Category Archives: In the Garden

After the Storm

17 Thursday Jun 2010

Posted by in In the Garden, Life at Home, The Great Outdoors

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Long after Monday’s flood waters have receded, I’m still droopy.

Maybe it’s because my home-sweet-home is saturated with musty smells coming from a drying basement.  Maybe it’s because I’ve worked with a few contractors who don’t seem to realize that my service calls are NOT everyday usual.  Or maybe my droopiness is just part of who I am, the sort of person that goes a little crazy when encountering waste and ineffectiveness.

After we unexpectedly hosted 4 to 5 inches of sewer water Monday morning, we engaged a remediation company to come dry and sterilize our basement.  Had my husband and I not been in attendance, the company technician would have left before the job was done.   As it was, the young man was forced to snake his hose down the basement stairwell three times — once of his own accord, another when my husband told him to try again, and a third when I sent him back down to the bowels of the house.  Our ‘worker’ reminded me of a young child doing something he didn’t wish to do; and though I can’t say that I blame him, we needed someone who took pride in his work,  someone who cared about the finished result rather than one simply going through the motions of fulfilling a checklist.

Ironically, our heating and air contractor told my husband that he was not too impressed with our remediation technician, that he would have expected a more thorough result.  As it was, Mr. Heat and Air opened up the blower, removed the saturated filter, slapped in a new one and turned on the system.  This time it was me telling my husband that I expected more — I imagined Mr. Heat and Air would have contacted the manufacturer to assess impact of sewage waters on the system — or advise us on unit sterilization.  But instead,  he left us with a new filter and a horrible musty smell coming out of our duct work.

I confess to expecting too much from others; I expect my contractors to care for my home as I do.  And while I’m in the confessional, I admit that I expect too much from myself as well.

I wish I could be more like my rock ‘n roll husband, who is steady as a rock in a crisis and rolls with the punches of everyday life.  Or I wish I could be more like my garden that bounced back quick from Monday’s destructive rainstorm.  But instead I am who I am — more than a little wilted after the storm.

Irish Sensibility

17 Saturday Apr 2010

Posted by in In the Garden, Life at Home, Soul Care, The Great Outdoors

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I listen to wet tires whoosh down Walker Avenue.  I hear soft rain piddle its tune upon wet stone.  They are bits of grace,  from a soft Irish rain falling outside my window.

A rain like this always soothes my spirit.  It makes me drowsy.  It makes me long for the comfort of my soft bed.  And even though it’s on the cool side — mid-fifties, I think  —  I’m going to crack my bedside window and cuddle up in warm blankets.

It has been a dry Spring.  The parched dirt must be quenching its thirst with this lovely Irish blessing.  The garden glistens like glass.  Twenty-four hours of straight rain has made my garden happy and plump with wet green.

What is it about a gentle rain that fills me with hope?  It makes me think baptism.  I feel wash cleaned.  Fresh.  The rain makes all things new.  The rain is holy, like that dove that swept down from heaven, all those years ago.

Perhaps a small drop will cure my spider bite scar, that even a week later, is still warm and tender with fever.  Or better yet, maybe it could wipe away Daddy’s pneumonia.  The nurse is worried about “Pappy.”  That’s her name for my father — who in younger days, was a more respectful ‘Mr. Pappas.’

Pappy, indeed.  The nurse says it’s hard for the elderly to bounce back.  Is she trying to prepare me?  Or herself?  I should have told her, if anyone can bounce back, my father can.  Doesn’t that sound just like a child, bragging about what her daddy can do?

Do raindrops taste as good as when I was a child?  Back then, I didn’t care whether I stayed dry or got wet.  Before I ‘got’  better sense, I would turn my small face up to the sky.  Open my mouth.  Wide.   Wider.   And catch raindrops with my tongue.   Sweet success.

I was  a young thirsty flower with no need for doctors or tongue depressors to tell me to say “Ahh.”  I knew good medicine when it hit me in the face.

For the time doing

06 Tuesday Apr 2010

Posted by in In the Garden, Life at Home, Mesta Park, Soul Care, Writing

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Some questions come up every Spring.

They grow out of  desire for renewal, from seeds planted deep within my soul.   However, the changes I wish to cultivate are not usually ones to myself.  These are too difficult.  These require too much energy.  These would require me to really know myself.

I stumble for answers when I come up against questions of identity.  At best, I’ve learned that I can only get at knowing myself — that through spiritual direction and contemplation and even writing and other acts of doing, I  am able to uncover layers of my buried identity.  But in the end, I know that I can never fully know myself.  I am mystery.  I am mystery to myself and I am mystery to others.

It’s the same for all of us.  We are all mystery.  We are mystery to ourselves and a mystery to others.  No matter how much time we devote toward self-knowledge, for now, we must be content to scratch the surface, to know only bits and pieces of our personal truth, as “we see through a glass, darkly.”

So outside of Lent, I let go of those harder questions of “who” and unite with Spring by concentrating on my doings.  I involve myself in some new creative undertaking, like my sister’s home remodel.  Or I attempt to develop some new skill or improve old ones, as with my online writing class at Shewrites.com.

But the desire for change responds not only to the questions of ‘who I am” or “what I’m doing.”  Always, always the desire infects the question of  “where I am.”  Each Spring the question arises, with respect to whatever place I currently call ‘home,’ — Do I stay or do I go?

I love living in this old house in Mesta Park.  I really do.  But in the restless Springtime, I began thinking about new old houses to live in, I begin looking at home ads, the local MLS and even that wonderful website called Zillow.com.

I don’t know whether the desire to pull up roots and transplant myself is just a natural outgrowth of the renewal that comes with Spring — a sort of keeping up with the Jones’ — the Jones’ being the Daffodils and Creeping Phlox that decorate my Springtime garden like painted Easter eggs.  Or whether my desire for a new dwelling springs from my deeper most being — to turn a sow’s ear of a house in desperate need of tending, into the proverbial silk purse —  that somehow, has always been part of who I am.

But wherever the desire springs from, I know that it will lead my husband and I to drive around other historic neighborhoods in search of a better fit — as it leads me, for the same reason, to look more closely at other houses in our own neighborhood while on our evening walks.  And it will lead us to attend ‘open houses’.  And it will lead us to closely regard the homes featured on various historic home tours.

Of late, of Lent, I’m wondering whether the focus on “the wheres” and “the whats” of life are mere subterfuges for the deeper questions of identity, a sort of fleeing from the harder work of uncovering true self.  Or whether the desire for change is, underneath, a longing for a home that is not here but out there in the great unknown that waits beyond death.  These two questions are too difficult to answer.  Who but God can say?

What I can say is that I’ve never found a home I’ve liked better, in the last four Springs of looking.  And what I know is that this place I call home soothes my spirit the minute I walk in the backdoor, after being gone all day, as I was this past Saturday, when I went to work on my sister’s remodel.

And this too,  I can tell:  On Easter  morning, with coffee cup in hand, I looked out my kitchen window onto my lovely Springtime garden.  And I turned to my husband and said, “How could I ever think of leaving my garden?  How could I ever think of leaving a place so perfect for our needs?

So in two easy questions, it looks like I’m home.  For the time doing.