Reflecting on Nancy, 2 years after her death

A million years ago I worked with Nancy. Old enough to be my mother, I was her supervisor. She was the first person I ever supervised. 

A gently bred Virginian, she followed her academic husband up north. She was a pianist, a classical music aficionado, a music teacher. Like many women of her generation, she eschewed career goals to be a stay at home mother. 

When her husband left for another woman, he assumed Nancy wouldn't be able to keep the large family home or care for their 5 children. He offered to take them instead, him and his new wife. Well, that did it! Nancy found a job. She worked to keep her children and the family home. She took in borders to supplement her income. She kept the kids and that big, aging, elegant house. When she related this story to me, years after the fact, her eyes were on fire.

When she died, I sent sympathy cards to each of her children. I didn't hear back from her only son. On the 2nd anniversary of her death, he replied. He'd refused to open the card out of deep grief, waiting until he was emotionally prepared to read it. Two years he waited! 

This is what I sent back to him:

Your mother was a wonder to me. Her passion for music, her children, and THAT HOUSE was remarkable. She was like that at work, too. She didn't just work with someone, she got to know them. She paid attention. She drew conclusions. She cared, often deeply. The faculty, staff, and students loved her.  

She could be stubborn, of course. I'll never forget how I bought her a new computer and she let it sit for a year until I worked up the courage to force her to learn how to use it. Yes, you get that from her.  

She would have understood and been a bit in awe of your decision to postpone reading that sympathy card/note for two years. A love, a loss, a pain so deep - well, she knew all that only too well. I'm actually consulting a thesaurus for the right word to use to describe her passion for the things and people she loved. It's a struggle to come up with the right word. Maybe intensity with a splash of rage? At her best, she was stunning.  

She surrounded her desk with postcards she received
from students and faculty over the years.

 

Do I have to clean my house for Thanksgiving?

I can't believe Thanksgiving is this Thursday. It is as if I went to sleep last July and then woke up this morning. What a wonderful and personally satisfying interlude this election cycle has been. I'm looking forward to more of the same in 2020. 

But now I have to come down to earth and face the cold hard truth. I'm going to have to clean my freakin' house in anticipation of a big family dinner. Let's just say the housework has been a bit neglected and a serious holiday cleaning is in order. Yikes. It will take me days. I better get crackin'.

I'm sure it is hard for readers outside the U.S. to understand Thanksgiving, unless you are Canadian. Then you have already been through yours and you know the drill. But the rest are probably wondering what's the big deal with this Thanksgiving thing, and why don't we just wait until Christmas for Turkey? I don't know. We just don't. We're American, for better or worse. 

Thanksgiving is a family-based holiday, but not commercialized or decadent like the U.S. version of Christmas has become. It is about food, memories, and love. Or at least that's what we tell ourselves. I bet a lot of the people who will celebrate on Thursday dread it like the plague because they will have to sit next to their mean-spirited aunt, or their racist father. Politics, religion, and unresolved emotional themes will ruin yet another family meal in some households. Oh well, as long as the food is good. It is really the best meal of the year.

I love Thanksgiving food. Thinking of mashed potatoes and turkey gravy, moist cornbread stuffing with nuts and dried fruit, homemade cranberry sauce, and all the rest make me happy. A special memory is my mother's pumpkin pie. Oh, Ma! I miss you so.

She never bought canned pumpkin. Nope, not my Mom. She bought small pie pumpkins, split them in half, cleaned out the seeds and baked the pumpkin in the oven before scraping it out and making the pie. THEE pie. The perfect pumpkin pie. It was totally different than one made with canned pumpkin. Hers was luscious; darker, complex, textured, better in every way.

Everything was usually made from scratch in her house, but certainly always on holidays. She would even make homemade bread for Thanksgiving. We topped it off with jellies and jams her and my father "put up" (i.e., canned) every August.

I have had dreams about her three times in the past two weeks. In truth, this is what the holidays really do.  They conjure up ghosts.

