I am knee deep in garden porn, new variants of old favorite plants, bold colors that will lift my spirits and make my yard look better than the heteros who surround me. I know, it's not much of a brag, but you gotta do what you gotta do, and I gotta dig.
We are really about 3 weeks from prime digging time, and planting in this zone shouldn't take place before Memorial Day, but it always does. We really start to warm up in April, usually, though last year was not good. But May 1, and after, it usually moves from the tiny little mild Spring weather we have for 3 days, into humid and hot, consistently over 70, consistently annoying Summer. I say annoying because I burn, therefore I am.
This is one event, the digging time, that I look forward to all year. I put on headphones, I play The Smiths station or the Kylie Station or the Goldfrapp station on my Pandora list and just zone. I dig, fall to my knees, and pull the dead vegetation out of the clumps, break them up, move on. Dig, drop, declump, dig, drop, declump. It's a weird heaven, but that can't be fixed.
This year, my surgery now expected by the end of March, will take at least a month for me to normalize a bit afterwards; this interrupts my chi. This compresses my digging schedule into May, when I'd normally be early planting. In my state, in my old man-ism, the digging schedule takes place over two weeks or so--there's just so much I can do in a day, and I recognize that limitation. And this year my hagged out garden needs a lot of work, plus I finally plan to herbicide the shit out of it, because I can't keep up with how fast weeds grow when the rain is nice and steady and the temperatures are glorious, as they were last summer. Well, glorious as it gets around here.
Despite that relatively minor gripe, the entirety of the approaching time to plant gives me lift and optimism. Anticipation of pleasure, the wonderful running around looking for native Indiana species (my new passion), and a few of the old favorites (Asian lilies on sale at Lowe's for half-off after their normal flowering season has passed). This is the optimistic time when I conspire to fix a bed, or an area, and this year I plan to do a big fern planting in a new part of my shade garden and I'm so excited about his that I could pee.
I know I've written about his before but it bears repeating: I run on optimism. It's my gasoline, my internal fusion plant, and without it, I quickly revert to a worrying, fumbling, half-dead, idiot. I create, in my life calendar, reasons for it. I write this blog which reminds me of it. I tell people everything is fine when obviously I'd rather not look as I do, or live as I do, because those are just conditions, and talk counts when you're keeping your head up.
I have been both lucky and unlucky with doctors in this regard. I've met those who with one look wrote me off and refused to listen to me when I told them how unprofessional their attitude was--but of course that didn't make me patient of the year in their eyes--just another deluded patient. Yet in the relationships that count with doctors, I've consistently hit the jackpot. My oncologists, Dr. Kramer in San Francisco, and Dr. Dayton, here, have both proven to match and even exceed my own blue skyisms at times; when chemo works, an oncologist is truly a happy person to be around, and mine has worked wonders. To be clear, in my case, a wonder was living, and I'm doing that like villain.
It's been of late Dr. Dayton, whose joy in my upward ticks both amuses and inspires me, that has more than matched me in positive thinking. He's been the way I chart through what I hear in one place, read online, see in the New York Times, hear anecdotally, feel internally, wonder about with concern. And the point of this is that you need that person, that one person, who sits at the center of your health universe and helps you make sense of it all because it does not make sense.
Often enough, between insurance companies and doctor's offices, you need to translate variants of English that you didn't even know existed. In explaining procedures, their time needs, their expected outcomes and expected side effects, doctors often revert to Med School lectures at a verbal pace of whythefuckdoIhavetosaythisjustshutuplaythereandtakeitbecauseIknowbetterthanyoueverwill. In blue skyism the only possible answer to such a thing is: I don't think you do, but thanks for the laugh.
I continually find that the life of a cancer patient is so much more complicated than I ever expected. I had this idea that upon a diagnosis of cancer, one's life became like a series of Belgian tapestries, circa 14th century. A scene of shock, a scene of treatment, a scene of losing one's hair, a scene of recovery, a scene of an Odysseus-ish return to a new normal. It does not work like that at all.
So many roadblocks are thrown at you, so much pre-conception, so much judgment, that it shocks one. And then if the conditions you are working around are severe, like my inability to speak, it becomes a fucking nightmare. Here's an example: My stupid home health provider, who vends my enterals (food) to me will not take orders over email and I cannot speak, and I will not make Charles take a phone call when I can be dealt with easily. They claim email is insecure but you know what? The Secret Service will let the President have email but they will not let him have a commercial smart phone because-duh-they are incredibly easily hacked and data is incredibly easy to sweep from them. Yet because I cannot speak, I cannot work with them because I cannot work with them from an easily hackable fucking cell phone.
In fact, any health care provider will discuss your intimate details readily on the world's most monitored, hacked, swept, data-losing, platform, but will refuse to do so by email. Too insecure. I mean you have to laugh or you'd just buy a gun.
So, I see Dayton, and instantly, I feel better. I saw him Friday (yesterday as I'm writing this) and I still feel better about life. I feel better about the surgery upcoming, I feel more informed and more capable to deal with recovery, I know better what to expect. I like that he doesn't pretend to know everything, and that we can have a fun but informative conservation about the most important topic in my life--me.
I read garden porn and I know that all I want is to kill weeds and plant beauty and enjoy the benefits of both. I want to watch Rally schnoodle his way through the shade garden which he loves as much as the birds and insects have proven to love it too. Even with my interferences it's mostly just naturalized space, the wild violets prove to be powerful, but too pretty to just uproot every year.
At some point I'll be out with my Gator mini-chain saw hacking down those stupid shade bushes that are pissing me off, the stupid mulberrys that grow everywhere because birds shit everywhere, and my weed whacker, my wheelbarrow (a new one coming!) and my spade (a new one of those, too), and I'll be in hog heaven...I love it. I feel warm, I like to feel the dirt, I like to imagine where I'll plant what. I'll be thinking how much I like blue skies and how much I wish I'd know that about myself way earlier. It would have spared me much grief.
But that's life, isn't it? It takes a log to pluck the toothpick from one's eye.
