PEAS HAVE OPINIONS

In our garden, the peas will grow from St. Patrick’s Day onward, quick up sticks and strings for the little pea-fingers to grasp.  Peas are a rare treat; I eat them raw, sweet, sad to have so few after I shell them if no one tells me no. Papa used to blame blackbirds for his scanty empty pods still on peavines, but looked at me while he told Gram that story.  He showed me how to unzip carefully to not lose a pea from the pod.  I’d helped to plant them, I mourned when we thinned them, and my share never reached the kitchen.  In our garden, we shall have peas and I will not eat them all up unless no one bothers to stop me.  

In our garden, herbs for cooking and herbs for making us healthy and happy will share space with the peas, then smother the empty vines.  Basil and parsley and garlic chives and thyme ring in my ears like music.  Things for tea will mingle together, so that anyone can rip a handful of green from the tops and have something to drink with a little honey.  The rosemary wants to stay in her pot, after all she’s been through, and be bolder yet again at the end of another summer.  Rue just for the carpets, lavender for everything,  catnip and chamomile for sleep, lemon balm for our throats, and bee balm for the bees.  In our garden, bees will be happy.  We need them to be happy.

Flowers shall fill every space between the herbs.  Beautiful things feed us and soothe us as well as beets.  In our garden, zinnias and cosmos and coneflowers and other thready-rooted things belong among the onions.  Lilies deserve top billing, a favorite, worthy of the sacrifice of a little root vegetable space in the soil.  One thing up, one thing down, one after the other after the other.  Green beans chase up the same strings as the now-dry peas, but taller.  Sunflowers and beans get along so nicely, like tomatoes love basil for the up and carrots for the down.  I used to know the rapid-fire patternings of successive planting by heart, and crop rotation and tilling schedules…

In our garden, there will be no tomatoes.

Maybe one.  I like the way the fuzzy-hairy vines feel, and the way the sun-warm fruit falls off into my hand.  The job of going to the garden for The Tomato for Supper was mine once I was old enough to make a good decision about which one would be perfect today but mush tomorrow.  I do wish that I liked the taste of a tomato, but I’ve given up on that.

This spring, I shall plant a garden anywhere I can find enough sunlight.  Can I put green beans in the front yard?  What about basil and thyme and zinnias and carrots and beets and onions?  Can I till the lawn into luscious black soil, or do I still live in a series of planters?

The rocks came along.  They don’t care where they live, but peas do not grow well in pots.  Peas have opinions.

In our garden, I will forget to remember why no garden but the one I planted as a refuge ever flourished. The soil I stood upon then was made of different stuff, so many generations of the same tomato that no tomato would grow there for seven years.  I will forget that the garden that exploded into life and made cabbages as big as basketballs was put in place only to feed my then-empty heart.  It did.  Everything in that garden at the house that isn’t there bloomed radically and shockingly, forty sunflowers to a stem when there should have been one, with neighbors stealing the seeds in the hope of the same thing happening for them next summer, and so many tomatoes that the man who stole three a day on his walk through the alley was a relief.

Always too many tomatoes, but my stem-crushing masses of  sunflowers were just plain sunflowers down the street the next summer.  In the garden where I slept and prayed and grieved and celebrated, the sunflowers kept me alive with their inspiring aggression and the spearmint erased any stink that clung to my dresses when I walked away from the real world where only one sunflower per stem grew in smaller yards of prettier houses.

The catnip was just a lure, always flattened, like I flattened the ever-widening swath of spearmint.  Less lawn, more good things to eat and drink and smell.

In our garden, Papa’s irises will finally bloom again.  I came back to them in October, and they’ve asked for more sun.  The daffodils seem happy, dutifully giving yellow to the gray-green world when yellow is the only new color available.  There’s enough spearmint to sleep in again, after my long absence.  Nowhere but here has it survived, and I am grateful that it waited for me and pushed out whatever evil anti-spearmint agent hides in the soil of this other, better town.

This spring, I may not get those peas.  This summer, I may not get a single leaf of basil, but we shall surely have the best, sweetest spearmint, enough to keep us in tea and mojitos and spring rolls and great vases of it brought into the house for flowers if flowers do not grow.

I can make do with those pots in case our garden doesn’t happen, but when I leave again, the spearmint’s coming along in a pot whether it likes it or not.

 

 

 

I’M NOT SCARED.

Once upon a time, not that long ago, getting a knock-down-drag-out virus was scary.  Living alone with a small person means that one person is available to be the grown-up, and that person was me.  I had very good neighbors and an even better boyfriend to lend a hand or deliver soup, but being alone and too sick to go out made me feel a bad kind of vulnerable.  What if I slipped in the bathroom in my rush and hit my head?  What if my fever, the one that comes with hideous-real nightmares that send me screaming from the room, shows up and I scared my little girl? What if I just couldn’t drink enough and fried my electrolytes and didn’t wake up at all? The what-ifs fueled the adrenaline that kept me on my feet when I should have been under a blanket.