My mother in pink, 1988

Grandma Told Stories

The last Grandma story (for now):

Grandma was a fundamentalist Protestant and a Pentecostal charismatic who talked in tongues when the spirit moved her. This was quite different than the European Catholicism of my mother's people, which was the way I was raised. However, loving someone with a different religion was my first clue that mysticism and goodness belong to all religions, and all (or none) are valid paths. She also retained many old Appalachian mores, superstitions, and beliefs.

She often told me ghost stories about events that happened in the family over the years.  One of my favorite stories was the one about "The Three White Horses.”

The Three White Horses
Grandma’s paternal grandmother, Luella, lived on a farm in Pickett County, Tennessee with her husband, Ewell. She was sitting on her front porch on 1 Jun 1919, when unbeknownst to her, their son Thomas (my great grandfather) died. Luella told Ewell that she saw three white horses running in the fields by their house that day. He just laughed at her and told her she was seeing things. Three months to the day, she went into the cornfield to fill her apron with ripe corn for dinner. There she had a stroke and died on 1 September 1919.   

Grandma also told me she once heard a strong, decisive knock on the front door to her house.  When she opened the door no one was there.  Later she discovered that a relative had died at the exact moment she heard the knock. These stories scared me half to death, and I had trouble sleeping for many nights after hearing that one.  Still, I was fascinated and could not stop asking for more.

My father died in 1995, and Grandma was bereft at losing her son. I came into town for the funeral, and I was dropped off at Grandma's house a couple hours before with the understanding I was to keep Grandma company until my mother came to pick us both up. It never occurred to me that Grandma hadn't been told I would be coming. She answered the door red eyed and with tears streaming down her face. It killed me to see her that way. She said she didn't want company right then, something I had never heard her say before. I felt so bad for intruding. I apologized and hugged her and said I'd walk to my Mom's house (probably only about a 15 minutes walk - no big deal). When Grandma realized I didn't have a car she refused to let me leave. 

Then I had to make it right somehow, you know what I mean? It was super awkward and one of those moments you will always remember. I realized it couldn't be Grandma who made it right, she was a 90 year old woman beside herself with grief. I had to do or say something that would change the tone, but still honor the feelings of that day. The best I could come up with was (in a small voice) "Grandma, could you tell me the story of the three white horses?"

She look at me out of the corner of her eyes for one long moment (as if to say, "Are ya kiddin' me, Colette?). Then her eyes crinkled up and she laughed out loud, a most welcome sound. She patted my knee, and proceeded to tell me the story. She was the grandmother, I was the grandchild, and we both knew how that worked. 

This brooch belonged to Grandma.  Not three WHITE horses, but still...

Orlando

The massacre at The Pulse nightclub last night took place at a venue about 25 minutes away from where I live.  Am I horrified by how close terrorism has come to my home, my turf, my family?  Yes, I am horrified.  

I am also filled with grief for the beautiful young lives that were lost.  The sorrow I feel for the loss of great potential, and for the pain their loved ones feel this morning is beyond words.  

Am I afraid?  No, I am not afraid.  I am angry. 

Cypress trees on Lake Eola, Downtown Orlando

Accepting my mother

A year ago this week I left Central Florida to go to Northern Indiana to help my siblings manage my mother's death. I spent a week listening to her labored breathing, listening for that last breath   signalling a peaceful end to a long, hard life. We protected her in death, she was never alone until she...was. When she took that final breath four of her seven children were standing sentinel at the four corners of her bed. She had to leave us, because we were not about to leave her.

My mother was always important to me, always a key figure in my development. She was not the perfect mother, but how many of us are? I think that might be an unrealistic expectation; a childish fantasy. I decided long ago to cut her some slack.

If I held her responsible for all my neuroses I would never have a chance at overcoming them on my own. I would never grow up. But then again, my mother was never a monster. I wonder if it is even possible to accept the shortcomings of a mother who actually tries to do her children harm?  It is easier to forgive ignorance than it is to forgive meanness.

