chronic illness can strip away petty perfectionism and shallow surface adornment to reveal what has been incubating below on a level that can only be felt as I return to a world that I no longer take for granted. To be reborn into the end of a season is truly a gift.

Blooming Where Planted

These asters are pinker than the typical bluer blooms.

After weeks of drought, September’s rains finally arrived long enough to give the sugar maples their first blush. The temperatures dropped in time to provide plenty of dew for bejeweling the spiders’ webs that decorated undisturbed corners of my forgotten gardens. New England asters that made themselves at home in my garden last year bloomed right on time. And gradually, very gradually I have begun to feel better.

What this long haul has taught me is to appreciate the positive and to count on a completely different set of symptoms tomorrow. When a system like mine is driven by a crazily capricious autoimmune pilot, life becomes a lesson in impermanence. Just when I think I’ve sent one unpleasant condition packing, here it comes again like the rejected suitor who refuses to take “no” for an answer. Fortunately, each time they return, they are less enthusiastic than the last time. And each time, I am fortified with better armament.

Even though my time outside is limited, I try to walk every day and take a moment to visit the flowers on my porches and vegetables in the gardens. The fact that they’ve carried on without me with only minimal effort from my husband is both humbling and comforting. We gardeners sometimes think we are indispensable with our planting guides and to-do lists, but Nature always has the final say in that regard. There have been many happy accidents and appearances that would not have occurred if I’d been diligent with weeding and pruning.

The volunteer asters mentioned above have flourished this year in particular, with multitudes of black-eyed Susans and ironweed popping up in unexpected places. An entire army of Autumn Beauty sunflowers came up from one little tortured survivor last year, and lined our driveway to the delight of the goldfinches. A month ago I found an Ageratina altissima, the notorious white snakeroot that led to Nancy Hanks Lincoln’s premature death, perkily blooming amidst my butterfly weed. I welcomed the sight since it is a beneficial native for pollinators despite its bad reputation.

There is still a long road to health, but through a slow summer and beginning autumn I have learned to let go of expectations, worry and control (mostly). There is peace (this year’s Word) to be found in a good night’s sleep, negative lab results, a beautiful chrysanthemum from a neighbor or visit from the occasional fluttering monarch. Finding a new flower friend in the mess and chaos of the world is a sign that confirms my efforts to be happy where I am in the moment.

Healing Harvest

Healthy greens from my garden are helping my recovery.

I won’t sugarcoat these past two months. While my husband has finally recovered, I have been overwhelmed by a virus that is unlike anything I’ve ever felt in my body before. Whether it remains like an unwelcome guest when the pantry has been raided bare or the specter of some mutation that has found my bodily hospitality irresistible, I have been made aware of its presence every day for weeks, often incapacitating me for days at a time.

I had falsely presumed that I was pretty healthy and protected going into the infection, but apparently my longstanding autoimmune issues and poor digestion that I’d been skirting around for years provided the perfect playground for viral monsters to enjoy. Women over sixty seem to be the likely age group that the virus likes to target for the long haul. Nearly all my symptoms are reported by others in the same boat, and there doesn’t seem to be anything that western medicine can do for us except treat the symptoms. Inflammation that moves around constantly, multiple infections, anxiety attacks, environmental sensitivities, neurological issues, insomnia and depression are all part of the welcome package, unfortunately.

There have been days when I want to give up as OTC meds and prescriptions fail or cause bad side effects. I have always been very sensitive to chemicals so this health journey has been an exercise in frustration. But not treating symptoms wasn’t an option, either. On the other hand, I am lucky because all my tests have come back normal with the exception of high blood sugar, which I was probably on the way to developing anyway but the virus kicked the pre-diabetes up a notch.

In fact, all the symptoms are issues I’ve dealt with at some time in my life, from very young (ear infection) to recent (food intolerances). My immune system has gone haywire from overreacting to innocent foods and environmental conditions, only making the symptoms worse. In eliminating the histamine triggers to buy some time for recovery, I’ve had to drastically remove many products from my life, eat a very restricted clean diet, and restrict activities including work in my beloved garden. In essence, I’m basically starting over and this is an opportunity for rebirth. I really have no choice in the matter because I can’t return to the old habits and diet. My body won’t let me.

But even on my darkest days, I’ve finally recognized the need to address the trauma from my past so that it does not dictate my future. Part of what is holding my healing back is the extreme flight-or-fight response of an inner child who never felt safe and can override any of my adult reasoning. Until I acknowledge the emotional and psychological steps in my recovery, the progress will be very slow. I’ve learned the hard way that relying on medicine alone to address my illness is just a bandaid to the underlying conditions that led me to this dramatic shift in my life. Wholistic treatments and counseling need to be a part of my recovery plan as well because building back my whole health is more important than almost anything else, and well worth my time and resources.