Now, we live here.  I got sick, and I did the usual “leave me be, I don’t want to infect anyone” behavior.  Being sick is bad, but being the introducer of some viral nastiness to someone I love is so much worse.

Here’s the amazing thing about this round of flu: no one got angry at me for being sick and I didn’t worry about making my little girl sick, either.  I was fed and checked on, up here in the empty top half of the house, and my grossness was not acknowledged.  I’m gross, to be sure.

The small person had no reason to need me to touch her food or drinks or silverware, thus risking infection and continuation of the grossness.  Oh, she hates to throw up.  Only once since age two and mobility arrived has she ever missed the bowl or the bucket.  She simply can’t abide vomit anywhere but AWAY, and the only time she missed was outdoors.  She was outside the hospital after a concussion, on our way to the ER, and convincing her that the inevitable throwing up could happen on the ground took some work.  I had to promise not to make her walk past it on the way back to the car.

This time, I didn’t worry about my fever spiking when I fell asleep, because help was steps away and I know he crept upstairs to peek now and then.   I didn’t worry about falling down when my legs wobbled, because he would have heard the thunk. He helped, and kept me at a distance so lovingly that I forgot I hadn’t been hugged in twenty-four hours until he did finally hug me, unexpectedly…and delicately removed that shirt to put it directly into the wash.

I’m not alone any more, and I wasn’t worried about a thing besides missing work.  I do miss my small person, but she is supposed to be with her daddy right now, anyway.  I’m sort of used to that part.

I was never afraid to live alone, at least, not until the last moment I lived alone, but being a sweaty, dizzy, feverish mess always sent me to a bad what-if place in my head.

The small person makes a joke of her fears, with a funny face and a “Mama, aaahm skerrrd!”  Then mama stands nearby and makes her scary what-ifs go away, but I can’t be my own mama all of the time.

When I might have felt skerrd in the other versions of my life, those bad what-ifs never showed their ugly faces.

The bad what-ifs haven’t made much of an appearance lately at all.  Some of them actually happened in a big way, not too many months ago, but now we are here.  Other what-ifs could have slipped in to take their places, but I’ve decided that I’m not going to let them hang out with us any more.

The cat stayed in bed with me.  The ginger ale flowed like wine.  The eggs, always my first test of food tolerance, arrived perfectly boiled with toast.

Now, I can take another try at sleeping.  I didn’t get much of it done last night, so I think I’m due for a few uninterrupted hours.

Let the nightmares come.  I’ll wake up to the sweetest dream of a life.

JUST FRUITCAKE, REALLY.

I really want to make this, minus the candied mixed fruit. More dates, more cranberries, but I’m so sickly fascinated by the rainbow of former “fruit” that I can never seem to put it into the bread. I just put the jar back on the shelf. Once, an expensive jar was passed to me from my grandma, a relic, too expensive for her to want to use but too pretty in the bottle to throw out, the label too nicely decorated…but I finally had to throw it out, in case my curious, maraschino-cherry-loving Thundergirl might eat it and die of ptomaine poisoning.  That’s what Gram said would kill you if you at bad food, but I don’t know if it’s still called that.

Amaretto might be even better than red wine, too, especially for basting. We had a “family” bottle of that, too, but I went and drank it all, all three tablespoons left in the bottle, after Gram died.  My dad had given her the bottle, swiped no doubt from the bowling alley, and that one big swig proved that booze doesn’t go bad.

YULE! An excuse!

“Fruitcake of Erebor”

8 oz golden raisins
8 oz candied pineapple
1 lb candied mixed fruit — NO. Well, maybe. It’s so pretty. Is it food?
8 oz dried figs, quartered
8 oz dates, quartered
6 oz dried cranberries
½ – 1 cup red wine

Combine fruits and wine and soak overnight.

8 oz butter
8 oz brown sugar
½ cup molasses
4 – 5 large eggs
1½ + ⅓ cups all-purpose flour
¼ + ⅛ tsp baking soda
¾ tsp cinnamon — I would add more
1⅛ tsp nutmeg — more
¾ tsp ground cloves — a little more. Don’t want to numb our tongues
4 oz blanched almonds
8 oz lb pecans
4 oz walnuts

1 cup red wine (optional)

Preheat oven to 300.
Cream butter, sugar and molasses. Beat in eggs. Gradually add flour, soda and spices.
Add the batter and nuts to fruit mixture and stir well.
Grease 8” foil loaf pans (4 – 6) with vegetable shortening. Fill each pan @ 2/3 full. Bake for 1¾ – 2¼ hours until done.

Pour about 1/4 cup of wine over each loaf when taken out of the oven. Remove cakes from pan immediately and set on wire rack to cool.

Wrap each loaf in plastic wrap (or cheesecloth), then with aluminum foil and store in refrigerator. May be basted with additional wine weekly, if desired.

 

 

Now, back to sleeping off a bug, definitely not ptomaine poisoning.  I blame finals stress for letting a chink form in my immunity armor, and that crack let in something that was very happy to take over my digestive system for the last 24 hours.  I’ve had tea and toast and two boiled eggs and a little more ice cream than might have been good for me, just now, because things seem to be cranking into reverse again. Maybe if I hold very, very still, it’ll be okay.