In many ways my Mom was the typical woman and mother of her working class, Midwestern U.S.A. milieu. Those mothers from Tim Brokaw's Greatest Generation did not pay close attention to their children's psychological well-being. For them, knowing right from wrong was simple, they did not think overmuch about the gray areas.

Things changed in the 1960's, and I don't think the older generations ever understood how complex and challenging the world became for their children. I have spent my whole life trying to figure out right from wrong, often making it up as I go along. For better or worse, that sort of moral confusion was a foreign concept to my mother.

She tried to be a good person. Sometimes she fell short, but overall she was kind and good. She could also be quirky and stubborn. I liked that part of her the best. She loved her family in a simple, casual way. However, it has been neither simple nor casual letting her go.

I think my mother's best maternal quality was that she accepted her children for who we were as children and for who we became as adults. In retrospect, that was huge. She trusted love. Not many of my friends' mothers were so accepting. And with seven strong-willed (and very different) baby-boomer children that couldn't have been easy.

Easter 1953

Dreaming and the unconscious mind

I had an interesting dream last night, wherein my unconscious mind sent me a very clear message about what to do next. I think that is almost always what dreams attempt to do, but this dream was actually clear enough for me to understand.

A little over a week ago one of my best friends, ShS, died of lung cancer. It was unexpected. She lives up North, so I have not seen her for almost two years, but we talked on the phone. She was an integral part of my group of friends, and has been since about 1993. She was also an amazing person, almost always positive and up for a laugh. We had such fun over the years. I am going to miss her terribly.

Her first marriage was difficult and ended in divorce, twice. Her second marriage (or maybe it is her third since she married that first husband, the raging asshole, twice?) was to a kindly man who loved her completely. They were together for 36 years. 

I have been concerned about her husband, K, since her death. At 70 years old, and with health issues of his own, I worry about him being alone. I know grief can be brutal. He is probably numb right now. How will he cope?

In my dream K sent me photographs he took of winter scenes via email attachments. There were at least a dozen of his lovely photographs, appearing almost black and white only because that is what winter looks like in Upstate New York. Perhaps also because that is what grief looks like? The subject matter was simple, stark, cold, and beautiful. He took pictures conveying his loneliness and sorrow. He did not turn away from his pain; instead, he made a picture of it and made it beautiful.

I was awestruck by those photos. When I awoke, at 3 a.m., I could not wait to send them to K so he could see what he needed to do. As I returned to my conscious state, I sadly realized I actually didn't have the photos. They were not in my email in real life. They were part of the dream.

It occurred to me that was what art therapy does for a person in crisis. It allows a suffering human being to plug into the creative imagination and find some relief from pain. It frees the symbolic to work on our damaged psyches, allowing that great archetypal world to soothe and begin to heal us. We experience the symbolic most purely without words, without language. I wonder if truth is easier to accept in that form?

I am going to share this dream with K. However, I know that the dream was also for me. Dreams are always for the dreamer.  Everyone who appears in a dream is a symbolic part of the dreamer. I am pretty sure that is true. So this message about managing grief with the visual arts, although universal, is one that I need to embrace and explore as well.  

Footprint and pansy in the snow

Nutty as a Fruitcake

I made fruitcake for the holidays. I know – Ick.  Many people hate it. I like my mother’s dark fruitcake recipe, which I make without the icky stuff she put in her version. I use dates, dried apricots, raisins and walnuts. No red or green candied cherries! As a result, I feel disgustingly superior and virtuous.

Only my daughter and I will eat fruitcake these days. I could easily skip it, but this is my first Christmas since Mom died. I miss her and I really wanted to make it. It will make my daughter happy. Maybe I can talk my granddaughter into trying it? Stranger things have happened.

Mom made fruitcake every Christmas I can remember until the slow progression of that hateful Parkinson’s Disease made it impossible for her to bake. Then I started making the Christmas fruitcake. I would send her one in the mail, just like she used to to do for me after I got married and moved far away. They weigh a ton, so the postage probably cost more than the ingredients; but it was my special gift to her. I felt I was honoring her in the making of it, and I knew she liked that I was carrying on her tradition. As a mother and a grandmother I understand that now.

