After the Rain

  

Japanese irises (forefront) began blooming at the end of last week. (Click on a photo for a better view.)

 

        We have been experiencing a drought here in Georgia for the last few weeks, with south Georgia bearing the brunt of the hot, windy weather. The Highway 82 fire in Brantley County has burned over 20,000 acres, and, as of yesterday, is only 6% contained. The Pineland fire has burned an estimated 32,331 acres, and is only about 10% contained. These are among the worse fires the state has ever seen, according to news reports, and the amazement of a local woman indicates how unbelievable some may find these Georgia fires, which have also destroyed homes. "Only 10% contained," she exclaimed this past week in a local gathering. "How can a fire be only 10% contained?"

        Anyone who has lived in the west understands very well how a wildfire can be only 6% or 10% contained after days of fire-fighting, for the West has long experienced wildfires, droughts and high winds feeding flames that travel long distances, destroying everything in their path. Those wildfires, however, have increased in intensity and speed and have started earlier in the season during the last 30-40 years, due to climate change.While Tom and I lived in Eagar, Arizona, we were lucky enough not to have a wildfire come dangerously close to where we lived, but longtime residents certainly had that experience in the Wallow Fire of May and June, 2011, which started in the White Mountains near Alpine, a town just 28 miles from Eagar. The fire was finally contained by July 8th of that year, and had burned 538,049 acres of land, from Arizona into New Mexico. The largest wildfire in Arizona history, it destroyed 72 structures, including 32 homes, and cost an estimated $109 million. 

        And then, in May of last year, the Greer Fire, which started near the town of Greer, about 20 miles in the mountains from Eagar, AZ, burned 20,308 acres, and came, as close as I could tell, to about a mile from the house that Tom and I had owned when we lived in Eagar. Fortunately, by the end of the month, that fire was contained.

        Today we've had rain in the Atlanta area, and rain is predicted tomorrow for south Georgia. So maybe the fires there will soon be contained. Here I am happy for the rain that has watered my garden. I was out in the front yard earlier in the season weeding my flower beds and adding mulch, but I got a late start on the vegetable garden. And because I am a member of the Love is Love Farm CSA, I don't plant a lot of vegetables here, as the weekly delivery of vegetables from that farm begins this week. I did plant okra, tomatoes, 3 pepper plants, 2 squash plants, one cucumber plant, and, in late February, potatoes. Gardening has long been a habit that I find difficult--impossible--to kick.

The Irish potatoes are doing well,

I purchased the squash and cucumber plants from Oakhurst Garden.

I usually grow tomatoes from seed, beginning in February, but for the last two years, I have purchased plants. These are from Garland's Garden in Scottdale, GA.

 

My amaryllises have begun blooming.

This is the native plant garden I planted in Tom's memory. There are a few non-natives in this area, but most are native. Most of these flowers will begin blooming in early summer.

How to Live with Grief

 

Clicking on a photo will pull it up and bring it into focus.

 

        I have titled this post "How to Live with Grief," but, actually, I don't have any real advice about living with grief. I only know how I live with grief, for I have discovered, after moving across the country, after therapy, after turning my journal-writing into letters to Tom, that grief, while it diminishes in many ways, never leaves. The most mundane of events can lift a full bucket from that well. Even applying for the widow's benefits of social security elicits emotions of sadness and anger, sadness that Tom is not here to share these retirement years with me, anger that he does not get to enjoy the benefits of his long years of labor.  

        So how do I deal with grief? By turning to the skills I spent years developing. Gardening is the skill and activity we shared from our early days of marriage, beginning in the early 1980s in an open field near the Texas A&M married student housing. Someone from the university would disk up this field every year, and students in married student housing could choose a plot in which to grow a garden. Tom and I  did this for at least a couple of years. After that, we had a garden in every place we lived except for the temporary housing we rented when we first moved to a new area. Over the years we have gardened in Texas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Georgia, and Arizona, sometimes more than once in these states as we moved around the country.

        But I also grew up gardening, or, rather, weeding, for that's the task my dad assigned for his children. My dad was a gardener, his mother was a gardener, and I know that my current gardening skills began with watching them. 