Seeing this situation as a lesson rather than punishment is a good first step as we enter September and the cooler breezes of autumn. May I be able to reap a healthy harvest in my efforts to heal.

Being Idle

After a fortunate two years, the dreaded illness finally entered our house in June after my husband’s business trip. And while we both managed to stay out of the hospital and recover from our initial symptoms, other lingering problems require us to rest and recuperate, a state of being neither of us has the patience for. With flower and vegetable gardens in full swing during a drought, the timing couldn’t be worse.

The fatigue they always talk about is real, requiring us to take turns with the yard duties depending on who has the energy or not. Either way, by high noon, we are relegated to sitting on the patio and watching plants and wildlife do their thing, whether we approve or not. This inactivity has become an exercise in Zen meditation, where nothing is good or bad, it just is. We are too tired to intervene.

Among our observations I’m sad to say that there are fewer pollinators at our house this year, although the lightening bugs are back in force rising up like little satellites of hope at dusk. On a positive note, wrens have finally built a nest in the wren house I put up that sat empty last year. And the bluebirds are back, always a symbol of happiness when they flash their beautiful blues. The rabbits have been quite brazen this year, particularly a buck we call Bad Bunny who was with us last summer. We know it’s still him because he’ll come right up to you, arrogantly munching our clover with a look that says “Yeah, so what are you going to do about it?”

Friends and neighbors have been very kind to us during quarantine, offering to bring us food and run errands. For the most part, we enjoy staying home and sitting out in our garden, comforted by the sense of community offered and counting ourselves lucky even though June hasn’t been the happiest of months.

The bluebirds are here to remind us that joy can still be found if you are waiting for it.

Reminding Memory

Fuchsias must be back in style again because after years of drought they’ve suddenly started popping up in garden centers. Being the stingy gardener from a long line of thrifty immigrants, I even managed to buy a small specimen that didn’t cost the fortune required for elaborate hanging baskets doomed to fry in someone’s overly sunny yard. My precious prize is sharing space in a recycled hanging pot with a small bit of vining variegated vinca for contrast.

As a child fuchsias always meant summer to me, when my father brought my mother’s parents the annual basket from his nursery to hang on their shady screened-in porch with the aluminum frame lounge chairs and puffy cushions I helped scrub and hose down every June when school was over and the long hot Maryland afternoons stretched into endless days of hay baling and competitive croquet. During years of childhood chaos, I could always count on my grandparents’ timeless routines where nothing ever changed and nothing in the house ever moved. You knew right where the Old Maid deck was stored and how long the Concord grapes needed to ripen on the groaning arbor.

These days I remind my mother of these memories. She lives in an unknown land with an uncertain fate. Each phone call focuses on a different topic, a test if you will, of what she and I remember. Whether they’re accurate doesn’t really matter because every five minutes her question will be repeated. I feel like I’m taking an interminable test that never ends and has no good grade. There is only loss and failure as the past slips softly behind doors that will probably never be opened again.

So I turn to the memory of plants and smell the spicy boxwood in my grandparents’ yard, taste the crazy squash my grandfather grew from foraged seeds that always ended up being slightly spaghetti in the center no matter what. I feel the downy pink puffs of the mimosa tree he planted that became our trickiest croquet wicket. To this day whenever I see a downy quilt of fescue lawn I want to fall down prostate on it to the childhood church of innocence.

As I walk my own yard, I spy the peonies adored by my step-grandmother, the sharp chicory of my mother’s salads, the zonal geraniums my father grew from seed by the thousands, the strawberries my maternal grandmother mixed with sugar and served over vanilla ice cream and the fuchsia that hung on the porch overhead during long evenings sitting with my mother’s father as he asked the same questions over and over, every five minutes.

Fence Me In

March has been a mixture of frenzied outdoor activity on warm days and cowering in the house on cold ones. We seem to be ending on a bitter note as the wind chill hovers around freezing today. The old adage “If you don’t like the weather in (insert state’s name), wait a minute and the weather will change” could be applied to this entire month regardless of where you live.

There have been periods when we rushed out bundled up in hats and coats to tackle some backyard project, shedding outerwear like strippers every hour before the next cold front blew in with much bluster and fanfare. Even so, we managed to build two screens for our patio from bamboo macheted from our neighbor’s jungle up the street, pound in twelve metal fence posts around the garden for our deer fence and trellis our rambunctious black raspberries in the back of the yard.

Currently I’m learning how to master a jigsaw so I can construct a garden gate and wooden frames fortified with chicken wire for my raised beds. Since our supply of bamboo is endless, we’re also considering more privacy screens and barriers for our little backyard world. As much as I appreciate our open southern exposure on the side of a hill, I crave a little privacy from prying eyes and hungry critters. Establishing boundaries can lead to peace in many ways, from peaceful relaxation in my sequestered outdoor living space to peace of mind when my vegetables aren’t decimated.