Food-related holiday traditions are the legacy of the common woman. As long as someone is still making our recipes we have achieved some form of immortality.

Of course, as a daughter (or son), you have to make these things a little different than your mother did. We must put our own spin on it to reflect our uniqueness, our modernity, our necessary and never-ending rebellion. Who among us actually wants to BE their mother? Not many.  We adjust and tweak to insure we are different. How much we have to tweak depends on who our mothers were.

I must confess that I stopped making them a few years ago, in 2012 - that fateful year when the fruitcakes I made went moldy. It made me so mad, that mold.  I threw a big, stinkin’ fit and stopped making the effort in subsequent years.  I guess I showed them! Now I regret that and so many other things. I was not the best daughter I could have been.

I cannot go back and make my mother a fruitcake for 2013 and 2014. Instead, I made a memorial fruitcake in 2015. I am storing it in the fridge because in Florida I do not have a cool basement, or any basement for that matter. I am going wild with the brandy. If it gets moldy I am going to throw it out without saying a word. I am keeping my anger in check. This is now a ritual, a sacrifice, an act of love. From here on in it is the making of fruitcake that is important, not the eating of it.    

It occurs to me that she may not have liked my version of the fruitcake. As I shamelessly bragged above, my version does not include candied green and red cherries, and who knows what other carcinogenic or candied crap she used to put in her version. She never believed those things could be bad for you. She liked the bad stuff, my Mom. It used to drive me crazy.

She definitely did not soak her cheesecloth in brandy. She used apple juice and wrapped the cakes in muslin. I am quite sure she also liked thinking that her fruitcake was better than mine. And, of course, it was. To be completely honest I miss the red candied cherries. I probably should not admit it or the thought police might come and haul me away. Out of sheer orneriness, let me say it loud and proud: the red candied cherries were my favorite part. I was a fool for not realizing that earlier. Next year I will put them back in.

I just realized that instead of giving her the fruitcake she wanted, I gave her the fruitcake I thought she should have. Aaaack! It is a good thing she loved me, because I can be insufferable.

Mothers understand these things, though. At least I do when my daughter now makes many of "my" Christmas cookies just a little bit different than I did. To become our grown-up selves we must separate from our mothers.

I am beginning to understand why a mother will always love her children more than her children will love her. Otherwise, none of us would ever leave her and no one would ever grow up.  It is as it should be.

Paris, 13 Nov 2015

“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées   

Like everyone else, I was glued to the TV and my iPad last night hoping for more information.  Hoping for clarity, I guess.  I had a hard time falling sleep, thinking hard about the families who had received the bad news that their family members would not be coming home from the concert or the restaurant.  I thought of good and evil.  I wondered about the nature of both.

 

“Remember that all through history, there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Always.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, The Story of My Experiments With Truth

At a loss, except for words

My last post, about losing our gardenia, made me think about loss again. It is an interesting concept, loss.  I am going to chew on this for awhile.  If it bothers you then for crying out loud, please do not read it.

What is this potent euphemism, loss?  Can you really understand it if you have not had the experience of losing people, places, and things? 

It happens to everyone, I am not special in any way.  Many people have had more and worse loss than me. I am not feeling sorry for myself in writing this.  I just want to step back for a few minutes and explore this thing called loss.  Why not?

I have moved many times.  Leaving one place for another is a special kind of loss.  I am not only thinking about houses and people, I am talking about the land, the climate, the flora and fauna, the way a sofa might fit perfectly in one living room but not another.  This is the loss of the familiar.  Of course with this kind of loss (moving) you also gain something in the process, so the loss of the familiar is tempered somewhat by the excitement of the new.  There is still emotional pain, but there is also hope.  And, of course, you learn things. 

As an adult I became acquainted with death. In early-middle age it seemed like people I loved were dropping like flies.  That is when I figured if boys could condition themselves to stop crying, so could I.  And I did. It was easier than you might think.