        When I moved to Georgia (again) after Tom died, I began landscaping my front yard with several beds of flowers, natives as well as non-natives that remind me of my childhood or other places we lived. As soon as the weather permits, I begin weeding those areas and adding mulch, removing dead plants, filling in gaps with new ones. Here are a few photos of my spring yard this year.

 

Bearded irises and miniature gladiolas--The next blooms in this area will be Japanese irises, daylilies, and Asiatic lilies. A potted lavender is beginning to push up stems for blooms. 

The bearded irises came from an area planted by a previous owner. I moved them to other areas. The amaryllises that are just now beginning to bloom as of this morning, are descendants from a bulb one of my dad's first cousins gave me years ago.

 

The funky face among the gladiolas and mountain mint Tom made in a pottery class years ago.

 

My son and daughter-in-law gave me this persimmon tree about three years ago. It's a reminder of Tom's enjoying a ripe persimmon plucked from a tree planted by a great-aunt just a few days before he died. 

            I always have a project going, whether it's writing or crocheting or creating a photo book for my grandchildren. My grandmother Margaret Cole Dugat taught me to crochet when I was a teenager, and lately I have been crocheting in the evenings when I watch mysteries or British comedies streaming on BritBox. 

         

      

                How else do I deal with grief? I meet with friends weekly for happy hour, I take music lessons, I play my Irish whistle in the evenings, sometimes sitting on my back porch, letting the notes drift through the neighborhood, I visit my grandsons across country, I call friends and family, I volunteer to write postcards for political candidates I support, sometimes I do phone-banking for them, I plan ways to make my personal space more comfortable and efficient, I clean my house. In short, I go on living, as difficult as it sometimes seems to be, the best way I can.

Still Gardening and Thinking of You

 

I am already deep into the gardening year of 2025. The two bulbs of amaryllises that were given to me over ten years ago have multiplied over and over, supplying gifts to friends and a bed of blooms here at my home in Georgia. And it's time once again to divide the ones that I have been growing in pots in my sunroom and (in season) on the screened-in deck. 

Every year as long as we gardened, Tom and I would start at least some vegetables by seed in February. Late winter was always a time to look forward to spring, to gardening together. Now I have been gardening alone for six years, and I realize that though time passes, grief doesn't. Oh, it morphs into something less visceral, less heart-searing, but it's always there, ready for a memory, a scent, a thought, to resurrect it fully. How does one get over losing a companion who had been a friend since we were fifteen years old? Today we would have celebrated our 47th wedding anniversary. Instead, today I will go into my garden and try to be thankful for the 41 years together, and the years before that of our teenage love. The heart always wants more.

This year, I didn't sprout seeds in February. Instead, I bought a few vegetable plants from a local nursery and then sowed seeds in my raised beds and front-yard flower beds when the weather warmed up enough for zinnias, sunflowers, moonflowers, scarlet runner beans, hyacinth beans, yellow squash, Armenian cucumbers, birdhouse gourds, okra, and basil. The seed potatoes I planted 3 weeks later than advised because cold weather in Montana delayed shipping have grown into such large and green plants that I fear all the energy is going into flowering plants and not the tubers. I am curious to see if I will get any potatoes from that crop.

Gardening is all about hope, and we need a lot of that these days as our country turns to cruelty, vindictiveness, and authoritarianism. Gardening also requires action, and we need that, too, to make this world a better place, to turn cruelty into kindness, vindictiveness into forgiveness, authoritarianism into egalitarianism.  

Flowering potatoes--hope the tubers are growing as well below!

 

These lovely amaryllises multiplied from one bulb that was cultivated by a friend who was a professor of horticulture in Florida.

 

New Home Responsibilities

 

In late August of 2020, I sold our house in Arizona and in September moved to Georgia where my husband and I had lived before, near Atlanta. I have now lived in Georgia three times: first, with Tom and our two children, from 1996-2003; then, with Tom and our daughter (our son being at university in Texas) from 2007-early 2011; and now, I alone have purchased a home where I plan to stay until I can no longer care for myself. That's the plan, anyway.