I’m also finding that fences provide borders which frame and enhance the views. For example, the bamboo grid on my patio creates interesting patterns with the lines from our maple tree canopy, singling out a particular curve of a branch that would get lost in an overwhelming sky. Likewise, the garden fence will help me focus on a finite space for planting. Rather like furnishing a room, the fence walls control the arrangement while providing some vertical space for growing.

In my research of beautiful gardens, the best designs unfold like a series of secret rooms that reveal their treasures only when you turn a corner or follow a winding path. While it may take years for my backyard to achieve such a sense of private mystery, I can learn, grow and observe on the journey to peaceful refuge.

Path to Peace

The significance of my 2022 word for the year, “Peace,” turns out to be more universal than I thought, unfortunately. My humble notion to spend a quiet year focusing on inner and outer manifestations at a personal level have been usurped by horrific images coming out of Ukraine, a country I associated with sunflower fields and ornate architecture resting in Russia’s shadow. Turns out this bravely independent country is much more than that. As am I.

The Year of the Water Tiger has already presented itself as the opposite of peaceful — brash, ambitious, unpredictable and aggressive. The specter of war has latched itself to the Tiger’s tail and opened up the world’s wounds on a larger scale. Apparently Covid’s death and destruction didn’t deliver enough suffering. Or rather, pandemic was the beginning of a series of evils released by Pandora’s box that humankind must address.

In the face of constant turmoil and uncertainty, I keep coming back to the original inspiration for my choice of theme this year. During a family vacation to St. Louis in 2013, I stopped by a downtown New Age shop run by a soft-spoken young woman in long skirts and even longer dreadlocks whose presence was palpably peaceful. The mindful way she moved, the soothing tones of her voice and the gentle attention she paid her customers created a moving meditation that affected me more than all the years in a local meditation group. She was peace in action, something I had never witnessed in practice except among ancient nuns in a dying convent.

I have held that encounter like a mental mantra close to my heart all these years. As an adult, I’ve experienced fleeting moments of profound peace that embraced me with infinite love only a few times in my life, mostly at unexpected moments. I would like this feeling to happen more and often. How to find and hold peace despite the ego’s determination to disrupt and divert is probably one of life’s greatest challenges. Perhaps it is the greatest challenge of all.

The inner and outer journey required to peace is what I will be exploring in this year of turbulence. I can already tell that the path’s lessons will be difficult and costly. In order to gain, much will have to be let go. I know the ego part of me will fight like a tiger to keep the drama and chaos going, while my soul spirit which has always known the way, will patiently wait.

Peaceful Kingdom

The first month of 2022 has already tested my new word for 2022. Last year’s “Growth” certainly proved profitable and prolific in my little household. I always stand in awe of the power held by a word in focus and intention, and the unpredictable ways that my word will play out in the year. The literal outcome for Growth was that I started and bought more garden plants than I knew what to do with, while the spiritual journey led me to appreciate all that I don’t know and can learn from.

Each day as I stepped outside into my gardens, there were many surprises, some wondrous, and quite a few . . . not so pleasant. As I’ve revealed in previous posts, our urban bungalow lot is home or close neighbor to squirrels, rabbits, skunks, groundhogs and local felines, all of whom can make their presence known in interestingly destructive ways. Last year various deterrents were employed, with physical barriers working best even though chicken wire and row covers aren’t the most attractive solutions. Stinky sprays smelling of garlic and rotten egg were also effective until the rains came, or the critters got used to the smells.

However, the biggest (physically and destructively) perpetrator of them all, remains undeterred for the most part. Even in these last few bleak wintery weeks they have polished off whatever isn’t inert or tied down. As much as I love their quiet demeanors and soft doe eyes, the deer and I have a love-hate relationship in regards to gardens. So much so that I’ve decided that a good wire deer fence is a necessity for these urban herbivores who think that everything I plant is especially for them. And I do mean everything — even strong-smelling herbs and bristly shrubs aren’t off limits. I guess the herd hasn’t read the deer-resistant plant lists yet.

I also plan to continue offering sacrificial plants that they can eat like last summer’s extra tomato plants I stuck in the very back of the yard, an offering to the antlered gods and occasional ground rodent. Various raised bed frames and screens are in the works, too, since we can’t fence in our entire yard at this time. Barricades can make good neighbors and keep the peace in edible turf wars. Therefore, my word for 2022 is “Peace,” both internally and externally. My hope is that we all can experience peaceful communion this year, not only in our backyards, but also in communities, towns, states, countries and the world.

So may it be.