I thought maybe I was starting to get the hang of it after awhile.  I imagined I was becoming accustomed to loss.  I distanced myself from pain. Working and being busy helped.  People in my life continued to die or move away and I handled the losses fairly well.  I started spouting the whole “death is a natural part of life” line - as if that statement isn't just the most obvious thing in the world.  I was beginning to imagine I was well-adjusted, strong even. It was great, too!  I think of those as my glory years.  Yes, I know that is a stupid thing to say, but I am not going to lie.  I am as stupid as the next person.

There are people who read this blog who only know me from that long period of my life when I did not cry and I am quite sure they found me super annoying. I was overly proud of not crying, and when you are overly proud you are kind of begging for a slap down.

Death is uncomfortably personal and indelicate; we come up with alternate words to describe it because it is frightening. It is a little like Voldemort.  We do not want to speak his name for fear that he may show up or exact revenge in unspeakable ways. We do not fully understand what he is capable of, so we fear the worst. Best to keep him at bay.

Losing someone to death begins a process for the living that is very similar to losing a place or a thing. We look for our loved ones but they are gone.  We miss them deeply.  We come to realize we will never find them again. We feel our loss and we mourn their passing. We grieve our loss.  We change. We reluctantly adjust. Truthfully, I find the whole process infuriating.  But whatayagonnado?  I guess that is why it is so fascinating to me.

Since retiring and moving to Central Florida in March 2014, I have been reacquainted with loss.  I retired and moved away, leaving my job, friends, gardens, home. I found myself missing many of the "things" I threw out or gave away when we were downsizing, preparing for the move. I lost things when we moved into our new place. I learned to live without these things and reluctantly adjusted. However, I am happy to report I finally found my black handled scissors!  At least there is that.

The first year and a half after my retirement was fun. Everything was new. I was ready for change. I was happy and energized.  I could not wipe the smile off my face.  Then in March 2015, I "lost" my mother and all bets were off. Holy shit!  Suddenly there was too much change and too much loss with too little time to process it all.  I kind of overdosed on change.  Does that make sense? 

I am reluctantly adjusting to all this change. Reluctantly is the key word, and I think it is a reasonable adverb to use here.  It kind of happens over time. It is fair to say that, more often than not, loss sucks.  Loss is that empty hole, that endless tug, the searing pain, those burning tears pooling just behind your eyes.  I hate losing people, places, and things.  I totally understand why some people become pack rats and others stay in bad relationships.  Change is a bumpy damn road.

Apparently loss must be felt if we want to be healthy minded. Or at least that is what society would have us believe. It seems to be one of those “you can run but you cannot hide” kind of things we hear so much about.  And I (reluctantly) think that is true. 

Shutting down is useful, pragmatic, and effective if you can manage to pull it off, but it is not strength. It is not that.

I never want to get too old to cultivate strength. It is a matter of principle and seems like a worthy goal, which is not to say that I AM strong.  I often fail at being strong, sometimes in notably big and sloppy ways.  I am not sure about you, but I am no Athena and I did not spring full grown from the head of Zeus.  

We all get knocked down from time to time. There is no shame in that.  Of course we all want to pull ourselves up by the count of 10.  Sometimes we can and sometimes we can't, "there's the rub!" There's the humanity.

I am beginning to see that strength comes when we are willing to feel our pain, not in the overcoming of it.  Big *$#@! surprise to me, by the way.  I am not romanticizing or promoting this crap.  I take no pleasure in thinking this is true. I take no pleasure in thinking of it at all.

Demeter, in winter

 

Mourning

We have acclimated to the climate and, except for the steamiest of hot summer days, we do not turn on our air conditioning until mid-morning.  That means we still keep the sliding glass door to the lanai open in the early morning hours.  Our cat, Buddy, appreciates this.  He hunts lizards in the pool area and likes coming and going as he pleases.   

