Persnickety Lemon moves from a condo to a house

 

I bought a lemon tree this past spring and set it on my condo balcony where it grew taller and and blossomed. It wasn't thrilled when I brought it inside just before the first frost. I noticed it was beset with white fly, and so sprayed it with sulfur in my condo bathtub. Twice. It protested. 

Then I protested, deciding condo life was not for me for a myriad of reasons. My brother M. didn't seem surprised when I told him. "You need dirt," he said. My daughter C. said that I was one of those people who just need to be "in charge of my shit." Okay. 

So Persnickety Lemon and I moved. Moving is never fun. Moving during a pandemic is fraught with complications.

I stood on the balcony while the movers took everything away. I opened all the windows in the new house while the movers brought the things inside. Persnickety Lemon does not have a parka and was not happy about the open windows on moving day. Or the open windows the day the painters came.

I am not happy that my furniture is way too big for this little 1950s house and that the dining room table fills the whole main room and the only place for a couch is in the basement. But I'm going to make some changes. And Persnickety Lemon is going to get some new leaves.

There are many things to like here.

Like the sunrise in my picture window.

And my utterly charming backyard with its sturdy shed. I can see that red door from my bedroom window, and it looks like a beacon of possibility.

Happy 2021 to you. I wish you good health.

How to Sing Auld Lang Syne With the Dead

My dearly departed number enough to make a chorus. In 2016, the year we've come to revile for its loss of so many beloved celebrities and the loss of hope for a woman president, I also lost my mother. It's a common thing to lose one's parents at this stage of life, but nothing is more unexpected than the expected death of a loved one. We tell can tell everyone about the many trips to death's door and the seemingly incessant knocking there, but once the door swings wide, there's nothing to do but gasp with disbelief. 

What surprises me these many months later is how close I feel to her at times. How I can clearly hear what she might say in a given situation. How the hairdo or the shape of a daughter's lipsticked smile makes me feel as though my mother is just inches from my grasp.

And what surprises me these many months later is how far away she feels. Her clothes are gone, her room repainted, the wheel chair at the dining room table donated. Some days I cannot find her in any room of the house we shared.

It's the same with the man who loved me, my friend Dale, my ex-mother-in-law. I can open my eyes in the deep middle of the night dark of my bedroom and see Dan's bass leaning in a corner, and I can almost hear the strings humming. They are playing George Michael songs on the radio a lot these days, and I'm transported in front of the TV with Dale talking about rock-a-billy. I pick up the pen to write my mother-in-law's name  on the order form for the same box of Christmas oranges  I've sent her for decades. The body has momentary lapses.  

I never look heavenward when searching for the dead. I don't believe in heaven or hell. For me, there is no old man with a beard, standing at a gate. I find neither solace nor fear in those images, though if  I hold fast to those convictions, I must also mourn the loss of  the myth of reunion. How do we all meet again in paradise if there is no paradise? Lately I've come to believe that these stories are translations of a cosmic reality so profound that we mere mortals cannot grasp it. Somehow though, I believe our spirits will merge; we'll be one with love and each other in some indescribable universal song.

New Year's has long been my favorite holiday. I want to start over. I need to start over. But should auld acquaintance be forgot? Do we go forward without the dead? We do and we don't. If it's true that we are stardust (and it is), and if it's true that our carbon atoms were once "part of volcanoes, giant redwoods, Apatosauruses, diamonds, plastic bottles, snakes, snails, lichens, nematodes, photosynthetic algae, the very first cells," as a recent science article in the Washington Post tells us, it's easy to imagine how we are and could become part of each other. "It’s certain that your carbon saw the interior of a star, survived a supernova, sailed through the solar system and splashed down on Earth long before arriving at you," Sarah Kaplan writes. And now for the best part of the article. "Now breathe out. Riding an invisible cloud of carbon dioxide, a carbon atom just left your body, headed for its next great adventure." 

I was holding Dan in my arms when he took his final breath. I was stroking my mom's hair and her hands at her bedside when she breathed out and the next in-breath never came. But I breathed in. I breathed in.

It's fairly certain that if I've ever breathed in the carbon atom of a singer or a musician, it's rendered no effect on me in terms of musical talent. I can't carry a tune. But on New Year's Eve, I'll sing Auld Lang Syne inside my head--or maybe out loud if I've had a third glass of wine.  I'll sing it, arms wrapped around myself, wrapped around cosmic love, while looking up at the stars.  2017 will be a brand new start.

Happy New Year. 

For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we'll take a cup of kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

It's Been a Rocky Year

2014 began with the countdown to surgery for the man who loved me, and it's come to an end with me stupidly losing the voicemails from him that I'd saved since his death in June. T-Mobile is holding fast to their position that these words from him to me are forever consigned to the ether. I'm still in shock.

And yes, of course, there were good things in 2014. Sweet tastes to wipe the bitter away.
As always I am awed by the love, generosity, and graciousness of friends and of my children.

I give you no resolutions. No particular plans or hopes. But with all my heart, I do wish you smooth sailing in 2015.

Happy New Year!/ Islands and Figs by Jack Gilbert

Not a New Year's poem per se, but it does speak of endings.

Islands and Figs

The sky
on and on,
stone.
The Mediterranean
down the cliff,
stone.
These fields,
rock.
Dead weeds
everywhere.
And the weight
of sun.
In the weeds
an old woman
lifting off
snails.
Near
two trees
of ripe figs.
The heart
never fits
the journey.
Always
one ends
first.


Photo note: That's an olive tree not a fig tree. You can see it for yourself: http://www.astragreece.com/writing.html

2011 Wrap-up

I posted to this blog 170 times in 2011. By court order both the name of the blog and its URL changed last year. Further prohibitions were put in place, too, and I am now legally restrained from mentioning certain people here in Margaritaville. I can't say that I miss them very much. There was plenty else to blog about in 2011: a monthlong residency at the VCCA, a modest writng success or two, several big family events--weddings, a graduation, birthdays, a fine Thanksgiving, a pampered Christmas. There were less happy goings-on, too. My dog Layla suffered a gradual delcine and left her world of love and couches in May; staggeringly large attorney bills drove me to the brink. But my divorce reached its final resolution in 2011, too. In the year's final days the last two documents were signed, and the results of those signatures are soon to be implemented. There was great joy in 2011. There was seemingly insurmountable distraction and frustration. There was good cheap wine, a lobster marathon, everyday beauty, love, travel, friendship, Mother Nature bent on destruction, mothers tending to reconstruction. There were rogue appliances in 2011. There were just plain rogues. There were roads, roses, robes made of flannel, rocky beaches, rhododendrons, rodents, and a robust appreciation for the potential of another year.

Thank you for reading, for your comments, for signing on as a "follower," and thank you for writing your own blogs so that I can reap your wisdom. Thanks for the love, the friendship, the hospitality, the phone call, the email, the hugs, the kisses, the advice, and for carrying the heavy stuff that I can't lift. Thank you for you.