I’m over being dismayed by being robbed of a day and a night.  It won, the bug.  I got sick.  But now, I’ve had an hour of daydreams about fruitcake and I can hear a guitar being played downstairs.  Earlier, I heard real singing, the way we sing when we think no one can hear or we know we sound good.

He sounded very good and happy, and I’m happy for that.

When I feel better, I’ll tell you about an alternate universe I visited while I slept.  The daughter was a champion moped racer in a culture that valued mopeds and bigotry, but we took care of the bigotry part, so all that was left was fertile farmland and love and a really confusing kind of ice cream.  My life work was to train moped racers how to disassemble and reassemble their bikes like rifles are handled in the military.  That was part of racing, breaking down your bike and putting it back together in the middle of nowhere.

High fever, anyone?

DECEMBER FIFTH, I THOUGHT THIS.

I wished for just a moment today, a guilty speck of a second, that the bruises would come back.

A person with two black eyes can rest, and not wonder so urgently when the hurting will stop.  I am impatient with my face now.  When I wake up, my sleep-smooshed nose dances dangerously close to a throb and my patchwork forehead feels the poke of an invisible fork, rhythmless and teasing.  There, then gone, maybe for the day, maybe just until I open my mouth to say good morning to my beloved people.

I don’t want to look the way I feel when I wake up, but I know that some mornings, I do.

When the bruises showed, every morning also showed a new and slightly improved version of my face when I risked a look in the mirror.  My reflection never horrified me, but I may have become stuck staring, or more likely, caught staring.  The patterns and their associated sensations were something that I would have documented, had I been able.  I wasn’t, so I rested and waited patiently to be all better.  I wish I could have put together a plot of those face-patterns with a word-map of how each had arrived and how a finger pressed here or there changed the colors under my skin.  The pairing would have made a fine thing to read and see, now.  The terror thus removed, my face would have been a project.  A dynamic work of art.  Living evidence of evolution and healing.

Now, I see just same-colored skin with two thin lines where the outer stitches used to be, and I feel hard knots under my forehead and eyebrow where inner stitches used to be.  My nose looks like my nose.  Nothing shows, and I move through the world at almost the same pace as the people around me, and those people don’t look at me with disguised double-takes. Acquaintances who know still linger when they look, well-meaning but curious.  I tell them I am fine, just learning to maybe be happy with Bs this semester, easing the discomfort with a smile and a joke about school and nothing more personal.

Still, sometimes I desperately want to lay still after the walk from the car to the building on campus where I must read small print and hear loud voices saying important things very close to my head.  The way I walk, sometimes a little carefully or a little hurriedly to get where I need to go to find a quieter place, is the only thing that shows. now.  The reading hurts, the loudness hurts, and the long walk is too long.  I have laid aside the fear, chosen to forget the human who caused this and give my whole self to human forgiveness and health, but I get angry at the physical pain.

My body betrays me when I count on it to move when I say go and understand when I say think.

Complaining also hurts, so I don’t do it.  Much.

Gaining those bruises and living to see them fade has made every day a gift.  When my small person is bouncy and I am exhausted, gratitude for her good health outweighs my urge to dial her spirit down to a more manageable level.  She has her own invisible bruises, and she sings them away, sometimes for both of us.  She can’t possibly know that and does not need to know.  She never complains, but she marks that painful night as a reference point for the beginning of this new life.

In this new life, her mommy takes extra naps and does not jump on the trampoline yet.  We live in a new house with new people who fascinate her.  She would follow them all around, watching and talking and inviting them to do this or that all day long if I didn’t see that they are too kind to tell her to let them finish homework or the latest episode of a favorite show in peace.I actively suppress worry that her joy at being here might wear on the quiet inhabitants of our new house, but so far, no one has complained about us, and I let her bounce to some degree until it’s bedtime or my face hurts from shared laughter or quiet solitary concern for our place in the peaceful mesh of the established routines here.

She is of great concern to the dog, but he is not the boss of things.  So is the cat, but I have no idea how to make a Squirrel not be a Squirrel.  Squirrel has at least learned that my no means no concerning the Christmas tree and the kitchen counters and how to come when I call her out of the attic.  That’s progress.

We progress.  Every day, I learn something about my physical body.  I am not as delicate as Gram believed me to be, after all.

I accept the frustration and anger at my body for its small betrayals.  The morning fork that pokes my forehead can be quieted with meditation, and the nose throb only happens when I forget that  I have a nose that would benefit from a force field that spans from chin to cheekbones.

 

 

 

I wrote this last week, to try to make peace with my face.  Everything that has anything to do with pain centers on the middle of my face.  Today, not the fifth of December, I had an unfortunate run-in with a blood-spattered bottle of body wash, and my day went to pieces along with my heart.  Fortunately, I had help in putting the shards into order well enough to see today as another gift, and I can sleep knowing that sometimes, nightmares end with a better kind of reality than the sweetest dreams ever dared allow.