I am not a big fan of air-conditioning, but it is essential here.  I cannot imagine what life in Florida (or anywhere in the Deep South) was like before air-conditioning.  Still, we both like to put off turning it on until the sweat is dripping down the back of our necks.  Like everyone else in Florida I bitch about the heat; however, I would rather live through a Central Florida summer than an Upstate New York winter.  No contest.  I like the heat, and the humidity makes my hair curly. If only I had lived here in the late 1960's during my Janis Joplin hair phase.

I am slowly coming out of a deep funk that started when my mother died earlier this year.  I am surprised at how hard this has hit me because I thought I was ready for her death.  It is so confusing, this grief thing.  I have lived through the deaths of my father and two brothers.  As Amy Shumer's boss says in Trainwreck, this is not my first rodeo.  I wonder if it is hitting me harder this time because I am retired and I actually have time to grieve this loss? 

The past few weeks I have noticed a change for the better.  About damn time, too!  I am becoming more aware of myself and the world around me each morning.  I take this as a good sign.  I do not know about you, but I can usually predict my mood for any given day by how I experience morning. 

Early mornings in Central Florida are almost always stunning.  The sky is blue, the sun is shining, and there is lush green foliage everywhere.  The first 8 months we lived in this house I woke up every single morning thinking, "Another day in paradise!"  Then Mom died and I did not notice much of anything.  

The worst part is I have not been aware of what was happening to me.  Grief sneaks up on a person like the proverbial thief in the night.  I am reminded of a big cat when she is on the hunt.  She approaches soundlessly, quietly; the prey rarely knows she is coming.  In an instant she pounces and tears into the neck with her killing teeth. Clamping on with that unforgiving death grip, she shakes that poor critter till it dies from a broken neck. The only difference is that Grief goes for the heart.  Grief has taken me like that.  She shook me like an alcoholic housewife shakes her first martini of the day. If you have experienced grief OR if you are (or know) an alcoholic you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Not surprisingly I have spent this fallow period longing for the past, yearning for a whole shitload of things I have lost along the way.  You know - my amazing flower gardens up North, living in a progressive and liberal college town, my black-handled scissors, and a time when I still had a mother.  This really has to change.  I want to move on.  One can effectively deal with the present and make necessary changes that will affect the future; but the past is just that. Those things are GONE.  Except for the black-handled scissors, I think they are someplace in this house.  But anyway, here's the deal: Living in the past involves very little actual living.

All I have done for 5 long months is complain.  I cry, I lose my temper, I behave badly.  I am not trying to be this awful person - at some point I simply lost control.  Please do not misunderstand my complaints about grief; I think grief work is important.  It has meaning.  A person needs to go through it, needs to feel their emotions, blobbity, blah, blah, blah.  I am just so *^!%# tired of it.  Enough!  I am ready to be done with mourning.  I wonder if I can pull that off, change myself just by wanting it?  What are the practical limits of desire?

This morning I stayed in bed long after waking up, a guilty retiree pleasure.  I eventually got up and walked into the living room.  The sliding glass door was open to the world.  As luck would have it, I noticed the blue sky, the pool, and the palm trees out back.  I can assure you I was not looking for them, I just turned my head and there they were.  I immediately thought "Wow, another day in paradise!"  I felt good and I wanted more.

My handsome husband is an early riser and he always makes the coffee before I get up.  This is yet another reason why I love that man.  I poured myself a cuppa joe and thought how great it was to have the morning to myself.  I went into my home office (aka N's playroom) and turned on the computer where I sat down to check email and, perhaps, to write.

The view from my office window caught my eye.  I used to look out and observe my neighbors' comings and goings.  THAT was a waste of time! Consequently, I moved my computer screen and now it blocks the lower part of the window.  I no longer see my neighbor's houses.  Now I pretend I live in the woods.  I see blue sky, two large sycamores, a part of the neighbor's live oak, and the top of our screamin' pink crepe myrtle.  It looks like this:

Grief is a common ailment.  I have friends who are also mourning the loss of a loved one right now. For some the worst will last a few months, for others it might last a year or even more. Grief is not a one-size-fits-all emotion.  I do not believe the feeling of loss ever completely goes away, but at some point we find a way to rebuild our lives without the people we loved and lost.  This is what we do.  There is no shame in being human.  There is no shame in feeling pain or in feeling loss.  It is perfectly okay to ask for help.  These are the lessons Grief is teaching me.  If I learn my lessons well maybe She will leave me alone.