The move has been difficult, but I have managed it. Within the first month or so of my move, hurricanes landing on the coast of Louisiana brought torrential rain to the Atlanta area, and a portion of my crawlspace/basement flooded twice. The roof also leaked. I was somewhat prepared for the roof; the inspection had indicated its need for replacement. The basement, however, was a surprise. My first priority was having the roof replaced, which was done quickly and efficiently by Rock House Roofing. Then I spent weeks interviewing representatives from basement waterproofing companies before deciding on a company recommended by my friend and real estate agent and her husband, a contractor. I had the basement encapsulated, with a sump pump installed and a de-humidifier plugged in.

The house I purchased, built in 1954, is much smaller than the one Tom and I purchased in Eagar, Arizona. Most of what could not fit in this house went into storage, and I arranged to have shelving and cabinets built to add storage space for books and other items. I had blinds installed in the large windows of the sunroom (once a carport) to add privacy to the room which is now my craft room and exercise room. And I ordered bookshelves for that room to hold my huge supply of craft material. When this pandemic is under control, I hope to locate a creative reuse store to which I can donate craft remainders from projects I have completed (or not). I need to downsize my stuff, beginning with the storage unit. Then I should do a thorough evaluation of all the stuff I have managed to cram into this 2/2, 1300 square foot house.  (Zillow lists the house as having 1092 square feet, but that's incorrect as that square footage does not include the now-enclosed carport.)

I have spent months watching how the water flows from the street, down into my sloping front yard and into my back yard. I am planning a dry rock bed to divert water that flows down the driveway and collects at the front of the sunroom/craftroom. I already removed grass and weeds, laying bare the soil that serves as an outline for the bed of the diversion, and the water now follows that pathway rather than collecting at the sunroom front door. Erosion has already done my work at the side of the house where the slope of the landscape encourages more rapid water flow toward the backyard. The top soil is deeply eroded, exposing roots from a neighbor's tree. 

Now solely responsible for all the tasks that Tom and I once shared, I have risen to the occasion, but not without anxiety. Tom was quite a handyman, and I am not. So when I ordered a shelving unit for the bathroom, I had to assemble it myself, a task that Tom once would have taken on and completed in short order. It took me several hours, but I got the job done. Same with the compost tumbler I bought. There are tasks I do not want to tackle, such as removing and replacing ceiling fans with lights. One ceiling fan/light fixture broke shortly after I moved in; the light and fan pull chains locked up. The fan switch locked up while on; the light switch locked up while the light was off--so I can turn the fan on at the wall switch but not the light.  Another ceiling fan is awkwardly arranged: the pull chain on the fan comes down through a small hole in the glass lamp shade of the light fixture, making it difficult to pull and operate. Once I am two weeks past my second covid shot, I will be looking for a handyman to deal with these issues as well as a few others.

Now that spring has arrived, I have begun planning how to garden in my urban yard. Gardening was an activity that Tom and I shared with great pleasure. Both of us enjoyed the manual work, but now I am feeling my age. I dug a round bed for herbs recently in one of the sunniest parts of a largely shady yard, and my right hip has been hurting since. I also dug a flowerbed near the house where I hope to plant some amyrillises that I have grown from bulbs since 2011 or 2012. The original bulbs multiplied many times, and I gave plants away before I left Arizona. However, the two large pots of several plants remaining I hope can be transplanted successfully outdoors and survive Atlanta winters. 

There are days--actually, every day--when I wonder what purpose do I have to carry on. Tom and I were married for 41 years, and our marriage--though not perfect, as none is--was a happy one and one in which I looked forward to being a part of into our retirement years. I so miss Tom's wittiness, his humor, his love of puns, his intellectual and emotional companionship, his love of the natural world and his knowledge of it. And I miss his ability to perform those many handy tasks that I never cared to learn to do myself. 

But I do carry on. The cats do their part to make sure that I do: every morning between 6:30 and 7:00, Cassie begins caterwauling for breakfast, and Mimi begins crawling all over me while I am trying to sleep. I rise to feed the cats, and the day begins. Purpose being perhaps overrated, tackling and completing ordinary tasks gets me through each day. And one day, after my second covid shot and after my adult children are thoroughly vaccinated, I will once again be able to visit family I haven't seen in over a year and meet for the first time our first grandchild. If only Tom were here to share that last event.

First herb bed in the new home: rosemary, lavender, regular thyme and lemon thyme, chives

the compost bin I assembled

My yard is full of violets