On Living

This morning I set out to dig a hole near the chicken coop because Niko had said the skinny citrus tree was planted too close to the apple tree and that Skinny should be moved before it was no longer an adolescent. Niko said the trick was to have the hole all set so that Skinny didn’t get dug up and then have to sit around with its roots exposed. It was risky business, but hopefully Skinny’s roots would survive the dig and the transfer to its new home.

Anyway. I was digging the hole. The earth seemed like rock, but soon I saw it was just hard-packed gritty dirt. I dug straight through a gopher tunnel, either end a hole of where do you go and is anyone in there? I had an appointment in two hours with a new physical therapist and I didn’t want to arrive with my back more busted than it already was, so after a while—especially when I realized I was going to have to go to the nursery to buy a gopher basket for the tree—i left the shovel parked in the foot-plus deep hole and went to sit on the grief walk to pull weeds.

Four times a year the Meadowlark Foundation sponsors a small group of women who have lost their children to come and collectively grieve and heal. This sandy path ends with a seat made of stone where the mothers can rest and catch their breath or cry or try to breathe or pray or stare out at the chicken coop as The Notorious RBG either paces and tries to figure out what to peck at next or flies over the fence that none of the other chickens can manage to scale and makes herself at home on the property.

Weeds are funny. There are so many different kinds! For me, today, a weed was any plant that was growing on the path: grasses, some sort of mini dandelion looking thing, some really mini white flowery things, and I forget what else. I was most interested in the root systems. The best ones were the ones that felt like tweezing an eyebrow hair—a gentle tug and a clean slide. Heaven.

Most of the weeds were not like that. They were like a confusion of ideas all jammed under the surface that had no intention of coming to the light. I took off my gardening gloves and tried to get my fingers beneath the surface of the earth holding on to just the right spot on the root base to pull those suckers out, but time after time mostly I ended up ripping off the top ground cover and leaving the roots there to spring up in days or weeks.

After a while, I decided to wait until my gardening friend came over to see if she had any pull-out-the-root tricks (because I am NOT using Round-up since, for one thing, when something turns male frogs into female frogs, you know something’s wrong). My friends travels with a Japanese trowel, so I thought maybe she also had some excellent weeding tool I’d never seen before hidden in her purse.

When I sat up and lamented my sucky weed-pulling skills, I noticed that one of the still-small fruit trees by the walk was surrounded by fencing which was almost as full of long grass as it was tree. Each group of mothers plants either a rose bush or a fruit tree in memory of their loss, and so I wondered if this was one of those trees.

I decided to rescue it.

I went over and jammed my hand in-between the openings in the fencing (why this tree was so protected while the others weren’t was a mystery to me—perhaps this tree, whatever it is—is beloved by deer) and started to tear out the long grass. This was weed joy! The roots tore out easily, without complaint. The soil was so sandy and I thought about how much there is to learn about growing things. Dirt! Weeds! Roots! Water! Fertilizer! Sun! Bugs! Gophers! Deer!

Being alive is like going to college.

(It’s so excellent when going to college is like being alive.)

A man arrived to power wash the front of the house. He was skinny and super sad looking. As he unpacked the equipment from his truck, he told me he needed to work because his friend had died, and he’d just learned the memorial service that was supposed to be tomorrow was canceled because no one felt safe being in a crowd.

The man began to cry. “I can’t believe they are afraid to hug each other.” His skin smelled of exhaustion and I was afraid he was going to do a terrible job on the house and that I was going to get in trouble. I thought about how afraid I was to be kind to this man who was not pleasing me because he was a wreck and I wanted him to have his shit together and get the job done.

We don’t know what this virus is going to do to us, to our friends, our family, our neighbors, people we don’t like much. It looks like it’s going to do a lot. It looks like it’s already doing a lot, even to me, hiding here in a town where there is still toilet paper in the stores and almost no people in the cafés.

Maybe all we can do is show up for each other and try to remember that light is not always something that looks clear and bright.

(That and wash our hands and not leave our houses.)

“Losing people is the worst,” I said, and I gave him a hug. His was so thin that my arms went around him almost as if he were a child. I didn’t feel the virus jump from one of us to the other. I wished us both well. I’d hugged him because I’d felt it was the right thing to do, not necessarily because I meant it.

Don’t touch me.

“Thank you for the hug,” he said.

I told him about the grief walk. He wiped his eyes and said he would go there when he was done.