Good Grief and the Good Earth

What is this thing they call dirt in Central Florida?  It looks like sand mixed with a little topsoil to me.  You should have seen my face when I first dug up a clump of "grass" only to find salt and pepper underneath trying to pass as dirt.  I was perplexed.

I am spoiled when it comes to soil.  I grew up in the 1950's and 1960's in the Midwestern corn belt.  The dirt was dark and rich and vital. If you stuck a seed in the ground it would never fail to grow. My sweet Mother had a vegetable garden as well as flowers.  Getting things to grow was never a problem for her.  When I was a little girl, I liked to follow her around to see what she was going to do next. She was everything to me back then.  I knew if I stuck close to her, interesting things would happen.

Outside in late spring or early summer, she would sometimes keep me out of her hair by giving me a packet of zinnia seeds to plant. They would most definitely sprout and grow into beautiful flowers.  They were my flowers.  I helped them grow from tiny seeds.  It was magical.  That is probably when I first caught the gardening bug.  Thank you, Ma!

When T and I first moved to upstate New York, we would often go for long drives in the country to compensate for living our lives as worker bees in town.  We could not help but notice the soil when the NYS farmers would till their fields. Those Upstate New York fields were filled with large rocks.  How in the world they manage to plant crops I will never know.  Apparently it is a constant struggle because with freezing and thawing the ground keeps pushing up rocks from the deepest depths of the earth.  If you notice a preponderance of lovely stone walls and fences in NYS it is because each year the farmers have to pull big stones and slabs of rock out of the fields so they can plant seeds. They have to do something with those piles of rocks. Consequently, stone fences are what they used to mark their property lines and field borders.  It must have been especially hard and discouraging work for the early settlers with their simple tools.  Thankfully they stuck with it and figured out how to work that stubborn land. They created beautiful stone fences with the rocks and stones.  The results are unique and amazing, well worth the effort. 

Once we moved out of town and into the country we got serious about perennial gardening.  In addition to removing rocks, we enriched the heavy clay soil on our land.  T was still young back then.  He did some impressive "double digging" for numerous perennial beds. We read gardening books.  We badgered other gardeners with questions. We made mistakes. We figured it out. We changed. We learned.

The first year on that land my Mom came to visit and brought us small, old-fashioned yellow bearded irises she dug out of her own garden.  She also brought us a start from her infamous trumpet vine.  The original plant had been in her father's garden.  She took a cutting from his trumpet vine before he died in 1961 and she kept it alive all those years.  Those were the plants we started with.  

For years we mulched with composted horse manure in order to improve that soil.  Is there anything more comforting than having a mountain of composted horse manure delivered to and dumped on your property?  As I said, we lived in the country.  It was fully composted, so it did not smell. No one ever complained about our manure pile. I figured they wished they had one, too.  Who wouldn't? 

We spent every weekend for 6 weeks each spring shoveling shit into our wheelbarrow and then hauling it all over our land to mulch the flower beds.  Eventually the mountain became a mole hill.  When it was gone, I would plant pumpkin seeds in the good dirt that remained and it became the source for our Halloween pumpkins. 

I am assuming our current HOA will not allow us to have a mountain of composted horse manure delivered to our front yard in this subdivision in Central Florida.  Bummer.  Where would we put it?  In the garage?  Oh, that IS an evil thought.  Please do not let me do that.  Instead, we must buy our composted cow manure in bags, for crying out loud. Like normal people. How did it come to this?

So here we are starting over, not knowing the land nor understanding the soil. Again.

