This is my front yard as seen from the master bedroom window.
I took the photo a week ago, Sunday the 18th. Since then the field of green weeds on the right hand side of the center island has been filled with little yellow flowers, flowers which gladden my heart, even though, yes, I know they are weeds. I love violets too, and apparently do not care if there are violets or clover in my lawn. Something to consider for the future, but at the moment the lawn is something green I don't have to think about. The same can be said for those areas of the garden that I am not yet ready to plant. Weeds are Mother Nature's interim plantings.
Weeds and all, the vista makes me smile. The center brown area, between the slates and the road, contains the blueberry bushes, and I hope to have small annuals beneath them, preferable to my eye over mulch, or, eventually, some form of ground cover. I am the kind of gardener that wants the beds filled with a panoply of growing things. To the right of the stones is where the three peonies were transplanted, and I am still in the process of planting Columbine and other perennials to fill the space. Something similar will take place to the left of the blueberries, in the still-weed-filled green patch. More peonies, a rose, some delphiniums -- all are planned but not yet planted. I hoped for this spring but plans may have been interrupted. More about that later.
Next photo. Still looking north, slightly to the east of the first photo. This bed, along the east side of the house, was the only part of the yard I disliked when I bought the house, now it is much more my garden. Hydrangeas, coreopsis, daffodils, irises, nepeta, even a stray peony are located here and are beginning to fill in nicely. The laurel that is falling down has finally been removed, and replaced. I suppose I should update the photos, but that is not going to happen today, not for this post.
Ther azaleas between the fence and the driveway are thriving, blooming intermittently, and there are more plants to go around the curved wall near the steps to the circle, all planned and ordered before I knew the course my summer would take. If you look you will see plants lined up, awaiting new homes, in the lower portions of the top two photos. I will get to them in time. Life is like that sometimes, and I grow annoyed with interruptions, but there is nothing to do but live with them.
The top two photos were taken two days after I had a partial mastectomy for a breast cancer that showed up on my mammogram in March. Remember that week I was crying? I was crying because I had to have a biopsy, my first, and I was tired of doctors and hospitals, tired of illness and exhaustion, of broken noses and broken heart rhythms. I felt it was silly to cry over a biopsy as 80% are negative. It was as much frustration as it was fear: I was finally starting to feel good, starting to walk and work in the garden and it didn't seem fair. Well, no one ever said life would be fair.
I've gotten over that now. There is no help for it. Now I am in fight mode. It seems I have an aggressive little breast cancer but it also appears we have caught it early and my summer will revolve around chemotherapy with radiation to follow in the fall. Many women have done this before me. Many more will follow. My primary goal is beating back the invader and reclaiming my body. My body is a war zone and I cannot make predictions as to what I will or will not do, when or what I will, or will not, write.
The last photo is of an iris, a Louisiana iris, that opened the morning I had my surgery. I missed it at its peak. We had cold temperatures and it only lasted a day or two. In this photo, taken that same Sunday, two days after surgery, it is already waning, but still beautiful. I love it even as it begins to curl and fade -- the grace is in the living not the perfect moment of full actualization, something ephemeral that we somehow always seem to miss anyway both in the world around us, and in our own lives. Even these photos, celebrating a past already lost in the mists, reminds me of the multi-faceted nature of every moment, reminds me of the fractal geometry of memory.
Life really isn't about what happens or doesn't happen, it is about how you chose to deal with it, or chose not to deal as the case may be. It is about where you chose to find beauty and joy, and what, when, and where you chose to let go.
Good grief I say! Enough is enough. And if I were talking to you in person I would probably say exactly what I can't write -- I am going put every effort into kicking this M-F-B (imagine the swear words here) in the balls. I will knit or sew or cook when I can as these things all soothe my soul. My hands will be in the soil. I will write whenever those splintered moments of clarity arise.