I get up each morning and stroll out through the lanai, peering out of our screened-in "birdcage" to stare at the new plantings in the back yard, imagining they have grown overnight.  I need to get my fat ass out the screen door and commune with those plants!  I need to walk the land, and stop thinking of it as just a small yard.  The Good Earth deserves more respect.  I need to surrender to this sandy soil and figure out what likes to grow in it. 

A friend once gave me a button that said "I don't know where I am going, but I'm on my way!"   It made me smile because it was so true.  I like to think this is me at my best, aching and floundering; slouching towards change much like Yeats' rough beast from Bethlehem. 

Up North I had daylilies of every type and color I could find. The wild ones started blooming in late June.  I thought wild daylilies were the most beautiful wildflower of all; however, now that I have seen Maypops in the wild at Lake Louisa State Park in Clermont, Florida, wild daylilies may have to try harder to get my vote.  Maypops are also called passionflower vine.  The Latin name for Maypops is "Passiflora incarnata!"  I think you get the picture.

Once the wild daylilies were spent Up North, one hybrid variety after another would bloom through the end of August.  I loved my daylilies.  For 9 long months of every cold, gray year I waited for them.  When they poked their way out of the earth and started growing, I was happy.  I miss them like an old friend.  I heard rumors there are varieties that grow in zone 9.  I am not sure if I believe it because I have yet to see a daylily down here. 

The last ones I saw were Stella D'Oro daylilies just starting to bloom at a South Carolina rest stop on our way down to Florida in late March 2014.  I distinctly remember how happy I was to see them!  We were homeless, frazzled, and on the road.  And then I saw them.  I trilled to T: "Oh, the daylilies are starting to bloom here!"  Then I thought, "Oh yeah, WE don't HAVE any daylilies." I got back in the car and we resumed our journey to Central Florida, slouching all the way.

I mourn the loss of my sweet Mother's yellow bearded irises. That is another plant you cannot grow down here.  Now that Mom is gone, I wish I could have brought some with me.  However, I know they would not have survived. Instead, I am planting Louisiana irises in a wet area next to the house.  I think I will like them more than bearded irises anyway.  They have a more elegant shape.  My mother would understand.

I am quite happy to be free of that damned trumpet vine.  I loved my Grandpa, but his legacy plant quickly became a greedy gut, invasive weed that wanted to take over my soul. I was tired of fighting it. 

I actually bought three Stella D'Oro plants last month and put them in the ground.  Not to worry, I enriched the soil. Stella's are small, but they are the mighty workhorses of the daylily world.  If any daylily can make it in Central Florida it will be Stella. 

Unfortunately, it is only late May and my daylilies already seem to be burning up.  I am not used to watering daylilies.  I am more of a "survival of the fittest" gardener.  But I have been watering these.  I am going to give them my all.  If I cannot have a daylily on my land I fear I might have to rethink just about everything I believe to be true and good.  Then again, maybe it is time to rethink everything.  Canna lilies are good.  It is also true that I can grow them here.

Here is a photo of everything I believed to be true and good circa 2013 in Upstate New York:

Here is Ma's old fashioned yellow bearded iris:

Here is a photo from behind the naturalized "drop-gardening" area looking up towards our old garage.  Refer to my Flower Lust post for more about my "drop-gardening" technique.  The house is hidden behind that Crimson King maple tree on the right. If you look real hard you will see my Grandpa's trumpet vine blooming up in front of the brown garage like a small tree.  That garage was great, too.  It had garage doors in front (facing the street) and in back (facing the gardens).  Brilliant design for riding lawnmowers:

 

Below is a better shot of that damn Trumpet Vine.  T built a pergola for it to climb over, but it really wanted to climb up over the roof and embed its sticky suckers under and over the roofing tiles.  It did such damage to the garage.  We had to cut it back, hard, every year; but still it persisted. It was WAY stronger and more determined than we were.  It dropped seeds that grew all over the ground in front of it, and in every garden bed close by.  They always grew and their roots were deep.  Trumpet Vine can serve as an inspiration to us all but in someone else's garden, please.